By Farhan Coleman

Last year, the Star Wars franchise made its triumphant return in the form of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This year, Star Wars took a slight deviation from its usual course with the release of its first anthology film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

There’s been a lot of confusion around this film as people have been struggling with where this film takes place in the star wars timeline, so before I continue with this review allow me to settle the confusion. This film takes place before Star Wars: A New Hope and it follows the story of the rebels who steal the plans to the Death Star. Gareth Edwards took over the directing duties for this film, which stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, Ben Mendelsohn, and Mads Mikkelsen.  

Disney, who owns the rights to Star Wars, has been on a roll lately consistently releasing high quality films and their streak doesn’t stop here. Rogue One is a very enjoyable movie and one of the few times where a prequel actually adds to the original. One of the best things about this film is that it shows us a side of the Star Wars universe that we’ve never seen on screen before. The makers of this film really want to emphasize that Rogue One was separate from the other Star Wars movies and they did so by giving the film a dark and serious tone which is something that we haven’t seen much of in the Star Wars universe.

Something that I believe will be a major topic of conversation coming out of Rogue One is that Darth Vader makes his long awaited return to the big screen in this film. He’s not in the movie a lot, but the few scenes that he’s featured in are absolutely marvelous.   

Rogue One is an extremely fun and enjoyable film, but no movie is flawless. One of the few problems I noticed was that many of the characters in this film, with the exception of Felicity Jones’s character, aren’t really developed very well which is pretty frustrating because all of the characters in this film are fun to watch and I wanted to know more about them. There’s also a scene toward the beginning of the film that features a mind-reading monster. This scene was totally pointless and in my opinion, didn’t need to be in the movie, but that’s for you to decide.     

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is yet another impressive installment to the Star Wars saga. The work that director Gareth Edwards did in this movie was absolutely amazing and it leaves us eagerly awaiting the release of Star Wars: Episode 8 next year.   
Final Score: 8/10