Economies of Hope
Formula for Rebellion in Rogue One
**Contains Rogue One Spoilers**
The original trailer for Rogue One, released back in April, opens on protagonist Jyn Erso in handcuffs. She appears before Mon Mothma and General Draven, leaders of the Rebel Alliance, as they rattle off her track record: “forgery of Imperial documents, possession of stolen property, aggravated assault, resisting arrest.” In the kicker line of the early promo, Erso responds, “This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel.”
In Rogue One, released December 16th, Erso still teaches the rebels how to live up to their name, but that sequence from the original trailer, along with most of the rest of the footage contained there, did not make the final cut. Rumors of writer Tony Gilroy’s call-up to fix the ending and soften the reportedly dark script of Gareth Edward’s blockbuster may offer some explanation for these omissions and the lighter fare that the movie ultimately delivers.
We don’t know exactly what changed between the release of the first trailer and the premier, but the standout line of the movie is no longer a hardboiled rebel pledge, but rather Erso’s hallmark-card declaration that “rebellions are built on hope.” It’s an abstract, Disneyfied picture of rebellion, but maybe one that better comprises the spirit of Star Wars.
In Rogue One, as in all Star Wars movies, the stakes are high, and here we know them with unprecedented precision. We know exactly where this story fits into the larger Star Wars timeline. We know exactly what these characters must (and will) accomplish. We have our point B; Rogue One provides A and everything in-between. Our hope is therefore validated before the opening text (n)ever crawls, and the job of Edwards and his crew is to provide us with the foundational roots of that hope.
It’s a tall task because it requires bridging the tonal gap between two fundamentally different movies in Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Where Revenge of the Sith leaves the universe in despair with the apparent destruction of the Jedi Order, A New Hope provides a campy run through the galaxy during which the Rebel Alliance looks all but invincible, and inexplicably so. Rogue One must then explain how the world has progressed from the bitter aftertaste of the prequels to the optimism of the original trilogy. Hope may be the only answer.
For much of Rogue One the rebellion looks as if it could be snuffed out with the flick of an Imperial wrist. But a giant leap occurs here, as in all underdog stories, whereby some mysterious factor — hope — allows for the believable upset of an insurgent good over an objective bad. In these stories the good guys are human — in nature if not in faith — they empathize, they love, they stumble, while the bad guys are mechanical, ruthless tacticians for whom the ends always justify the means. Star Wars has always pitted categorical evil against categorical good — that is not the issue — only that here good must prevail, no matter the odds. It is the unspoken rule of any similarly black and white narrative, and it raises the question of just how far hope can carry an underdog.
Every David and Goliath story faces a similar challenge at its root, but the narrative obstacle comes into focus in a universe where capital-H Hope is as potent a force as the Force itself. This is why the heroes of the Star Wars franchise shun odds at every turn. When Han Solo dodges enclosing TIE fighters by guiding the Millennium Falcon into an asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back, an anxious C-3PO objects that their likelihood of survival is impossibly low. Solo shuts him up with the now iconic, “Never tell me the odds.” Rogue One evokes this line several times as the intrepid Captain Cassian Andor shrugs off the warnings of the droid K-2SO. Part of the charm of an underdog story lies in watching the impossibly outmatched protagonists outmaneuver their enemies by riding on little but rote skill, dumb pride, and cosmically vindicated hope. In the Star Wars universe the addition of hope balances any equation; odds do not apply.
So when Jyn Erso and her motley crew of rogue rebels disobey Alliance orders, commandeer a stolen Imperial shuttle, and slip unassisted into the force field-protected planet Scarif to rob an Imperial data bank and deliver the plans for the Death Star into Alliance hands, their odds look impossibly slim, but their success is, of course, inevitable.
While the Force might allow for the greatest deus ex machina in sci-fi or fantasy, it is largely absent in Rogue One. Instead, hope fills the gap, and also gets the literal final word of the installment. But the stand-alone structure of Rogue One allows for at least one major check on any trite definitions of hope: here, everyone dies. The protagonists watch from a sunset beach as the rising horizon turns into the tidal wave of a dying planet. Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor embrace. The screen goes white.
These heroes did everything they could, and they can never know that their work leads to the eventual destruction of the Death Star. This should feel tragic, but it instead feels like little more than a puzzle piece falling into place. The characters don’t garner enough sympathy to be any more than plot mechanisms. For all of its diversity, the rogue fellowship that the movie centers upon looks mostly familiar: an insular and punkish hero, her battle-hardened foil, a robotic straight man, a nervous pilot who proves his salt in the final battle sequence. The movie does a good job of wrapping character backstory into the narrative (dad built Death Star, daughter must destroy it), but everything adds up in the pre-constructed formula of what we know to be a Star Wars movie or an underdog story. It all comes out a little bloodless, a little predictable, a little formulaic.
This underdog victory comes by the sum of a few measly parts and one massive, incalculable variable: hope. Hope is the composite of it all, manufactured in a way that gives it, for all of its admirable ambition and humanity, the underpinning taste of big studio commercial IP, reduced to a variable in a math problem or the crutch for a far-fetched plot. Even for this stand-alone Star Wars installment, there is apparently little room for a challenging vision in a franchise of this pedigree and a studio of this size. Hope informs the stakes of Star Wars movies, not the other way around, but in Rogue One the stakes have less to do with the Death Star or the Rebel Alliance or the Force, and more to do with Disney and the box office and a brand. Of this much a blockbuster can be made. But a rebellion? Not so much.
