It is a dark time for the galaxy. The Empire reigns supreme after a 19 year chokehold since the end of the Clone Wars and it’s up to a plucky band of Rebels to take down their ultimate superweapon before it can do any real harm to the galaxy. This . . . is not that story. This is the story of the downtrodden soldiers and spies and pilots and believers who laid down their lives in an attempt to find any weakness in the Empire’s ultimate plans, in an attempt to find hope.
This is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Rogue One is a first for Star Wars in many ways: it is the first Anthology film; the first film to not exclusively follow the exploits of the Skywalker family line; it is the first film to show the war of the title from the perspective of the infantry and pilots that fought on the frontlines; it is the first time we have gotten a real history into how the Rebel Alliance discovered the Death Star; and it is the first time I have left a movie in near hysterics because it did every goddamn thing I wanted it to.
What makes Rogue One stand out is how the stand alone aspect allows it to strip away the trappings of George Lucas’s directorial style. Gone are Lucas’s film serial inspired opening crawls in favour of a short scene setting up the core emotional conflict in a much more nuanced way.
Gone is the locked down, stick-it-on-a-tripod-in-the-corner cinematography of Lucas’s films with a more handheld, vérité-style approach. Gareth Edwards brings the humanistic side of the conflict to the forefront. Gone is Lucas’s penchant for grand, Shakespearean dialogue in which characters enunciate their emotions without depth and in it’s place is a group of broken characters who find their purpose with one another amid a devastating conflict.
This is not an adventure story. There is no swashbuckling swing across the chasm to safety with a beautiful princess clinging to you. This isn’t the Star Wars we know in terms of style, but it’s one that still feels intimately familiar. This is a war movie. It’s a movie that tells you, in no uncertain terms that the people you care about will die sudden, messy deaths.
As much as the film keeps the saga’s rhetoric about the power of hope in a rebellion at the forefront of the conflict, the nitty gritty of the final act is less noble and more desperate. This is a last ditch effort and because the tension of whether they succeed or not is dashed by the fact that we first saw the Death Star destroyed 40 years ago, the film builds its tension in asking the question “Who is going to get out of this unscathed?”
Most people would expect the Disneyfication of the franchise to allow the team walk away from the movie like badasses for Rogue One 2: This Time With Bothans. Not to outright spoil the ending, but the people at Lucasfilm clearly respect the material and the universe too much to milk this beyond a standalone movie. The climax of the film builds its emotion out of the knowledge that no one is safe.
This isn’t a Saga movie where the deadly precision aim of Imperial Stormtroopers whiz past Luke Skywalker while he blunders through the Death Star on sheer, dumb luck. This is war. People die. It gets pretty emotional and tough to watch near the climax, but it’s a necessary building of context that brings a deeper well of depth to the original Star Wars, a story we all thought we knew front to back.
This is a very different kind of Star Wars than we’re used to seeing. It’s hard not to compare it to what came before. In The Force Awakens, the familiar iconography was taken and updated while the structure and themes of the movie were purposefully reminiscent of the original Star Wars in order to bring the franchise back to audiences old and new. With Rogue One, the iconography is the same as what we have been familiar with since 1977 — with some new elements thrown into the mix — while the structure and themes are a new and complex ground for the franchise to tread.
Continued belowThere’s been many comments made about how Rogue One is the movie that remembered that Star Wars is about war. I disagree. Star Wars has always been about war. However, it has been a clean, safe, and detached kind of war. From the limited perspectives of our heroes in the Original Trilogy to the conflict between factory produced clones and battle droids in The Clone Wars, Lucas had been removing much of the human element of war. Rogue One is the Star Wars movie that remembers that war has consequences.
Let’s talk about the people of the movie for a second, then, shall we? While The Force Awakens was firmly Rey’s movie in the end, it was surprising to find that Rogue One doesn’t necessarily favour Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso as the Main Character. Her connections to other characters facilitate the beginning of the story, but she’s not some Force-guided chosen one. She’s an ordinary girl estranged from the major conflict of the galaxy who gets wrapped up in something bigger than herself because of the people she knows. The film is as much about the rest of the Rogue One crew as it is about Jyn.
Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor probably has the most surprising arc in the film, starting out in a place that was not advertised at all that brings way more depth to the character than simply being the gruff, leading man Han Solo-stand in I thought was going to be. Riz Ahmed’s Bodhi Rook is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, continually pushed in the background by the plot despite having as much a part of the core emotional conflict as Jyn herself.
The two that will clearly be favourites of many will be Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Imwe and Jiang Wen’s Baze Malbus. The two have perfect chemistry and tie the story to the larger world of the Force while providing most of the film’s laughs that don’t come from Alan Tudyk’s K-2SO. Alan Tudyk was already experienced in playing motion captured robots that worm their way into our hearts in I, Robot and Rogue One shows just what an unbelievably scene-stealing talent he is.
On the other side of the equation: Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic. Krennic is a fascinating beast as he’s more the figurehead of the Empire and a metaphor for how its ambition was its ultimate downfall than an actual aggressor of an antagonist. Having read James Luceno’s Catalyst and having context for his role in the construction of the Death Star and relationship with Galen Erso, I loved this character, but I’m curious that he might play as more of a generic Imperial boogeyman without that context.
Rogue One: A Star Wars is by no means perfect. On a technical level, there are two main failings that are unbelievable spoilers so I won’t go into detail, but they mostly don’t work in execution rather than concept. They’re snafus along the way that, if you’re able to look past it, you’ll see the bigger picture more clearly. This was a huge risk for Lucasfilm, to follow up the first chapter of the next generation of Star Wars movies with a film set more than 30 years prior that mires itself in staunch adherence to the technological aesthetic of the films from the ’70s and ’80s, but I think it was a risk worth taking.
Once upon a time, a story like Rogue One would have been a novel or a comic book or a video game that would have deepened the context of the film, but easily missed by those who weren’t seeking it out. Now, Lucasfilm is able to widen the scope of the world and tell smaller, more compact stories that still have galaxy changing consequences and cement them in the canon of the films. If The Force Awakens was the reinvigoration of Star Wars as a brand, Rogue One is proof that Lucasfilm isn’t content to just sit on their hands and let it print money for them. They’re going to build stories that are emotional, engaging and poetic on levels we haven’t seen from the franchise before. Because the Force is with them.
