Lobotomized and depersonalized, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the latest entry in the film franchise, is a pure and perfect product that makes last year’s flavor, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” feel like an exemplar of hands-on humanistic warmth and dramatic intimacy. Sure, J. J. Abrams’s movie offered merely effectively packaged simulacra of such values—but at least he tried. 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.

Edwards’s “Godzilla” was both spectacular and preachy, a Sunday-school lesson cloaked in the kind of movie that the pupils get to watch when Sunday school lets out—but its moralizing seemed, at the very least, like Edwards’s own moralizing; it had a voice, albeit one far less authentic and original than the visual one that he conjured with the film’s colossal action scenes. I hesitate even to ascribe the deadness of “Rogue One” to Edwards’s failure, except perhaps a failure of executive authority rather than of artistry. Authorship of “Rogue One” may fall to its screenwriters, Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (the latter was reportedly involved in extensive reshoots), or to the writers of the story on which the script was based, John Knoll and Gary Whitta—but I’d likelier ascribe authorship not even to the movie’s battalion of producers but to the “Star Wars” brand itself, since “Rogue One” has (with a few momentary exceptions) all the heart and soul of a logo and a theme.

There is a story to “Rogue One,” one that I overheard a viewer or two describe as “dark” on the way out, and I suppose that, despite the inevitable happy ending (or, at least, successful mission), some serious unpleasantness occurs along the way—mainly the death of some major characters. But it’s a sign of the narrow constraints or limits of Edwards’s artistry, or of the script that he was handed, that the scenes in which such unpleasantness occurs have all the emotional impact of a checklist or a call sheet that simply says whether an actor will or won’t be needed the next day. Whether the downplaying of the formidable cast’s charismatic energies is an intentional downplaying of the potential risk to the characters that they play—whether it’s a matter of not actually allowing viewers to get too attached to characters or actors, not allowing viewers to be bummed out by bad news but rather breezing past it in a spirit of fealty not to these characters or performers but to the franchise—is the kind of corporate Kremlinology that would rightly take the place of criticism in assessing the substance and tone of the movie.

The protagonist of “Rogue One,” Jyn Erso, is first seen as a child, living in extreme rustic isolation with her parents, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen) and Lyra (Valene Kane), when a drone susses them out and a spaceship bearing officers and soldiers of the Empire comes to capture them. Galen is a scientist whose talents are needed to complete the Death Star—a project in which he wants no part. But, while her parents are wrangling with their would-be captors, Jyn gets away. Many years later, as an adult, Jyn (played by Felicity Jones) is arrested by the Rebel Alliance on the grounds that her father (with whom she has had no contact for fifteen years)—who had in fact been working all those years on the superweapon—was a collaborator with the Empire.

Though Jyn had never exhibited any spirit of revolt—she’d had enough trouble surviving, even pseudonymously, merely keeping her head down—she’s thrown together with a venerable figure from her past, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who huffs with a breathing mask seemingly borrowed from David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and reminds her of long-standing affinities. She’s also tossed together with a band of outsiders, one of whom brings her a holographic message from Galen in which he explains why he worked on the Death Star and conveys his insider knowledge about how she can defeat it. The drama, such as it is, involves Jyn’s transition from an apolitical survivor to an active rebel, and the movie builds to the climactic battle, ranging from the cloak-and-dagger to the conventionally military to the space-Wagnerian, to realize Galen’s grandly subversive plan.

Actually, “Rogue One” is unusually dark, but only in the literal sense—its cinematography enshrouds the characters in a surprisingly murky depth of shadows. The cinematographer, Greig Fraser, has quite the résumé—several of his films are notable mainly for their cinematography, such as “Foxcatcher,” “Killing Them Softly,” and, above all, “Let Me In,” in which the camera work is more or less the movie’s main character and certainly its main appeal. When, late in the film, the galactic combat bursts into the brilliant baby blue of a seemingly bottomless atmospheric dome, the impact of light and color is momentarily stunning—the sole moment of sheer sense-pleasure that the movie offers.

To the producers’ credit, “Rogue One” offers an international cast that, along with Jones, Whitaker, and Mikkelsen, features Diego Luna (as the rebel captain Cassian Andor, who is Jyn’s main cohort), Riz Ahmed (as the band’s intrepid pilot), and Donnie Yen (as a blind martial-arts spiritualist). But it seems as if the condition for assembling this diverse group is not letting them say or do anything of note, anything of any individual distinction, anything of any free-floating or idiosyncratic implication. There’s none of the Shakespearean space politics, enticingly florid dialogue, or experiential thrills of the best of George Lucas's "Star Wars" entries ("Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"). The script of “Rogue One” is so flat and inexpressive, the direction of the actors so methodical, as to render these artists nearly robotic and synthetic. The one character with any inner identity is, in fact, a robot, K-2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, and the only performance with any flair at all is a C.G.I. incarnation, or, rather, resurrection.

Even the climactic battle scenes, in which the band of rebel warriors risks all to disable and destroy the Death Star according to Galen’s instructions, pivot on an unintentionally comical plot point—centered on the transmission of an exceptionally large packet of data—that seems ready-made to be reprocessed as a series of commercials for an Internet-service provider or a cell-phone plan. It makes perfect sense: “Rogue One” isn’t so much a movie as a feature-length promotional film for itself; it’s a movie that is still waiting to be made.