My complicated relationship with last year’s Episode VII: The Force Awakens is well-chronicled on this site. I use that to open with so that if you didn’t already know, I can tell you that my Star Wars fandom isn’t the blind kind. It isn’t the kind that accepts whatever comes out with the brand name on it. And I absolutely loved Rogue One. It is everything I hoped for.
I think at this point it’s fair to say that, no matter how Episodes VIII and IX turn out, the future of Star Wars is with the anthology movies, and what a kickoff Gareth Edwards has given them. There’s so much to love here, and I don’t want to spoil anybody, which is going to be hard. From the opening shot, the film is both different from everything we’ve seen before, and yet perfectly, entirely, Star Wars.
The same is true of Michael Giacchino’s score. No great blasting brass to start this film, no opening crawl, but a brassy accent over a passing spacecraft and a long, slow pan across the rings of a planet we’ve never seen before, a soft trilling underlining the tension and mystery of the cosmic scene. It at once fits with the great John Williams’ extensive work on the franchise, and announces that this is a different kind of Star Wars movie.
The production design is gorgeous. Set shortly before the original 1977 Star Wars, this film perfectly captures the look of that iconic galaxy far, far away. The juxtaposition between the natural world and the high-tech, and the way the technology appears worn and battered, well-used, like an old car or the registers at your local supermarket. Part of the charm of the original trilogy was the way the vehicles and the tools and weapons all blended seamlessly into the world Lucas had created, the slapdash repair jobs on the backwater desert planet, the rebel fighters hangared in a jungle temple, a fleet of ships repaired with mismatched parts and never repainted. Rogue One nails that, and every frame of it is packed with that kind of detail.
There’s also the tendency of architects in the Star Wars galaxy to design workspaces in the most impractical, most dangerous way possible. It wouldn’t be Star Wars if somebody didn’t have to walk across a gantry with no railing hanging out over a bottomless pit in order to turn on a light switch. The Imperial bases in this movie feel true to the Original Trilogy, true to the cartoons, and true to the video games dating clear back to the 1990’s. Not for nothing, but the machinations our heroes have to go through to come up with those data tapes is like something the level designers would have made you do in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. It’s as Star Wars as a thing can possibly be.
[WARNING: Mild Spoilers follow]
Then there’s the story. You already know what the movie’s about, in broad strokes, I hope. It’s the commando mission to steal the Death Star plans. But it’s also a story about a woman named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the man who designed the Death Star. Her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is forced by the Empire to help them construct their technological terror. He does it knowing that as long as he’s cooperating, his daughter is safe, and the weakness, the exhaust port to the reactor core, he leaves intentionally vulnerable so that the rebels have a way to fight back against the station.
He sends a message with a defecting shuttle pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) to deliver to the harsh leader of an extremist rebel cell, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). When the Alliance gets word of the defector and his message, they break Jyn Erso out of a labor camp and draft her to help them get Gerrera’s ear and a meeting with the pilot. But everything goes pear-shaped and soon Erso and her team are caught between the complicated internal politics of the Alliance to the Restore the Republic, and the iron hand of the First Galactic Empire, culminating in a desperate, last-ditch effort to secure the Death Star plans and give hope a fighting chance for survival.
All the performances are solid. Felicity Jones is a wonderful lead, and Diego Luna is excellent in his supporting role as the morally complex rebel spy, Cassian Andor. Both characters have compelling arcs, Jones as a survivor, drifting through the prison system, until she finds her purpose in life, and Luna as a kind of Star Wars black flag operative, jaded and cynical, nothing left to lose, but who clings to hope in spite of the darkness all around him.
Alan Tudyk hilariously voices a hulking, reprogrammed Imperial droid named K-2S0, who seems to owe more than a little of his being to Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Jiang Wen and Donny Yen are Baze and Chirrut, a big badass with a big gun, and a Zatoichi-inspired blind martial artist who believes in the Force, although he is not a Jedi.
The characters come together through shared peril, in the classic Star Wars style, and have to build trust as they go crashing through constant adversity. I have read a few complaints that the characters weren’t engaging, but this was not my experience. I found them to be plenty engaging. Apart from Jyn we didn’t learn their backstories, but we did see them interact with each other enough for them to show the kind of people that they are, and for us to decide if we like them. In the end that’s all we really got from Han, Luke, and Leia in the original Star Wars.
Rogue One is a war movie, but it’s also very much a heist movie, and I think invoking “The Dirty Dozen” and “Where Eagles Dare” gives you the right idea. It’s also chock full of references to “Star Wars” (or “A New Hope,” as it is called to differentiate the movie from the brand) and “Revenge of the Sith.” It also breaks out some unused ideas from earlier drafts of “Empire” and “Jedi,” and eagle-eyed viewers will notice The Ghost from Disney XD’s “Rebels” in at least one shot. A number of characters from the other movies show up here, though I won’t spoil who or how. Since the TV spots and trailers have given away Darth Vader’s presence, I will tell you this:
Darth Vader has basically two scenes in this movie, and both are relatively brief, but the first one… the first one is perfect, and then the second one…is, unbelievably, impossibly…better. It’s the best Vader has been since The Empire Strikes Back. His screentime is small, but he is larger than life, presented like a horror movie character, part Dracula, part Jason Voorhees.
I can clearly see why George Lucas loves this movie: it’s a love letter to everything he ever made, it stands apart from his beloved Skywalker Saga, thus not encroaching on his legacy even as it builds perfectly, and respectfully, upon it. It’s as perfect a Star Wars movie as anyone could hope for. “The Force Awakens” left me cold, but “Rogue One” left me full of emotion. It’s the bleakest Star Wars film, in many ways, bleaker in its way than even “Empire”. But like the best dark films, it offers a message about hope. That when things seem at their worst, when you’re at your lowest point, that’s when you need to take a stand. To kick against the encroaching shadow, to cling to hope, fight for it if you must, because amidst the dark of night your light shines all the brighter, if you let it.
Without Jedi Knights, without any religious or philosophical trappings, this is still Star Wars. This is the world of the rebel soldiers, weathered, battered, broken; standing in the shadows, looking for A New Hope.