★★★★☆
Spoiler alert, the Rebels successfully get the Death Star plans over to Princess Leia, who puts them into R2-D2, who then goes down to Tattooine with C-3PO in an escape pod.
Remember, Episode III ended with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) having declared himself Emperor, and Darth Vader, now fully encased, as his right hand man.
The twin children of Anakin and Padmé were split up, with Luke sent off to Tattooine, a planet where life did not seem to change regardless of what happened on Corruscant, while Leia grew up with a greater awareness of galactic politics.
And Episode IV started out with Darth Vader capturing Princess Leia’s ship. Apparently Leia (Carrie Fisher) is both Alderaan royalty and an elected official representing Alderaan in the Imperial Senate. It isn’t until Episode IV that the Imperial Senate is finally dissolved.
How exactly did the Senate function in that time between Palpatine’s initial imperial declaration and the labeling of Leia as a traitor and Rebellion sympathizer? Going into this new movie, I was not expecting anything more than a morsel, if anything, towards answering that question.
Remember also the brief appearance of the Death Star plans on Geonossis in Episode II, though perhaps at that point they were more sketches than actual plans. Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) took them to Palpatine on Corruscant prior to the big reveal of the Grand Army of the Republic, and also that we saw construction of the Death Star already in progress at the end of Episode III.
This brings us to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which is technically a prequel. I will do with this movie as I generally do with movies that are not prequels, that is, I will give a lot of detail about the first half of the movie, but not so much about the second half.
If I may mix up my mythologies, have you ever wondered why the Death Star has that very particularly convenient Achilles heel? Sure, it's only two meters wide, and you have to get past a bunch of cannons on the surface, but you don't have to get inside the Death Star to fire at it.
The reason for the flaw is now retconned: Imperial scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) designed it that way on purpose. He sends his daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones, Stephen Hawking’s wife on Theory of Everything) away with Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a Rebel extremist who later falls out of favor with the the other Rebels.
Once the Death Star is ready for its first test firing, Galen sends Imperial cargo pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) to deliver a message to Jyn: the Death Star has a flaw, and that flaw must be exploited to destroy it.
Jyn hears this message on Jedha, where an ancient Jedi temple city has been ransacked by the Empire for kyber crystals (which power lightsabers and now the Death Star’s main weapon).
Grand Moff Tarkin (a Peter Cushing resurrected with shoddy CGI) decides to use the temple city as a small test of the Death Star’s capabilities. Jyn and a few Rebels barely escape the explosion.
On Yavin IV, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is ordered to kill Galen. But that’s unnecessary, because Galen has already outlived his usefulness to the Empire.
Still, it’s useful for the Rebels to go to the kyber crystal refinery on Eadu because they get to steal an Imperial shuttle, SW0608, which will come in handy later.
There are onscreen titles to help you keep some of these planets straight, something that some Star Wars purists will inevitably complain about. I for one would have liked a few shots, less than half a minute, showing the kyber crystals on the assembly line being refined.
From a screenwriter’s perspective, the need for these planet identifications should have been a signal that maybe there are too many different planets in this movie. Three planets, plus the asteroid field, were enough for what is, in my opinion, the best Star Wars movie of them all.
No word yet on whether creepy Legate Drumpf and Gul Flynn (to mix mythologies once more) plans to allow NASA to continue researching real life planets similar to Star Wars planets like Tattooine and Hoth.
If I recall correctly, Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) goes to yet another planet to meet with Darth Vader (voice of James Earl Jones) and get choked by him. The Imperial Senate still exists, but it’s a minor annoyance: they were told that the destruction of the city on Jedha was because of a mining accident. Tarkin is already looking forward to the day when the Senate becomes fully irrelevant.
Meanwhile, on Yavin IV, the Rebel Alliance Council can’t agree to stand up to the Empire and are skeptical of Jyn’s assertion that the Death Star has a flaw. Jyn decides to go to Scarif, with or without help, to steal the Death Star plans. A small, ragtag motley crew of Rebels joins her.
You’ll see the renaming of SW0608 coming: Bohdi Rook comes up with its Rebel callsign almost as casually as Darth Sidious comes up Anakin Skywalker’s Sith name in Episode III. Once on Scarif, Jones’s Jyn channels Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games.
It turns out that the white supremacists calling for the boycott of this movie are also men’s rights crybabies. Never mind that the vast majority of heroes in our various modern mythologies are men. Never mind that the heroes of the classic Star Wars trilogy are men (Leia is perhaps enough of a damsel in distress to not upset the men’s rights crybabies).
The white supremacists seem to be offended just about as much by non-white men being heroes as they are by the white women heroes in these new movies (Rey in Episode VII, and now Jyn in this movie).
Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack does the job in the context of the movie, but it does not stick in the memory. You’re not coming out of the theater whistling any of Giacchino’s new tunes. For Jyn, Giacchino seems to come up with a putative version of the Anakin and Padmé love theme from Episodes II and III.
And even without the music, and even though you already know how it turns out, the battle of Scarif is pulse-pounding, edge of your seat excitement. Plus there are plenty of small details for the fans, such as that the T-15s are now obsolete. Also, have a hankie ready for the death of a droid.
And perhaps the characters of Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) are an homage to the two Hidden Fortress characters that are said to have inspired C-3PO and R2-D2 (both of which make brief appearances).
I saw this movie at the AMC Star Fairlane 21. I no longer buy popcorn or pop at the movies, so it wasn’t until today that I noticed that now they have those “freestyle” fountain soda machines like they have at some Burger King restaurants.
I don’t like this development, even though it doesn’t affect me personally. At least for now, the concessions stand still has human employees. Oh, and there’s a Burger King coming soon to the Fairlane Town Center. A bookstore, on the other hand, that’s never coming back to the mall.
Anyway, Rogue One is rated PG-13 “for extended sequences of sci-fi violence and action.”