Rogue One: A Star Wars Story review - this time it's war

Quite recently, in a galaxy very near home, Lucasfilm and its partners set out to stuff every corner of every solar system with some incarnation of the Star Wars brand. There are the Yoda slippers. There is the R2D2 toothpaste. There are the Boba Fett mass cards. Now we have the first film in the “Star Wars Anthology”.

The premise of Rogue One is easy enough to explain. We join a group of rebels as they seek information that will help Luke Skywalker blow up the Death Star at the end of the film I refuse to call Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. But Rogue One is something other than a prequel. It is one curlicue in a baroque narrative pattern that is being spun around the main strain of films. I Can't Believe it's Not Star Wars.

It is hardly worth asking how Rogue One will work for those unfamiliar with the existing films? One may as well wonder how it will play for organisms that breathe something other than oxygen.

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Death Troopers on the march in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Photograph: Lucasfilm

Let's answer the question anyway. Such rare creatures will find something like a self-contained narrative. The picture begins with Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a director of weapons research for the Empire, arriving with armed escort at the home of martial engineer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). The Star Wars films have always zipped between samurai and Wild West influences. The opening tends more to Ford than Kurosawa as Krennic drags Galen off while Jyn Erso, the captive's daughter, watches terrified from nearby rushes.

She is rescued by a muttering Forest Whitaker – whose stupid Star Wars name I can’t be bothered to cut and paste – and spirited away to the life of a mildly criminal nomad. Dad is pressed into designing the Death Star, but he has not sold his soul. The clever sod has built in a flaw that will allow its eventual destruction. Jyn Erso falls in with a gang of hooligans who, in defiance of Rebel command, set out to locate the plans Luke will one day require.

Star Wars fanatics needing commentary on and references to the wider canon will not be disappointed. Minding the current hysteria about spoilers, I will be no more specific, but we can safely praise the computer boffins for two creations that, even in this time of digital wonders, fairly take the breath away. Laamu Atoll in the Maldives provides a beautiful closing location that looks to have been peeled spectacularly from the cover of a golden-era science-fiction paperback.

K-2SO, the franchise’s latest robot, voiced elegantly by Alan Tudyk, is so charmingly lugubrious – part Iron Giant; part Marvin the Paranoid Android – that one can’t help but yearn for a reboot somewhere else in the universe.

Rogue One's greatest selling point is, however, an old-fashioned, 21st-century human. Felicity Jones is endlessly charming and spirited as the grown Jyn Erso: a brigand who can't sustain the amoral pose. Jones's achievement is all the more remarkable given the blandness of the dialogue. To adapt Harrison Ford, you can write this shit, and you may even be able to say it, but it seems unlikely that anybody will listen.

Other members of Jyn’s posse struggle to establish any sort of personalities. The great Donnie Yen is there. The equally fine Jiang Wen is here. Neither leaves any more impression than a peanut would leave on a girder.

Happily, the final conflagration is sufficiently punchy to push thoughts of such underdevelopment from the mind. Gareth Edwards shoots that sequence in the style of a second World War battle and, so doing, reminds us how much the story owes to the school of Alistair MacLean. The chaps are heroic. The villains are dastardly. All that’s missing is Burton and “Broadsword calling Danny Boy”.

It may be a manifestation of commerce gone mad, but Rogue One definitely works. It is the best little space opera of the year. Does that make it a space operetta?