A movie has been made for “Star Wars” fans that finally answers many of the questions they’ve long been asking, having to do with the tensile strength of a franchise that has experienced its share of strain over 40 years, and the ability of artists with new, perhaps iconoclastic visions to bring a faraway galaxy from long ago into a bold new future.
That movie is “Star Wars: Episode VIII” and will be in theaters roughly a year from now.
In the meantime, we have “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” Gareth Edwards’ perfectly serviceable, if undistinguished, placeholder. This is a movie that, technically, doesn’t need to exist, apart from abject fan service, the minting of some easy money and mindshare maintenance at a time when attention spans ping from one sci-fi spectacle to the next with brazen promiscuity. So many images in “Rogue One” conjure recent films — from “Mad Max: Fury Road” to “Arrival” — that it’s easy to forget that it was that first “Star Wars” installment, back in 1977, that started it all.
To its credit, and like last year’s “The Force Awakens,” “Rogue One” pays homage to the imaginative and physical world that George Lucas and his collaborators built four decades ago. Hewed from the same “used future” aesthetic Lucas so cleverly perfected, the movie has a scruffy, tarnished patina, staging that harks back to wartime classics from the World War II and Vietnam eras, and video-game-like visual flourishes. It fits neatly with the “Star Wars” mythos, especially during its rousing third act and immensely satisfying final moment.