Rogue One: A Film For Star Wars Fans
by Tom Farr
SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven’t seen Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
The opening crawl of the original Star Wars gives us a brief description of an earlier story that provides context to the story we’re about to encounter. From this opening crawl, we learn that the galaxy is ruled by an evil Empire and that a small rebellion that has been fighting against the Empire just won its first major battle. During that battle, a group of rebel spies were able to steal the plans of the Empire’s super-weapon, the Death Star. It is, of course, with these plans that the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars is able to destroy the Death Star, stripping the Empire of some of its power and demonstrating ,that the Rebel Alliance is a force to be reckoned with.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story explores the question of who exactly these rebel spies were that stole the Death Star plans. It fleshes out the story that was only briefly touched upon in the Star Wars opening crawl.
But did Rogue One adequately tell this story, and was it a story that needed to be told in the first place?
Mixed Feelings
I walked out of the Rogue One with mixed feelings. When I walked out of The Force Awakens last year, I knew immediately that I loved it. Rogue One has been more of a slow burn. I didn’t know if I loved it or not when I walked out.
One the one hand, I was plagued with a sense that the movie didn’t really give me any new saga-shattering information like The Force Awakens did. On the other hand, this was expected since Rogue One is a story in which we already knew the end and regardless of not receiving any new information, it did flesh out the Star Wars universe a little more and gave us a closer look at the struggle between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire that we haven’t seen in other films.
After processing the movie for a couple days, I’ve decided that I loved it. I’ve read that it’s the best movie since The Empire Strikes Back. I wouldn’t go that far, and I wouldn’t say it was as good as The Force Awakens (unless, of course, you hated TFA). It was, however, a fun journey back into a critical moment in Star Wars history.
Rogue One as Tragedy
When I walked out of Rogue One, the feeling I experienced most vividly was sadness. The Force Awakens ends with a sense of hope, that things are about to head in a positive direction as Rey holds out Anakin’s lightsaber to Luke on Ach-To. Though the rebels end up with the Death Star plans in the end, which are critical to the story line of A New Hope, the story of Rogue One is a tragedy. The rebel spies, we learn, gave their lives to steal those plans. This makes sense and provides a layer of depth to A New Hope that wasn’t there previously. It raised the stakes.
But after watching a story about a little girl who seems destined to help take down the Empire and fulfill the legacy her father left for her, I just didn’t want the story of Jyn Erso to end with this movie. To be fair, we can only assume that Jyn dies at the end of Rogue One, but it seems highly likely.
Of course, we already knew that Rogue One would be the end of Jyn’s story. She’s never mentioned in the original trilogy or The Force Awakens. She doesn’t show up in any of the canon stories post-Rogue One. Still, I was hoping they’d introduce us to a character that would show up somewhere later in the story, perhaps in a story between the original trilogy movies.
Instead, she and every other member of her team ends up dead on the beaches of Scariff.
Rogue One Introduces A Lot of Characters
Most of the characters dying leads me to the one area where Rogue One feels a little off. Rogue One introduces us to a slew of new characters, so many, in fact, that I had hard time keeping track of their names. There are some great character performances in the film, but the introduction of so many characters in a limited amount of time meant that we never get to emotionally invest in most of the characters that end up giving their lives by the end of the movie.
I cared about Jyn and her father. The film does a great job there by building the father/daughter dynamic. Chirrut, the blind, staff-wielding, Force-devoted, Guardian of the Whills, is an easily likable character that I’d love to see again. The Empire-turned-Rebel droid K-2SO gives the film much-needed comic relief while also building an emotional connection with the film’s protagonist (I’ve never hurt so thoroughly over watching a droid die). The problem is that that’s only three characters. There are many more, and most of them just felt expendable to the plot.
The Rebel Alliance and The Empire Up Close
The area where Rogue One exceeds is in the way it portrays the struggles of everyday people under Imperial Rule and the difficult, often morally questionable, choices members of the Rebel Alliance felt they had to make in their quest to restore peace and justice to the galaxy.
It’s only a few minutes into the movie that we see Cassian kill a seemingly innocent man in order to get out of a tight spot with Imperial Stormtroopers. Cassian often expresses regret over the things he’s had to do in the midst of war, and Rogue One shows us the ugly reality of the Galactic Civil War closer than earlier films. People on both sides of the war die, deaths that wouldn’t have to occur if the conflict didn’t exist.
