By an odd and sad coincidence, I saw Rogue One the day that Carrie Fisher passed away. Of the original Star Wars trilogy's trifecta of main characters, Fisher's Princess Leia is the closest tied to the events of the film. Indeed, this odd tangent-interquel ties itself so directly to the original Star Wars that one could play A New Hope immediately after it and more or less be a continuous story, albeit one that would abruptly shift its focus to different characters.
The ultimate result of Rogue One is, of course, already known. That's the nature of any kind of prequel or interquel (the chronology of the Star Wars films has been messy ever since the prequels and will only continue to grow more so as these "Star Wars Stories" go on.)
Rogue One is in many ways a proof of concept - they want to make more Star Wars movies. But while the cynic (who is not entirely incorrect) would say that the primary motivation for this is money (Disney wants to get more than three movies out of their 4-billion dollar purchase) I also think that, with generations of artists who grew up loving the Star Wars universe, people want to try different takes on it.
Much like Marvel's vast comic universe, which has stories and characters as bright and optimistic as old Captain America and as dark and disturbed as the Punisher, the Star Wars universe has always seems ripe for alternate takes. The expanded universe, primarily in novels but also comics, has allowed what could be called glorified fan fiction to show us different sides of that world. Rogue One is the first instance of a film being made in the same vein - we're seeing the Star Wars universe expanded.
This is a movie that, apart from a couple of brief cameos, doesn't really concern the Skywalker family. The hero isn't a Jedi, and in fact, the morals are murkier. Most importantly, this is not a movie about people with destinies chosen by a mystical fate. Yes, the Force does play a role, but it looks a lot more like real-world religion, where your own beliefs will shape what you see with your own eyes (or other senses, as the most devout character in the movie is blind.)
It's also a movie that finds a reason to care about people who aren't the most important people in the galaxy. Ultimately, the events of the film would warrant maybe a page or a paragraph in a history textbook, and are basically two sentences in the original movie's opening crawl, but to the people involved in the story, it's the most important event in any of their lives.
To get some thumbs-up/thumbs-down criticism out of the way before I jump into spoilers, I'll say that mostly I'm still digesting it. Characterization suffers a bit from having a ton of characters to keep track of as well as the somewhat procedural nature of the story (you could argue it's kind of a heist movie, though I think it's more accurate to call it a War Movie, ironically in a way that the main series isn't, really, despite being called Star Wars. I would take the PG-13 rating seriously, as this is absolutely darker than the typical Star Wars movies. So if the lack of depth to its characters is its biggest flaw, I'd say it's biggest positive is the addition of some much-needed nuance to the Star Wars universe, with a more realistic (and fractured) Rebellion that doesn't always act like totally good guys and also a world where there's real grunt-work to be done while Luke and Darth Vader are swinging around their lightsabers.
And now, spoilers. And they are pretty big, so be warned.
So I think the most surprising thing about the movie is that I believe every new character introduced in the film is dead by the end.
Even with Felicity Jones on magazine covers everywhere, this new heroine does not make it out of the film alive. This is not franchise-building in the typical sense.
In a sense, because the Star Wars Story movies will be a sort of anthology in contrast with the main series' episodic saga, the filmmakers had license to dispense with their characters, but holy crap did they make use of that license.
The film isn't as graphic as Pekinpah's oeuvre, but there's a definite Dirty Dozen vibe to it. I guess you could also cite Saving Private Ryan, or maybe just a lot of war movies.
Ultimately what we see is a group of people who put the success of the mission above their own lives. In the end, we always knew that they would get the Death Star plans delivered to the Alliance, but what is in doubt is who among our plucky band of misfits will make it out alive, and the answer winds up being none of them.
What it does is retroactively make the victory in the original movie a lot more bittersweet. That medal ceremony should, by all rights, have the Rogue One team standing there with Luke, Han, and Chewbacca.
We also see the horrific devastation of the Death Star from the ground level. While Alderaan is the only planet that the Empire winds up completely destroying, they test-fire the weapon twice during this movie, on a low power setting, and the result is like if every nuke on earth were detonated in the same place at the same time.
Oddly, Grand Moff Tarkin plays a large role here, and rather than re-cast him, they instead created a somewhat-believable but still leaning-over-the-edge-of-the-uncanny-valley CGI version of Peter Cushing, presumably with a separate person impersonating his voice. (They do something similar with Leia, which looks less convincing but is thankfully only for one line.) Tarkin is a real asshole here, hated both by the Alliance for the obvious reasons but also his underlings for being that boss that steals credit for your work (even if your work is evil, that's still annoying.)
Much has also been written about Rogue One's politics, which have come under fire from conservatives largely based on false rumors that the movie had had rewrites to make it more anti-Trump. If I may risk showing my political colors here, I think that the underlying fact is that the Star Wars movies (and frankly, most popular stories) have always at least intended to be politically liberal. The movies are universal enough that people with any politics can project their worldview onto them, but I will point out that it has always been about an ethnically-diverse rebellion against an Empire run entirely by white men who believe strongly that diplomatic and political situations should be resolved with force. When the movies first came out I think a lot of people (including Ronald Reagan) borrowed its iconography and terminology to describe the Soviet Union (and I'm not saying the Soviet Union wasn't in its own way an evil empire) but the intentionally obvious real-world analogue for the Empire was Nazi Germany, the embodiment of right-wing ideology taken to the extreme.
The Death Star is the ultimate expression of force (not Force) being used for political power. And when you have a President-Elect advocating that we kill the families of our enemies to demoralize them, maybe it's not the movies that we should be worried about.
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