Watch the new trailer for the Star Wars spin-off movie, Rogue One.
Calm down, Star Wars fans - the Force, and your childhood, remains intact.
The first reviews for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story have landed, and most critics are promising an epic and dark blockbuster that lives up to the franchise's legacy.
One reviewer, however, stood out from the packand called it an exercise in marketing with "the heart and soul of a logo".
Starring Felicity Jones, Ben Mendelsohn and Darth Vader, Rogue One hits New Zealand theatres on Thursday. A prequel to Episode IV: A New Hope, it's the first stand alone Star Wars story set outside of the events of the main trilogy that debuted last year with The Force Awakens.
While the film's creation was troubled with reported reshoots ordered by Disney, today's first reviews promise something special.
"The damn thing is alive and bursting with the euphoric joy of discovery that caught us up in the adventurous fun nearly four decades ago," wrote Peter Travers from Rolling Stone.
"With the smashing Jones giving us a female warrior to rank with the great ones and a cast that knows how to keep it real even in a sci-fi fantasy, Rogue One proves itself a Star Wars story worth telling."
Variety reviewer Richard Lawson reported that Rogue One was even better than The Force Awakens, calling it "dark and dashing".
"Somewhat free of the weight of expectations that Force Awakens had to maneuver under, Rogue One is looser and livelier and more daring. It fits into the universe's milieu with ease and style, while exploring new emotional and narrative terrain."
"It is easily the most exciting blockbuster in recent memory this side of Mad Max: Fury Road, and that includes The Force Awakens, which now looks lazy and bloated with sentimentality and fan service in comparison to the subversive ingenuity of Rogue One."
Jones earned particular praise from Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw.
"Felicity Jones is in the tousled-yet-game tradition of Star Wars female leads, like Carrie Fisher or Daisy Ridley: well-born but determined, with a sense of purpose befitting an heiress, if not a princess ... This is another really entertaining fantasy with fan-fiction energy and attack."
Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso in a scene from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
However, there have been occasional negative reviews, with the worst coming from The New Yorker critic Richard Brody, who asked: 'Is it time to abandon the Star Wars franchise?'
"The director of Rogue One, Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series' fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a master, come anywhere close to life," he wrote.
"Rogue One has (with a few momentary exceptions) all the heart and soul of a logo and a theme."
