When the Empire catches up with Galen, Jyn hides while Commander Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) kills her mother and drags her father away. Made orphan she is rescued by uncompromising Rebel Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and raised as part of his cadre.
Now, fifteen years later, going by an assumed name she is stuck in an Imperial labour camp having long forsaken any ideas of resistance to the Empire when Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) "rescues" her.
Cassian is a Rebel spy who needs to speak to Saw about an Imperial defector and he thinks Jyn is his way in. The increasingly violent and paranoid Saw and the Rebel Alliance parted ways years ago. This defector claims to have information about the aforementioned superweapon.
This is the Star Wars movie you don't need to be a Star Wars fan to like. It links strongly in to the rest of the material without ever getting bogged down in it.
The Rebel alliance shown here isn't very unified and definitely up to less than ethical shit out of desperation. Andor is a child soldier now grown up to be a spy and assassin.
It's tense all the way through, grim and frenetic (but not gory) once it comes to the action scenes and has a sense of scale the later sequels just somehow didn't get across for all their epicness.
Dare I say it this feels like the only Star Wars movie since Episode IV that didn't feel like it was trying too hard to be part of a franchise. It doesn't dwell too much on what's gone before or too much on what will come next because that's already been set in stone in Episode IV.
The two leads are excellent and somehow it all just works even though the messy opening premise and direct continuation into Episode IV could have spelled disaster.
It's a shame the other recent franchise entries tried to out-awesome each other as this more grounded tale of two ordinary rebels gathering a team and doing heroic shit works so well.
Highly recommended, the best Star Wars movie 9/10, yes really because the original trilogy laid the foundations for it but are still 70s blockbusters and times move on.