“I'm one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”
- Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
In 2012, when it was announced that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm Ltd. and its main export, the Star Wars franchise, fans initially did not know what to make of it. Over the past decade, Star Wars under George Lucas – and his universally despised prequels and Special Editions – had basically become a pop culture punch-line. Lucas was starting to allow outright parodies of his work by fans like Seth MacFarlane and Seth Green in trilogies of “Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken” episodes; none of that adult-themed humor would ever be allowed through Disney. How would the Mouse House of all places be able to resuscitate a galaxy far, far away? It started by the appointment of longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Kathleen Kennedy as the head of Lucasfilm. She devised a Story Group of authors, writers and other creatives to plan out the franchise going forward as opposed to waiting on the whims of a burned-out creative mind who genuinely hated the moviemaking process.
2015 brought the first fruit of their efforts, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams. It was a worldwide smash hit with critics and audiences, bringing back the love of Star Wars once again. The film successfully reintroduced fan favorite characters while launching new and intriguing characters to carry the franchise forward. But the previous three-year wait time between Star Wars films would not be enough for Disney. With their considerable resources, they would set out an ambitious release schedule: one Star Wars film a year for the foreseeable future. Every other year in which a Saga film would not be featured, Kennedy would set a date for what Lucasfilm would call Anthology films – films set in the Star Wars universe that did not have to obey the previously set chronology and would be based on events previously not seen or characters’ origins. The first film under this new banner would be called Rogue One.
A year beforehand, rising British director Gareth Edwards was adding the finishing touches to the biggest film he had ever directed at the time, an American reboot of Godzilla for Warner Bros. Pictures. It was then when he received a phone call from Kiri Hart, the leader of Kennedy’s Lucasfilm Story Group at Disney. It seemed his name had come up at the top of the list of potential directors for a standalone Star Wars film. After a meeting, it was decided that the perfect Star Wars film for Edwards’ sensibilities would be a war-themed film centered around the Rebel Alliance’s theft of the top-secret plans to the Death Star. This story had been developed by long-time Star Wars visual effects veteran, Academy Award winner and the man who gave the world Photoshop, John Knoll. Edwards was a die-hard Star Wars fan from a young age, even dragging his girlfriend to the then-abandoned Tunisian set of the Lars homestead on his 30th birthday so he could drink actual blue milk from the same table Luke Skywalker had. It killed him to not be able to tell anyone about his new project, even his mother. When the go-ahead was given to Edwards to tell anyone he wanted that he was doing a new Star Wars film, he gleefully had a guessing game with his mother over the phone. Clearly, this was a director after a geek's own heart.
Jyn Erso (Academy Award nominee Felicity Jones) grew up without a stable sense of family. Her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), was taken from her at an early age to go work for the Empire on the same day her mother was murdered. Years later, after her willfulness and bad attitude leaves her in an Imperial cell, she is broken out by resistance fighters Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his mouthy droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). They lead her to the Rebel Alliance and their leader, Mon Mothma. She is concerned about a new weapon the Empire is constructing to destroy any planet that stands in its way of galactic conquest. When asked why she should care, Jyn is stunned to learn that her father was the lead architect of what becomes known as the Death Star. Believing him to be a pawn of the Empire, she volunteers her services to help rescue him while obtaining the plans to the Death Star.
As many online have already pointed out, most of the movie does not reflect the footage the trailers advertised. The film notably went through reshoots months before its release headed by Tony Gilroy. Most feared Disney’s influence to lighten the movie to a childish degree, even allowing the characters to live at the end. In fact, the entire Internet had the story backwards. The original script was written with all the characters living at the end, because Edwards assumed Disney would not want them killed off. With Kennedy and Disney’s help, they agreed to go with Edwards’ preferred ending where Jyn and the Rogue One crew are all killed by the Death Star. As to the footage used in the trailers not seen in the film, it was deemed by Disney’s marketing that it would be useful to sell the film on without using the actual footage. Directors of films that go through immense post-production changes are often cagey in their responses to the press or simply disown the film outright. However, it seems Edwards had a great time working on the film and seems to be proud of it. He even joked that the demises of the heroes is, “…a great Disney tradition…. For every single character to die in all their movies.”
One of the major talking points of the film is the revelation of a supporting character played previously by an actor who has been dead for over two decades: Grand Moff Tarkin, performed in the image of Sir Peter Cushing. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Tarkin makes a brief walk-on appearance near the end of the film portrayed by another actor in prosthetic makeup. The character has also appeared in both “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and “Star Wars Rebels”. Here, however, it appears digital technology has improved enough to allow for Peter Cushing to make an appearance from the grave. I must admit, I was quite taken aback at how much of the movie he was in. I have long been an advocate of performance capture but this is de-aging on a dead actor – something rarely attempted before. Is it utterly perfect? No, but it does well. It is an improvement on the de-aging effect on '80s Jeff Bridges in TRON: Legacy, but not as convincing as '80s Michael Douglas at the beginning of Ant-Man. The only thing that bothered me most was the gray, translucent quality of Tarkin’s face. You could almost see his veins through the skin and it did not rub me quite the right way. Still, it is an evolving technology and I hope to see more experimentation with it in the years to come.
Rogue One, while a story we all know the ending to, is a fine film with a lot of good action and characters. They all get something to do in the third act and it is thrilling to watch good practical effects in action. However, I think I must confess that I like The Force Awakens more: it moves the story we knew forward into the future while respecting the past. This is a movie that does respect the past certainly (almost too much for me, with that Ponda Baba and Evazan cameo), but we all know where it is going. You can literally watch the end of Rogue One, replace the Blu-Ray with A New Hope, and just keep right on going. Nothing bad certainly, and I did thoroughly enjoy the film, but I am ready for The Last Jedi to keep the Star Wars train rolling.
RIP Carrie Fisher and Kenny Baker
