Rogue One: It's Unfairly Forgotten

You know, in retrospect, I realize that "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" was something of a massive risk for the heads of this beloved franchise. "Star Wars" is a story for the dreamers. It's about special people being tasked with special missions to accomplish special things that will forever enshrine them in glory. Star Wars is about the chosen ones. And so, it was a seemingly illogical move to release a spin-off film about everything that Star Wars is not. Rogue One was not about the chosen ones. Instead, it was about unremarkable people taking on a mission far beyond their individual capabilities to accomplish something that no one else wants to do but needs to be done anyway. In a lot of ways, it's an anti-Star Wars movie. Rogue One has a lot more in common with biographical, true-to-life, and inspired-by-true-events war films than it does other movies in the franchise that it's a part of. The tank scene on Jedha seemed to take a lot of cues from The Hurt Locker instead of falling back on familiar tropes established in the franchise's Original Trilogy. The beach battle scenes in the third act of the movie reminded me more of the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan than they did, say, any of the ground battle sequences from the Prequel Trilogy. And the X-wing strike on the Eadu Imperial Research Facility packed a visceral and strangely grounded punch that reminded me more of the Japanese strafing runs from Pearl Harbor than they did the Death Star attack from the original film in 1977. I guess what I'm trying to say is that for a Star Wars film that does a lot to set itself apart from other Star Wars films, as well as for the fact that it earned over $1 billion worldwide, Rogue One doesn't get talked about quite enough. However, on the other hand, I firmly believe that Rogue One is ultimately Star Wars in its purest form. Stay tuned if you want to find out what I mean by that. Today, I'm going to try and even the scales of relative and comparative obscurity a little bit and spend some time talking about why I love Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

For those of you unfamiliar with the film (which should be very few of you), Rogue One is the first of two Star Wars stand-alone anthology films and follows the story of a ragtag band of rebels who embark on a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star, the Galactic Empire's new weapon of mass destruction.

The first thing I love about Rogue One is the fact that it puts the "war" into Star Wars. I was rambling on earlier about how the film felt more like a World War II espionage film than it did other Star Wars movies, but I want to reiterate this point and give you some specific examples of this more grounded tone, as well as why it is a good thing. I want to draw your attention to the ground battle on Scarif, the beach planet where the Death Star plans are locked away in a vault. When I first watched Rogue One back in early 2017, I was just a youngster who wasn't really into movies and the hidden craft behind them yet. All I knew was that loud gun go pew-pew a little differently than I was used to in Star Wars movies, and big machine go vroom-vroom and whoosh differently than was normal in this universe. Looking back, I now realize a few things. The battle on Scarif Beach felt a lot less like Star Wars than it did, say, Band of Brothers. Camera techniques, sound design, and effects work were very different than any other Star Wars film, and even I, a youngster at the time, picked up on it. And I wasn't just imagining this difference. Gareth Edwards and his crew actually did draw a lot of inspiration from World War II films, among them titles such as Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen, and The Thin Red Line. Far less emphasis was put on the individual hero, and far more emphasis was put on a team of ordinary people working together as a cohesive unit (or...not working together as a cohesive unit, depending on how you look at the film), a common theme in war films but an uncommon one in Star Wars, no matter what the franchise might want to tell you differently. Rogue One doesn't behave like a Star Wars film, and in theory, this should have done more to differentiate the film from other films in the franchise than it actually did.

The second thing I love about Rogue One is its incredibly solid cast of characters. Juggling a large cast is a very difficult thing to do, and, for all intents and purposes, the movie does it incredibly well. Although those unusual Star Wars naming conventions do, at times, make it difficult to remember names, every character in this movie has a distinct voice, be it the voice of a spy, a traitor, a devout monk of a bygone order, or a disillusioned monk of a bygone order with a big machine gun, but also a defining feature as well: they're all outcasts, moral and social devils, or rogues of one stripe or another. On top of that, as much as I love the Star Wars franchise, every single character that has ever been front and center in the other 10 films has had something special to their name, most often a deep connection with the force or a heritage that somehow involves a Jedi or Sith. In Rogue One, this just simply isn't the case. Rogue One is the first Star Wars film that focuses on people that other Star Wars films would have ignored because audiences would have deemed them to be too "ordinary." Making the bold decision to change character conventions this drastically should have been more memorable than it actually turned out to be, and the irony that a fanbase that loves underdog stories about farmers but flat-out ignores a film that, in every way, narratively and strategically, is an underdog, is not lost on me at all. Rogue One is the first Star Wars film that was actually about what Star Wars had always claimed to be about, and people completely ignored it because of that.

The third major thing I love about Rogue One is its far more grown-up approach to galactic matters. Star Wars movies tend to be glamorous and heroic, creating this overwhelming sense of idealism that never quite avoids feeling manufactured rather than authentic. Glamorous and heroic are two things Rogue One is very much not. The movie is far more violent, hard-hitting, genuine, and up-front than your average film from a galaxy far, far away, and the moral and ethical questions the movie raises surrounding the almost Black Hawk-Down-esque violence go well beyond the typical questions asked in a Star Wars movie. Questions such as "How far is too far to overthrow an even monstrous evil?" or, verbatim, "How are we any different from Stormtroopers?" have more teeth to them than is usual in a franchise science fiction flick, demonstrating in a satisfying manner that the good guys can't always afford to act good. The overarching ideas surrounding forgotten sacrifice, the benefits and drawbacks of undying loyalty, and the price of doing the wrong things for the right reasons have lingered with me far longer than I expected, probably because I never really expected to see them in a Star Wars movie.

To be fair to Star Wars fans (who, for the record, haven't been fair to me a day in my life), Rogue One probably got overshadowed by all the internet discourse surrounding a certain, very specific Star Wars movie from the following year, 2017. I think that this echo chamber that shall not be explicitly addressed by name drew a lot of attention away from Rogue One. However, I hope that today, I helped draw a little bit of attention back to it because I think this movie deserves to be talked about a lot more than it actually is. If it's been a while since you've seen this movie, I would heartily endorse any thoughts you may have about going back to watch it with an open mind and zero expectations. Now, I do need to say that even though I love this movie, I am under no impressions that it is perfect or more narratively airtight than it actually is. The movie could have completely lost the first 10 minutes of its runtime and instead used dream sequences or flashbacks to streamline the plot, and this would have slimmed the movie down a little bit, but other than that, I have very few complaints about this movie. Rogue One is one heck of a Star Wars film, and it's one that deserves more love than it gets due to the fact that it dared to be different. Thematically, you could even say it is Star Wars perfected, and its excellent structural aspects will only lend authenticity to this claim. I don't know if I would take this post that far in the name of rebelling against largely accepted standards of quality in Star Wars circles, as I couldn't possibly hope to get an audience that way, but others might read this and decide to take that step because, after all, rebellions are built on hope.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - 8/10

Psalm 144:1-2