The Good, the Bad, and the Meh of Rogue One

I have been waiting to complain about Rogue One for months. Money’s always tight around this time of year and originally we hadn’t even planned on seeing it, but my wonderful husband, when he saw how important it was to me to be able to publicly scorn this heathen apocrypha, insisted that we go. He is good to me.

This was why my conflicting emotions as the credits rolled were a problem. My husband didn’t help matters by thinking it was great. We had some tense moments walking back to the car, me thinking: “I have married a complete heretic”, and him thinking, I’m sure, “I have married a complete zealot” (in my defense, he knew I was a zealot when he married me).

I find myself unable to give an unreservedly bad review of Rogue One. It entertained me. It surprised me. With that in mind, I shall try my best to be fair as I sort through the good, the bad and the meh of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

*SPOILERS * SPOILERS * SPOILERS *I’M SERIOUS THERE’S GONNA BE SPOILERS GUYS *

I had two major complaints about Rogue One:

My harshest critique is that it threw A New Hope under the bus. The story did not feel like it had grown organically out of the events of A New Hope, but rather that A New Hope had been unwillingly manipulated into fitting the story of Rogue One. I got a bad feeling when I started seeing reviews that said things like, “You’ll never watch A New Hope the same way again!”. I happen to want to watch A New Hope the same way as I’ve always watched it, thank you very much.

In Rogue One, we find out that the “small exhaust port” that the Imperials had overlooked, allowing the Rebels to start a chain-reaction that destroyed the entire Death Star at the end of the first movie, was an intentional flaw planted by the main character’s father. I’ve heard some people say that this makes ANH make more sense. I think this is probably because they haven’t watched ANH recently. In ANH, you are intended to think that the plans were stolen without prior knowledge of a weakness, so that it can be analyzed to look for one (for instance, as Luke, Leia and Han are leaving after escaping the Death Star, Han asks what is so important about R2, Leia reveals he is carrying the plans to the Death Star and says she “only hopes” they can find a weakness when the plans are analyzed). Defenders of Rogue One will find explanations for this, just like defenders of the prequels found explanations for Luke and Leia’s conversation about her mother in ROTJ not jiving with the conclusion of ROTS, but in my opinion any additions to the original Star Wars trilogy must play second, not first, fiddle, and the intentional flaw bit is not believable when you put the movie together with ANH. It also makes the climax of ANH seem like less of a big deal.

My second complaint about Rogue One was the “good guys aren’t always good” theme they had going with the Rebellion. If this had been another movie, it would not have bothered me, but this is Star Wars we’re talking about here. The simple conflict of good vs. evil is part of the escapism and appeal of the original trilogy. That’s not to say that good guys can’t turn bad and bad guys can’t turn good in Star Wars, but the lines around good and bad are pretty clearly drawn, almost like a sci-fi fairy tale. Rogue One was not in keeping with this tradition (the prequels weren’t either, and they stink). There’s a place for posing unsettling ethical questions, but that place is not Star Wars. To play my own devil’s advocate, I think a gifted opponent could convince me to be okay with this element in R1 by making a distinction between a “Star Wars movie” and a “Star Wars story movie”, thinking of on the same level as an extended universe novel or something (I don’t really read extended universe novels but I allow that they have a right to live). I also felt that the major moral dilemma (Cassian choosing at the last moment not to kill Jyn’s father), was a silly predicament for him to be in the first place. Why on earth would the Rebellion want to kill the man who could be the key to discovering a weakness in the Empire’s planet-killing weapon? Finding some way to destroy it is pretty much their last hope of not being slaves to the Empire forever, so you’d think they would not be eager to burn bridges. Perhaps they were worried that he would design more weapons for the Empire and letting him stay alive wasn’t worth the risk, but really, what’s he going to do … design a weapon that blows up TWO planets?

A minor complaint: we all know that Peter Cushing is dead and Carrie Fischer doesn’t look like that anymore. The CGI representations of Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia were about as impressive as you can get, as CGI, but they are not fooling anyone, and it was distracting. A more restrained hand could have made this effective with Tarkin (e.g. I would not have complained if you had just seen Tarkin’s back, and his face reflected in the window, like he was at the end of his first scene, the entire time), but it seemed like they were just trying to show off what they could do.

As a movie in its own right, Rogue One was far from flawless, but it was also far from a complete waste of money and a Saturday afternoon.

The space fights are legitimately slobber-worthy. The droid K-2SO is actually funny on more than one occasion, and that’s a nice nod to the Star Wars tradition of using droids as comic-relief characters (a tradition continued, but executed poorly in the prequels). The set-up was formulaic but the conclusion was very strong (more on that later). The world-building was done quite well. Following Jyn and Cassian through the streets of Jedha, encountering many familiar species (and a couple familiar faces) and some new ones was quite enjoyable. The world felt authentic.

But by far, my favorite thing about Rogue One is …. *SPOILERS NOW I MEAN IT!*

Everybody dies. This is what really, for a few moments, almost tipped the scales for me. When I realized that Jyn and Cassian were for reals not getting out of this alive, I kind of wanted to do the slow clap. To have Jyn develop from being a cynic who abstains from personal sacrifice to making the ultimate sacrifice for a cause that she recognizes is bigger than she is, is very powerful. In Jyn’s speech before the Rogue team embarks on their renegade mission, she urges them to “take the chance … and the next chance, and the next chance, and the next chance … until there are no more chances left”. And she (as well as every single other major character) proceeds to actually do that, from no compulsion except the personal realization that it’s the right thing to do (compare this to Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen).

If this had been a stand-alone movie, I think it would have gotten my approval simply for that fact.

In conclusion, as a Star Wars movie, I do not recognize Rogue One as canon, but it is certainly better quality apocrypha than any of the prequels (even, if I’m being fair, Return of the Sith, which was the least bad of the three). As a movie, it certainly could have been better, but it was in a class above the average.

But I still want to see the movie where the Bothans die to get the information about the second Death Star.