Films as Fanfiction

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

2016

D: Gareth Edwards

**********

Pros: Directing, Cinematography, Action, Effects, Tone

Cons: Unnecessary, Bland Heroine, Some Logical Flaws

     I love Star Wars so obviously I would love to see expansions of this universe.  There was hope that Disney would take advantage of this literal galaxy of potential, but unfortunately decided to rehash the Original Trilogy.  Even the standalones were very closely related to existing arcs.  Like Solo, this plot was an answer to a question already answered, but it was still rather enjoyable. 

    In this case we’re revisiting the stealing of the Death Star plans.  It’s not necessary to know this, and besides I’d rather see a movie about the liberation of the X-Wings from Incom.  What’s strange is that they felt the need to rationalize it by claiming that the Death Star’s weakness was a “plothole.”  First off, it’s not.  Designs have weaknesses and tradeoffs, and this humorous article actually explains the exhaust port better than the movie does  In fact, neither the Imperials nor the Rebels in ANH knew of a specific phantom weak spot (thus making much of this movie’s plot irrelevant); they were acting on the common sense assumption that it had something to take advantage of.  I don’t even remember this being a problem at all until people conveniently started selling it as the most ridiculous thing ever in time for this movie’s release.  It’s like the movie nitpick version of an SJW issue.  It’s not unbelievable that the Death Star had a weakness.  What’s ridiculous is that a known rogue scientist purposely sabotaged the process without anyone noticing.

      The scientist in question is Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who sent a secret message through an defecting Imperial transport driver named Bodhi (Riz Ahmed) to Rebel partisan Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker).  Getting wind of this, the Rebel Alliance sends agent Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and reprogrammed Imperial Enforcer droid K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) to retrieve Galen’s daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones) due to her connection with Saw.  Along the way they pick up a blind Force monk named Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and his friend Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen). The circumstances turn Jyn into a sort of “chosen one” aesthetically, if not logistically.  This ends up adulterating the selling point of this movie: normal rebels without the benefit of Plot Armor fighting the Empire in the dirt.  While all the protagonists do die (it would have been more impactful if some of them had survived), they seem to do so right when their usefulness to the plot is fulfilled.  It doesn’t help that Jyn is a remarkably flat, weak character, constantly needing to be goaded until the climax.  For all the accusations of sexism leveled at the fanboys, people don’t give Felicity Jones nearly enough crap for her bland performance in a movie with otherwise good acting.  Credit where it’s due, though: she does a great impression of a kid looking out of a minivan window during a boring road trip when the good guys are flying from an exploding city.  

         This problem is reinforced when Galen’s message turns out to be directed toward Jyn.  Instead of simply telling the Rebels what the weakness is, he babbles on about his love for her but does little to provide her any information.  He just assumes she’ll go to the Planet of Scarif and download the plans recognizing that the file name is his pet name for her.  This speech is also interspersed with shots of the Death Star’s destruction of the city on Jedha.  This would have been a great opportunity to finally see the horror of the battle station from the POV of the people it’s killing.

        The best character is the villain, Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, in a bigger star-making role than Jones).  His personal obsession with Galen turns out to be his and the Death Star’s undoing.  He spends the movie attempting to repair his mistake before his superiors finally have enough of him.  I usually find plots about protagonits' owing dangerous people money to be hackneyed and tedious, but the desperate villain trope has everything appealing about this without making us sympathize with the character to much.  In the process he gets in a political struggle with Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry, with CGI).  He’s my second favorite Star Wars bad guy, and the movie would have been better if they had scrapped the heroes’ arcs and simply focused on him as a villain protagonist.  After all, all we need to know about the Rebels here is that they’re normal people fighting the good fight. 

        Still, two characters the movie who could have been developed further were Bodhi and K2.  Bodhi’s arc as a defecting Imperial, along with the mistrust he faces, could have been a good story.  He might have formed a connection with K2, who would struggle as result of his own redemption being programmed rather than chosen.  Droids are an interesting case in Star Wars: they’re clearly conscious, sapient beings, but they’re also limited by their programming.  They have the awareness to appreciate their lack of genuine free will, and they develop copes.  K2-SO’s is excessive snark and defiance on minor orders.  He’s one of the more amusing characters in the film.          

        The movie is quite enjoyable for all its flaws, which illustrates the importance of a consistent tone and good directing.  There is one stretch where it drags down, largely because of two disordered scenes.  The first is the attack on Eadu, the Imperial weapons facility Galen is working on.  It seems unnecessary, and then we get to the blatant fanservice of the Mustafar scene with Darth Vader (Spencer Wilding, voiced by an incredibly exhausted-sounding James Earl Jones).  The latter is fun to watch.  Vader’s palace is cool, and he’s refreshingly in-character, expressing his lack of enthusiasm for the Death Star and frustration with Imperial power politics.  Unfortunately, he drops a terrible pun while choking Krennic (using the word “choke” as if unaware “aspirations” is already a pretty good stealth pun).  The scene would have made a lot more sense if: 

1)    It had taken place before the Battle of Eadu, with the mention of it deleted

2)    It had no mention of the meeting’s being Vader’s idea (Krennic had a point: Vader was wasting his time and endangering his counterintel op)

In this case Krennic, desperate to gain power back from Tarkin, reaches out to Vader in order to get an ally in this feud.  This backfires because Vader takes the leak just as seriously as Tarkin does.  With Vader on his butt, Krennic now takes the problem seriously and travels to Eadu to confront Galen.  This would have also made the Eadu scene seem less tediously pointless.  More importantly, the Mustafar scene wrecks an excellent reveal for Vader later in the movie.  It should have been deleted or edited so that we never actually see him.