The original Star Wars might have us believing the Empire the bad guys of the story and the Rebel Alliance, the good guys. Rogue One eliminates the tidiness of such a belief. The rebels were responsible for many deaths in their quest for victory, just as the Empire was.
In fact, Rogue One shows us that the Rebel Alliance was made up of people capable of both good and bad choices. For example, we know throughout the film that Galen Erso is one of the good guys. We might even assume it before it’s explicitly revealed in the film. Realizing that Cassian was committed to completing his orders of killing Galen simply to eliminate a great mind from the Empire didn’t foster good feelings about the rebels. In fact, it only reinforced the galaxy’s desperate need for the Jedi, who avoid taking life if at all possible.
Rogue One is a Movie For Star Wars Fans
Rogue One is a movie for fans of Star Wars. It’s not really a standalone film because it relies on so much of the mythology already in place from the saga films and The Clone Wars television show. It tells a story that we already knew in greater detail, filling in the gaps, such as how the weakness of the Death Star came about in the first place, which I loved. There are so many allusions to the saga films that it would take a Star Wars fan to truly appreciate what Gareth Edwards has given us.
I loved the conversation between Mon Mothma and Bail Organa (played by Jimmy Smits, who played the same character in the prequel trilogy) about Organa’s Jedi friend hiding out in the desert, alluding to Obi-Wan Kenobi hiding out on Tatooine.
Jedha, the planet where Saw Gerrera was hiding out, felt deeply significant, and I loved the reference to the Whills, which is an allusion to George Lucas’ original idea for Star Wars as The Journal of the Whills. The mention of the Whills in this film and the inclusion of a passage from the Journal of the Whills at the beginning of the novelization of The Force Awakens have me excited about the deepening of the Whills mythology in the Star Wars universe. Jyn’s time on Jedha also showed us Ponda Baba and Cornelius Evazan, two characters that cause Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi some grief when they visit Mos Eisley to find a pilot in A New Hope.
Though many may question the ethics of including the CGI likeness of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, it was fun to see him again, and I was thoroughly surprised when I thought all we were going to see of him was a reflection in a window. The CGI was good, though a bit jarring because you know you’re watching a CGI person alongside other real-life actors. The same was true with the young Leia CGI inclusion at the end of the film.
By far the most gratifying part of the film was the last few minutes of seeing Darth Vader the enforcer in action as he cut down several members of the rebellion trying to get the Death Star plans through a closed door at the end of a hall. Though we’ve always known that Darth Vader is a skilled Sith Lord with the lightsaber skills to match, this is really first time we’ve seen Vader in a live-action film use those skills to cut down multiple individuals who should have been able to defeat him with their blasters. Rogue One showed us the Vader we’ve all been wanting to see, a stark contrast to the Anakin Skywalker we saw at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
Of course, we also got to see that Vader has a castle on Mustafar, the planet where he was defeated by his former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and left for dead before Palpatine rescued him and fitted him with the suit that keeps him alive.
Proof Of The Expansive Nature of Star Wars
Rogue One isn’t a saga film. It’s not about the Skywalkers (presence of Darth Vader aside). Admittedly, the Skywalker line is what ultimately draws me to Star Wars, but Rogue One shows that there are other stories to tell within this universe that have nothing to do with the Skywalkers. Though I didn’t invest in Jyn Erson as deeply as I did Luke Skywalker as a youngling, it was still a good story,* and it demonstrates the expansive nature of the story George Lucas created forty years ago.
I walked out of Rogue One questioning whether or not this was a story that needed to be told because I didn’t feel like I learned anything new. The experience of the story, however, is what matters most about Rogue One at the end of the day.
*Of course, if Jyn had survived and we learned later on that Luke secretly met her, fell in love with her, married her, and produced Rey with her, I probably would feel more invested in the character.
Tom Farr is a writer, teacher, and storyteller who believes in crafting lies to tell the truth. When he’s not enjoying the good life with his beautiful wife Lindsey and their three much-adored children, he’s striving to create stories that thrill and inspire and preparing for the day Disney calls him to write a Star Wars movie. He’s also a contributing editor for Made Up Words. His work has also appeared on Panel & Frame, Wordhaus, Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, and The Unsplash Book. Check out his fiction writing portfolio on Medium and sign up for his author newsletter.
