I’ve just seen Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and I still can’t believe it. The impossible has happened. And I’m not talking about ho-hum stuff like hyperspace drive, starships making noise, or wild and fantastic aliens in dust-blown, steampunk galactic slums. I mean that a film has suddenly and against all odds made me care about the entire Star Wars franchise.

That’s a frankly staggering achievement for something so surely poised to be an also-ran, a plain and simple money-grab between proper installments in the series. And these it may be, but oil my beard and call me a wookie if it isn’t also shockingly well done.

While I’m no expert on this stuff, by my estimation Rogue One takes place shortly before the events of the original Star Wars (which emerged into the 1977 of wide collars and strutting Travoltas and caveman computer graphics and my own birth, but thanks to George Lucas‘s best-of-breed hubris, was right from the get-go styled as “Episode IV” of a putative nine-part saga). This means Rogue One fits in some time after the Jar Jar Binks fiasco, and not long before Luke Skywalker first shows up.

This of course is fertile ground for nostalgic hat-tips playing to the neckbeard-and-sandals set, and I assume there were many such references in this movie — though the lion’s share sailed right by me. No matter: The ample-waisted gent in the orange jumpsuit (complete with home-trimmed hoses) surely loved them. (When he sat down, this ersatz X-Wing pilot was marshaling the force to balance a teetering popcorn and two large sodas.) Also of note: As the lights dropped and the title screen flashed (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”), someone cried out, “Star Trek!!”

If seeing a Star Wars film on preview night mere meters from the Googleplex isn’t asking for a nerd rodeo, I don’t know what is.

Felicity Jones was a good choice to lead: she’s competent, emotional when needed, strong, and layered. The supporting cast is similarly composed of solid working actors doing an honest job (Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Mads Mikkelsen, Forest Whitaker, and Riz Ahmed — who was excellent in Jason Bourne and Nightcrawler). Rogue One was directed by relative newcomer (but SFX veteran) Gareth Edwards (who directed Godzilla) and written by Chris Weitz (About a Boy) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, State of Play, and four of the Bourne films). As you’d expect given this pedigree, it’s genuinely watchable.

Aside from being just a solid movie, what’s great about Rogue One is that it stands alone. It doesn’t pander to the canon by larding up on cameos and tie-ins. It doesn’t throw one-trick aliens and wisecracking droids against the proverbial wall to see what sticks. Rogue One introduces compelling new characters (and isn’t shy about killing some off, either). This is a story with real stakes, about a young and disorganized Rebel movement struggling to face the Empire’s gathering storm of power. It’s not a tremendously nuanced take on good vs evil, but that’s never been the franchise’s strong suit — what it is, though, is an engaging war story with memorable characters and truly beautiful special effects and just enough nostalgic stuff to slot it in where it belongs.

Rogue One also avoids making a golden calf of the original trilogy, and thus sidesteps the tiresome idolatry of other recent Star Wars pictures. This is wise and good, since for the silent majority who are not already orange-suited converts to the myth, such veneration has never played well. A brief aside on this point: There’s a great scene in Crocodile Dundee where Paul Hogan turns on the TV in his hotel room, sees the opening credits for I Love Lucy, declares that he’s seen this already, and shuts it off. But after my father (who saw the original Episode IV in the theater) watched The Force Awakens — the entire film, mind you — he dismissed it by saying he’d seen basically the exact same movie 38 years before. That right there is the risk of too much reverence, too little imagination, and an almost fetishistic need to hew close to Lucas’s disco-era musings.

Rogue One doesn’t, and I’m glad. It’s a tight, eminently watchable and visually striking dip into the Star Wars galaxy, one that lays a rich backdrop for everything that’s already there and hands the baton to the Skywalker trilogy in a way that makes me actually want to see those films again.

Now I really have seen it all.

Haus Verdict: A total surprise — this putative franchise underdog may well be the best film in the whole series. A solid, entertaining, beautiful, and surprisingly powerful blockbuster. Worth your time this Christmas.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opens tomorrow, December 16.

Never miss a review — sign up for email updates to the right, or like The Parsing Haus on Facebook.