       Eventually the Rebels mount an assault on the Planet Scarif to retrieve the Death Star plans.  The heroes sneak off using the new call sign “Rogue,” which seems a lot like an orphaned payoff.  The resultant battle is the best thing to happen in Star Wars since Return of the Jedi.  In addition to specificity and strategy that makes it one of the more well-thought-out of the space battles in the series, it’s also where the special effects shine.  It looked  100% convincing in ways most MCU battles are not. Rogue One ends up succeeding more in its goals of being a Star Warswar movie with the extras in the Battle of Scarif.   It also features the best scene in the movie…

       The Hallway Scene is one of my litmus tests to identify people who feel the need to feign sophistication and those who can actually appreciate and enjoy things.  The former apparently promote a false dichotomy between Turning Your Brain Off and Turning Your Heart Off.  Here we finally get to see how frightening Darth Vader (Daniel Naprous) is to a regular person.  Imagine fighting for the Rebellion always knowing about Vader, always hoping you never cross his path, and then one day you get unlucky.  Imagine this being your first sight of Vader as an audience member. He and the Force are effectively foreshadowed throughout the movie, and then at the finale you see this…thing.  The movie leaves with this cliffhangar knowing this the series’ prime villain.  If not for the Mustafar scene, this would supplant A New Hope as the beginner movie for the series.  But some people won’t stop dismissing this effective climax as “fanservice” or “something out of a horror movie.”  They often denounce it as too dark, not understanding the significance of a bunch of ordinary people standing up to the Galaxy’s biggest walking nightmare and holding him off just long enough to save the day.  

These guys >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>MCU superheroes

       One of the dumber takes on this scene is that it finally demonstrates how evil Vader is.  Sure, he might be playing with those guys a little too much, but it’s not like fighting enemy soldiers in a battle is as evil as murdering children, sand people, complicity with the Death Star, etc.  In fact, he probably spared some stormtroopers’ lives by doing this.  I could answer Vader’s absence in the battle at the beginning of ANH by claiming that Vader had spent enough time in the bridge conducting the chase of the Tantive IV that we wasn’t as fresh.  

       The movie should have cut to credits as Vader was looking after the fleeing ship (the music even builds up to a perfect segue to the Star Wars theme here), but instead we had an unnecessary scene in which Leia (Ingvild Deila) is given the plans.  When asked what they are, she cheesily turns her back on the guy and says “hope” to no one in particular.  The scene itself is worse than CGI on Leia’s face.  The CGI facework is a little off, but I’ve never minded that as much as when the entire battle scene looks like a Pixar movie.  Also, Leia is sufficiently hyped earlier in the movie when Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) says “I’d trust her with my life.”

       Where fanservice is concerned, the movie has its cringe moments.  The presence of contemporary ships like X-Wings, Star Destroyers, etc. are fine, but some of it is forced.  In the first scene Galen is apparently posing as a moisture farmer on Planet Seattle.  We even have a gratuitous shot of bottle of blue milk in which it is the focal point of the entire image.  Now I’m sure there’s some forced rationalization for those vaporators, but I can’t imagine any justification that can’t be simply explained as water filters.  There’s also a cringe-inducing cameo from Dr. Evazan (Michael Smiley) and Ponda Baba.  However, the movie does combine nostalgia with creativity by adding the U-Wing.  While it’s admittedly designed to sell merchandise, it’s an example of how that’s not always a bad thing.  Not only does it look good, it also serves a thoughtful, practical purpose that’s essential to the plot.  Much better than the redecos of the Sequel Trilogy.  Saw Gerrera is also an import from The Clone Wars, though I don’t see what was ever so interesting about him.  

       The movie isn’t terribly political, despite the assertions of the writers.  It’s an interesting phenomenon in which the Left is so convinced of its own righteousness, as well as the evil of its opponents, it comes full circle.  Instead of hitting you over the head with their own opinions, they simply produce a straightforward black-and-white action movie because they now can’t even tell the difference.  That’s probably why the BP for 2018 went to a blandly safe movie about the Civil Rights Era.  In fact, the only thing really divisive here is the one heroic character seemingly named after an overrated tyrannical communist, and even that’s qualified by observations that he’s an extremist who alienates the Alliance.  Still one can’t help but think upon hearing standard lines about standing up to evil that the writers are completely thinking about resisting Trump.  The irony is that, despite not being remotely enthusiastic about Trump’s nomination, I have my own bad take about the movie that’s in his favor:

1)    Krennic is Hillary.  Corrupt, megalomaniacal official whose carelessness is responsible for intelligence leaks.  The difference is that, unlike the Democratic Party, the Empire was actually willing to hold him accountable.  Also liked fancy white dresses.

2)    Battle of Eadu is Benghazi

3)    The Rogues are the Trump movement, mobilizing under someone who up to this point had no connection to the Alliance/GOP, with some help from fringe elements (Saw)

4)     The decision to invade Scarif was the nomination of Trump, after which many in the GOP sat out the election while the establishment decided to reluctantly throw in with the Trump Train.

On the other hand this ignores that the Trump movement was acting against the Republican Party during the Primary.

         Rogue One, despite nitpicks, is a very enjoyable movie with a solid cast.  Gareth Edwards succeeded in making a more down-to-earth spinoff of this space opera, with cinematographer Greig Fraser’s contributing to the grit.  Michael Giacchino’s score sounds distinctive while fitting the franchise, but one song sounds suspicious.  Action is engaging with the exception of one tacked-on adult fear moment in which a child is endangered during a gunfight on Jedha (only to be blown up offscreen afterward!).  Rogue One's greatest strength is earnestness.  It takes the franchise seriously and treats it with love, not looking down on it as a “silly space movie for kids.”  That’s why it ultimately works.