I've really been slacking on my reverse-order Star Wars rewatch, but I finally got to Rogue One this week, and wow, what a movie! It never ceases to amaze me that there are Star Wars fans who don't like this film.
Watching it in proximity to A New Hope and the subsequent films really shows off the artistry of Rogue One, both visually and as a singularly constructed story that's entirely its own thing (except for what's essentially an epilogue that serves as a bridge to the next movie). We meet a set of six terrific protagonists, learn who they are in brief by the various tastes of tragic history we get for them, and see them each complete a growth arc within the framework of an action-packed, aesthetically gorgeous quest for redemption and purpose. The music and cinematography soar and dance together, the villain is uniquely banal in his petty, empty quest to prove himself, and despite the fact that everyone dies, it manages to be great fun for almost its entire length.
New impressions from this viewing:
Everybody goes on about Darth Vader being so much more dynamic and intense in this movie compared to the OT, especially his presentation in Episode IV, but honestly, the most athletic thing he does is twirl his lightsaber in a circle one-handed to deflect blaster bolts. He Force-pushes a guy to the ceiling, which is no more drastic than tossing around the heavy machinery the throws at Luke in ESB. Aside from that, he's just walking down a hallway. Yes, he kills a fair number of guys in a very compressed time-frame, but really, it's downright mild compared to the things we see him do in Rebels.
The Threepio/Artoo cameo stuck out as a bit more forced to me this time ... while simultaneously making more dramatic sense as a bit of foreshadowing that we'd end the film on the Tantive IV heading right into the opening scene of ANH. It was an odd moment of contradiction to recognize both of those things at once.
Another complaint I've seen is that there's no explanation of how Vader followed Leia's ship to Tatooine from Scarif, and the answer was obvious to me this time around. In ESB, Vader orders his underlings to calculate all possible destinations along the Falcon's last known trajectory when it disappears from the fleet's screens. If he used the same trick after the last scene in Rogue One, one of those destinations would clearly have been Tatooine, and he certainly wouldn't discard that as a mere coincidence. Just as his intuition convinced him the rebels were on Hoth in ESB, it would have told him to head for his own homeworld as soon as he found out it lay along the hyperspace routes accessible from the point Leia's ship went to lightspeed.
The context of The Clone Wars and Rebels series makes Saw Gerrera immensely more compelling in this film. If you watch TCW, then Rebels, then Rogue One, you see his entire journey as a lifelong insurgent fighting the Empire, and you see how diminished his chosen path of extremism has left him.
CGI Leia remains the single worst thing in the film for me, and even as such, I really don't mind her.Having now gone through 4 of the 5 Disney films bracketing the OT, I can honestly say, the people who think Disney has somehow ruined Star Wars are hopelessly out of touch with the things I value in Star Wars. All taste is subjective, and my opinion is certainly worth no more than theirs. But it's crystal clear to me that those people just like Star Wars for reasons other than the ones that attract me to the SW universe.
On to Solo!
