Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The Star Wars universe has never seemed so empty, two-dimensional, and pointless. A film that fills two sentences from the epilogue of A New Hope and fulfills its role mechanically, without enthusiasm, without exciting characters, but with lots of wooden sentences and abbreviations. The film contains disposable heroes - heroes without a past and a future. And if it sounds like a good starting point for a war film on paper, it creates an incoherent hermaphrodite on the screen, which gives me almost physical feelings of discomfort when I watch it. Like 2016, the incredibly disgusting and unbelievable digital resurrection of the two characters in the original trilogy. Episode VII showed that old clichés can have a new life. Rogue One is the corpse that contains the best and most chilling scene in the last five minutes. Until then, you are watching the clashes of opaque and poorly drawn characters in space, which, despite jumping from place to place, resembles someone's cramped living room. A disappointment of galactic proportions, there is no doubt about that. P. S. Bonus points for reviving Forest Whitaker from Battlefield: Earth: This is truly a feat for lovers of recession. Edit: Given this year's Christmas competition, I have to add a third star. It simply does not deserves the same treatment as Assassin's Creed and Passengers. (14/12/2016)

It took a long 33 years, but we finally got it. After Episode 6, the best film in the Star Wars universe. It doesn't feel contrived, it doesn't tell the story through bridges for morons, and it treats the main and episodic characters in a brash and bleak way, like in a real war. The beginning is perhaps too slow (my only complaint), but otherwise it's pure fan joy. I'd love to have a beer with Gareth Edwards, not only is he one of the few to understand the poetry of the original Japanese Godzilla films, but his rendition of Star Wars doesn't look like a cheesy coloring book either. Give him Star Trek, too! (21/12/2016)

Something is wrong if you have to wait 131 minutes for the first great scene in a film that is 133 minutes long. This film is not made out of love and fondness for Star Wars, it's made for people who will go to see it out of love and fondness for Star Wars, because any billion in profit is good. A woefully ordinary and completely useless film that doesn't fit in with either the old or the new episodes. (16/12/2016)

Star Wars for me has always been a saga based on adventure, laughable naivety, likable heroes, and fairly one-dimensional but ultimately fun characters. Rogue One has none of that. Nothing against trying to make a darker story, but the attempts to turn the rebels into sort of bastards who aren't afraid to slaughter innocents because "the ends justify the means" are more distracting than interesting, as are all the other attempts at a grittier atmosphere and the efforts to make this sci-fi flick into a war movie. Although it could work, it would just have to have more interesting characters that we know something about. Not two Asians who are teamed up with the heroes because they happened to meet in the city and became best buddies during a scene that probably ended up in the editing room. No one in the bunch is the least bit interesting, failing to evoke any emotion and just being there, either pretending to be a blind halfling or a fat lover of big guns, and that's where all ends. Nobody is funny, nobody is cool, nobody is scary, they're just there, flying from planet to planet and you're supposed to root for them because the director said so. And the more the minutes tick by, the more tedious and annoying the whole thing gets. Fortunately, Rogue One looks great and pulls a truly epic space carnage out of its sleeve in its last half hour, so in the end I left the cinema not satisfied, but certainly not angry – although I did feel more and more embarrassed with each successive reference to Episodes 4 to 6. A moderately entertaining film and a pretty big step off for the entire saga. I hope it's the last one. (15/05/2017)

The talk of dirty war action is just ruin or unfulfilled wishful thinking, where good characters are absent, or even unbearably obnoxious, giving the impression that whether it's the overacting or if it was built this badly from the start, it's hard to keep a film on such wobbly legs that you know how it's going to turn out. Therefore, any refreshment is welcome, rather than watching a generic blockbuster, of which you have a dozen a year, and it would have been enough to throw away 120 minutes and stick the last fifteen as a prologue to Episode IV. This is because few films this year have had as strong a highlight as the one when the red lightsaber lights up in the shadows. (15/12/2016)