Rogue One, as numerous reviewers have noted, opens in a way which is disconcerting to fans of the Star Wars universe; there is no opening crawl to set the scene - reviewers cleverer than me are quick to make the point that this is perhaps because Rogue One is the opening Crawl from A New Hope - and the music is quite different (and, to be honest, not really as good). But that is merely the beginning of the divergence.
Rogue One is and entirely different sort of movie from the other seven in the series to date, even Empire, which is normally considered the darkest of them. This is not merely a question of tone, although it is a far sadder and bleaker movie than Empire. Rather, it is that the other Star Wars films are rooted in modern high fantasy, that bastard offspring of Tolkien that managed to channel Tolkien’s concern with epic stories but without his perspective on the ultimate cost of heroism and war.
Rogue One draws instead on the kind of war films that started emerging in the 60s and 70s: The Dirty Dozen, A Bridge Too Far and the like. It is a worm’s-eye view of what rebellion might look like and, in the final scene, drawn straight from a horror movie, a sense of what it would be like to be one of the ordinary soldiers facing superbeings; soldiers able to face any normal enemy are butchered sobbing and screaming for their lives as Darth Vader is unleashed amongst them.
This is not normally a perspective made available in the Star Wars universe; but the stories in that universe are hardly unique in this. The tradition of concerning ourselves with the exceptional goes back to our earliest stories: no-one is much concerned with the Greeks cut down but the valour of Hector or the hapless Trojans slaughtered by the rage of Achilles.
This is the core of this film, and what makes it different and, until you settle into its rythym, jarring: it is not about exceptional people doing exceptional things, it is about ordinary people doing often dreadful things. Rebels bagging would-be defectors for later torture to establish their veracity is a view of the good guys which is uncomfortably true to life. The rebellion may be fighting monsters in nice uniforms, but this film exposes the cost of that fight, not just in the death of all the characters we might care about, but the corrosion that has been visited on them before they die: there is none of the easy, superficial redemption Vader receives at the end of Return of the Jedi, instead it is about hard choices made between awful alternatives.
All that said, having lauded the vision and subtext of the film, what did I think of it as a movie? Good, in a word. Not as good as The Force Awakens (itself a demonstration of how much better A New Hope could have been with better dialogue and direction, rather than relying on being propped up by a few good actors and a great editor); it suffers from stuttering pacing at the start, where it cuts between scences trying to tell us everything we need to know. Characters often act in ways there doesn’t seem adequate motivation for (such as Saw’s decision to let himself die, or Jyn’s 180 degrees on the rebellion itself); these elements feel like there wasn’t room to establish them properly, or perhaps that they rely too much on back story from the Rebels TV series.
The acting also often has a flat affect, but this is in keeping with the tone and style of the film; the humour of the combat droid sidekick stands out (and delighted Ada, who quoted him incessantly).
All that said, the battles are spectacular, and the execution of many of the scenes - the awful destruction of the old Jedi temple and the city around it, the general scenes of Saw’s extremists battling their enemies - are well done and pull you in. Jyn regaining hope for her father, and their subsequent awful reunion are surprisingly affecting, while her berating of the rebels - if you blindly follow awful orders, you might as well be a stormtrooper - is well-pivoted into a tough dialogue on having only awful choices. Overall, a good film, just not a film in the classic Star Wars style, and most definitely not a film for the youngest Star Wars fans.