Rogue One (I’m not using the stupid subtitle) was pitched as a different kind of Star Wars movie. Gone are the easy labels of good and evil, and in their place: moral ambiguity. Even though it’s right there in the title of the franchise, Rogue One was supposed to be the first entry to be a proper war film. Good people do bad things in the fog of war, and there are no tidy solutions. As absurd as it sounds, the trailer almost tried to pitch it as “Star Wars for adults,” or at least edgy teens. This felt a stark contrast from The Force Awakens, which opened last Christmas with more a vibe of “all your friends are back in town!”
Awakens made all the money, and got great reviews (I gave a qualified rave), but a year later it seems to have developed quite a backlash. Some of it is justified: it is still way too similar to A New Hope, and it feels incredibly safe in spite of major character deaths. Some of the complaints seem incredibly disingenuous and feel like coded sexism (we’re really gonna complain about “Mary Sue” characters only after a woman and a black man are headlining a Star Wars movie?). All of these different issues kind of merged into a single buzz phrase: Fan Service. Fan service has a pretty negative connotation nowadays because it belies a lack of originality that all movie fans have been decrying now for about 10 years. Prequels are fan service, expanded universes are fan service, nostalgia is fan service. Through this lens fan service is cheap, uninspired, and lazy. However, not all fan service is created equal. There are good and bad versions, and no film is a better exhibit for this than Rogue One.
Rogue One is all about the rebel mission to find and steal the architectural schematics for the Death Star, which places it right before A New Hope in the chronology of the Star Wars Saga. The film’s protagonist, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is rescued from imprisonment and recruited by the Rebellion to locate the plans. The Rebels need Jyn because of her connection to her father Galen (Mads Mickelson), who invented and created the Death Star for the Empire. She agrees to help in order to avoid being rearrested by the Empire, but also to learn more about the fate of her father, who had been taken from her by Imperial Officer Orson Krennic (Ben Mendleson) when she was a little girl. Jyn, Rebel Spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and a droid with an attitude named K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk) follow a trail of bread crumbs across the galaxy in an atempt to stave off annihilation from the Empire’s newest weapon.
Since Rogue One is a prequel to the first Star Wars trilogy, fan service is going to be woven in with the original narrative. While the film uses that reality as a strength often, let’s start with some of the bad examples, because for all the talk of a “all killer, no filler” mature Star Wars film, there are still plenty of corn ball scenes. This isn’t a spoiler because he’s in the trailers, but Darth Vader is in the film. He’s in it very minimally, basically two scenes. The first scene had me worried that my suspicions were confirmed, and that Vader was shoehorned in for a cash grab since the film has few familiar faces. His impact on the plot is minimal, and even gets a prequel worthy clunker of a pun to throw at an underling. This is textbook bad fan service: it adds nothing and the brief pleasure you get from experiencing it is quickly cancelled out by you thinking “That’s all we get?”
Two more examples of bad fan service are a very quick cameo by C-3PO and R2-D2 that felt obligatory, and, most egregiously, two very fake looking CGI characters from the original trilogy. The misjudgment of using these CGI characters cannot be overstated. It is baffling that the filmmakers would not either a) recast the characters with younger/alive actors, b) not use the characters, as they are easily written around. And they don’t do a quick 2 shot and then cut to the back of their head. It’s long dialogue scenes with close ups. Seeing those shadows of beloved characters was the film equivalent of watching your favorite band 30 years past their prime. It makes you feel old.
But Rogue One also mined the entire catalog of the Star Wars video games, TV shows, and film universe to create riveting, kinetic, action sequences. The third act in particular has some of the most satisfying Star Wars action ever put on film. It felt like the most insane level of Star Wars Battlefont you’ve ever played. From the breathtaking sense of place and scope supplied by Director Gareth Edwards, to the foregrounding of A New Hope at the end (the second Vader scene is fan service at its absolute best and completely justifies his inclusion), it largely redeems a ton of the issues in the clunky first act and mushy second. Endings are always important and Rogue One has one for the ages.
But those missteps are what keep it from being an unqualified success, and one can’t help but wonder what could have been. There are all kinds of clues, from unattributed quotes of sources close to the production to trailer footage mysteriously absent from the final cut, that suggest Rogue One was a much different movie once. The film (like in The Force Awakens…noticing a trend?) went through multiple rewrites and reshoots. Maybe that is why Forest Whitaker’s character is a total mess. Maybe that’s why in the middle of a dark, somber film a character will randomly wax poetic about the merits of “Hope”. There is definitely a mishmashed, “too many cooks”, feel to the film that I hope can be avoided in subsequent Star Wars films now that the current production machine is operating in earnest. I’m not holding my breath.
I don’t want it to seem like I hated the film, I actually really liked it. The team of rebels that come together have great chemistry in spite of being a bit underdeveloped, and the film was arguably more exciting then The Force Awakens once it really gets going. I’m hard on Star Wars because it’s my favorite Hollywood film franchise and unlike the prequels, I see the potential for greatness among all the noise. The executive level producers just need to get out of the way and let the creatives do their thing (This is also true of the Marvel films, which is also ultimately Disney. I think the people running Star Wars are doing a much better job). Rogue One is the best blockbuster of the year by a mile and I suspect will be better with each viewing.
B+
Talking Films to Death 