It wasn’t a given that I would watch this. I dislike the idea of Disney releasing a Star Wars film every year like clockwork and having Gareth Edwards direct it is not a mark in its favor. I thought his Godzilla was one of the worst films I’ve watched last year. But word of mouth on Broken Forum and other places eventually led me to realize that this was unexpectedly good and so I duly trooped to the cinema and added my bit to Disney’s ridiculously growing coffers.

Jyn Erso is the daughter of an Imperial scientist Galen Erso who turns out to be instrumental in the design of the original Death Star. She grows up by herself in order to keep her safe from the Empire but when the Rebel Alliance hears news of the superweapon, they send a covert operative Cassian Andor and his reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO to locate her and use her as a means to get to her father. Their path eventually leads them to a Imperial defector who originally smuggled the secret message out from Jyn’s father plus a couple of guardians of a ruined Jedi Temple. Thus forms their merry little band who would proceed to find Galen and bring news of the Death Star’s vulnerability to the rebels. Unfortunately things are never that easy and strangely even Galen doesn’t have the full set of the Death Star’s plans and so they must assault the archive world to get a copy of the plans and find a way to get them into the hands of the rebels.

Rogue One is clearly divided into two distinct parts, the first being the whole setup and the second being the raid on the archive planet of Scarif. The first of these two parts is frankly mediocre and it’s no surprise that the much talked about reshoots to fix the film seem to be focused here. The director’s job here is to provide Jyn’s backstory and cause the audience to develop some emotional attachment to this all new set of characters. This is only partially successful. You do feel some affection for the new characters, mainly due to the excellence of the casting and the engaging interactions between them. But the drama between Jyn and her father lacks any emotional weight whatsoever. You get the impression that Saw Gerrera was meant to be a more important character but all of his good scenes were cut. The pacing is atrocious as we are quickly swept from one planet to the next without any time for the scenes to breathe. A sure sign of this clumsiness is how the film keeps using establishing shots of fancy spacecraft landing on exotic planets, over and over again such that it wears on the audience. We’re supposed to develop feelings for the characters, not the planets.

Things completely turn around once we hit the beaches of Scarif. From here on it’s all one long action scene and it is glorious. The objective of the ground troops is to keep the Imperial garrison busy while Jyn and Cassian penetrate the archives. You could complain about the stupidity of the Imperial forces in responding to the attack instead of concentrating their forces around the only strategic point that matters but it gives a concrete way for the ordinary troops to contribute and it works great. The action is far smaller in scale than, for example, Attack of the Clones, but it’s so much more dramatic and powerful. You can’t help but cheer as the rebel fighters swoop in to save the ground pounders and you feel each individual death keenly. The ground and space theaters feel like parts of the same battle through little touches like a ship dropping off troop reinforcements. Best of all, each small victory is paid for in blood and there is no deux ex machina Jedi completely owning the battlefield and trivializing the efforts of everyone else.

There are plenty of nits worth picking like how awful the ergonomics of Imperial design are, how blatantly unrealistic the CGI version of Tarkin is due to his extended screentime and why stormtrooper armor can’t even protect against a stick. But on balance I have to admit that Edwards has more hits than misses. For example, I  enjoyed the much more plausible flight trajectories of the starfighters here after the ridiculous acrobatics of The Force Awakens, I’m convinced that the relationship between Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus are deliberately meant to hint at them being a gay couple while leaving enough room for doubt, I appreciated that Jyn is competent but isn’t a superhero and that she has no romantic story arc. It’s also great to see how the threat of the Death Star feels so much more real when they are merely destroying cities rather than entire planets and how everyone reacts to it as if it were a big deal. Finally, for perhaps the first one in the entire franchise, the audience is shown why everyone fears Darth Vader so much as Edwards films him exactly as he would an implacable horror movie monster.

I’m not sure why Rogue One is so good while Godzilla was so awful. Perhaps Edwards always was a good action director. Perhaps common ownership caused the film to absorb some of Marvel’s DNA as evidenced in the excellent inter-character banter. Perhaps the script is just so much better. It can’t be accidental for example that the desert world of Jedha evokes the Middle East and Saw’s extremist guerillas resemble Iraqi insurgents. This would of course make the Empire the United States, a deliciously subversive artistic choice balanced by the fact that the rebels also do horrible stuff. Whatever the reasons, Rogue One is a fine action movie, far and away better than The Force Awakens and very much the equal of the original trilogy.