Star Wars: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Alexander Freed

Rogue One: A Star Wars story, like Catalyst before it, is another story that did not need to be told. It is the novelisation of the film, a format I am not usually fond of, but they had the good sense to assign this one to a capable writer. Even so, Alexander Freed has his hands tied with a derivative plot and underdeveloped characters. Admittedly, he does a decent job with the weak materials, but the core problem lies with Disney Star Wars and their ultimate lack of vision. Compared to other Star Wars books, Rogue One is rather introspective, flirting with psychoanalysis and generally darker topics. The repeated references to Jyn Erso's childhood trauma featuring a 'closed hatch' where she is made to hide, eventually gets annoying, especially in the end action scenes where melodrama should be making way for tension building and plot resolution.

My second main complaint with the book is Freed's focus on my second least favourite Star Wars character ever created, Imperial defector, Bodhi Rook. The character, it must be said, was a glaring and clumsy attempt to add greater ethnic diversity amongst the actor pool. Unfortunately, in this case, it meant hiring an untalented actor of Pakistani descent, purely to meet Disney's inclusivity quota. Rogue One features the most diverse ethnic cast of any Star Wars film to date, but Rook's performance was appalling, and Freed seemed under pressure to include the character in the novel as much as possible. Every time the character spoke, I was reminded of the actor's awful East London accent and this ruined the book almost as much as it did the film.

Rating: 3/5