Note: This is our "longread" review of Rogue One that contains a few plot details, revealed judiciously. If you want to enter the theater entirely 100% unspoiled, check out our spoiler-free, only need-to-know review of Rogue One.
Rogue Oneis an amazing achievement and an extremely effective story. But if you try to describe it to someone who hasn't seen it, you run the risk of sounding like a revivalist preacher.
I mean, revivalists are just bursting to share allthe Good News. But they tend to skip to the end of the story in their excitement -- our Lord is risen -- which is, when you think about it, quite the spoiler.
SEE ALSO:Everything you wanted to know about 'Rogue One' but were afraid to askThe Rogue Onereviewer faces a surprisingly similar dilemma, only it's not about skipping to the end. There is an important fact about this film that occurs within the first 30 minutes and involves a major character, which would normally place it in the territory of Stuff Critics Can Safely Talk About.
Yet in this case the thing is such an unprecedented big deal, and Lucasfilm has kept it so well under wraps, that you really shouldn't speak of it until your audience is prepared to sample a jaw-dropping secret.
So I've placed my discussion of this thing at the end of this article, because it would simply derail the review otherwise; you wouldn't be able to think about anything else, and it's not the totality of what the movie is about. But consider this your treasure map to a buried lede.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story L to R: (Felicity Jones) & (Diego Luna) Ph: Film Frame ©Lucasfilm LFLCredit: LucasfilmThis is not an overtly political film; it's a war picture. It's the tale of the team who stole the Death Star plans immediately before the original Star Wars, plain and simple.
And yet it goes far deeper in exploring the concept of resistance to authority. Every character in this movie is resisting something and meeting with resistance, from the very first scene (which also resists for the first time the notion that Star Wars movies have to open with a crawl, or even a title).
Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is a scientist with a conscience who has run away from the Empire's still-classified project to create a superweapon that requires massive amounts of energy (the Death Star, natch).
Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) is the Imperial officer who apparently overcomes his former friend Galen's conscience: the work has stalled, he must come back. There are those within the Empire who resist Krennic's ambitions, so Krennic must resist Galen's wish for freedom.
SEE ALSO:7 'Rogue One' clues revealed by the prequel novelYears later, Galen's estranged daughter, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), is in chains in Imperial prison for her resistance -- and yet when the Rebellion comes to free her, she resists them too. Her resistance is arrested by K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), a rebellious and sassy Imperial droid who is resisting his programming.
Kaytoo is set to become your new favorite Star Wars droid, by the way, especially if you've ever found yourself blurting out exactly what was on your mind -- resisting norms of polite conversation.
K-2SO: He means well.Credit: LucasfilmThen there's Captain Cassian Andor, played by dashing and wispy Diego Luna -- who resists your notion of what his character is about almost immediately.
As a spy, Cassian is more John Le Carre than James Bond. Within minutes of meeting him, we find him in an impossible situation where he has to take the life of another human in a horrible manner, in order to resist a detachment of Stormtroopers.
Cassian is a morally grey man; he's on the same road as Jyn's mentor, Saw Gererra (Forrest Whittaker). Saw is so morally compromised in his resistance that the rest of the Rebel Alliance will have nothing to do with him. He is a literally broken man, barely resisting death.
Saw, like most of the Rebels, doesn't know the Death Star is a thing until the last possible moment. But he does know a fight is necessary; he knows the Alliance's political leaders are resisting this fact.
Unfortunately, given the scale of the threat, he's right.
SEE ALSO:Forget Darth Vader. This is the 'Rogue One' character that has Star Wars fans buzzingLuckily, there's Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), an Imperial pilot who resists (his orders, and his nerves) and smuggles key information to Saw. Rook is an underused character, but Ahmed makes every second count to show us a man who has to constantly retrieve his courage.
And on the former Jedi planet of Jedha, there's Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), a trouble-causing monk who resists his blindness -- and more importantly, resists the notion that the Force died with the Jedi decades earlier.
Chirrut gets around that problem by simply not being a trained Jedi. The source of his power is probably the Force, though the film is nicely ambiguous; he couldjust be blind man with a stick who is so in tune with all his senses that he can drop 10 Stormtroopers in two minutes.
Think blind Arya in Game of Thrones, but played by a martial arts legend.
Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen)Credit: lucasfilmThrow in the fact that his trusty sidekick Baze Malbus is there to mop up with a laser machine gun, and Chirrut's act is entirely believable. Cynics will not be able to resist Donnie Yen's performance, which steals every scene he's in.
Yen is already a superstar in Hong Kong; if this movie doesn't make him as big a deal in the U.S., I don't know what will.
I'll leave the bearing of Rogue Oneon our own reality to another post. (I will briefly note that the timing of the movie continues to be chilling: if you're keeping up with news from Syria, you won't be able to see the horror of what the Empire does to the ancient desert city of Jedha without thinking of what the Assad government and its Russian allies just did to the ancient desert city of Aleppo.)
SEE ALSO:Star Wars is political, and it always has beenThere are two realities I'm talking about here that the movie achieves: the reality of war, which is essential to this most realistic of Star Wars movies, and the reality of the worlds of Star Wars.
It has always been essential that Star Wars movies feel real, used, lived-in -- like you could just step into the screen and walk around inside that desert hovel, that Cantina, that piece-of-junk spaceship with special modifications.
(If there's one major visual flaw with the prequels, it's George Lucas' fateful decision to make almost everything in the galaxy look too shiny and new -- making viewers think that even the actual model spacecraft was CGI).
It has also been essential that a Star Wars movie move very quickly through these incredibly detailed, randomly realistic environments, too fast for us to catch all the details. This is the secret sauce that keeps us coming to the theater time and time again.
In last year's The Force Awakens, we wanted to go back and live in Rey's AT-AT or Lor San Tekka's tent with Poe Dameron at the beginning, at least for one more all-too-brief minute before it burns down.
Rogue Onedirector Gareth Edwards seems to understand and appreciate this quality even more than Force Awakensdirector J.J. Abrams. He shoots many scenes handheld and stuffs them with extras, as if he's recording a documentary in an alien galaxy, which is exactly the style Lucas went for -- but never quite reached -- in the original trilogy.
But oh boy, are we there now. Now that I've visited, I can't wait to go back to the bustling market in Jedha City in all its higgledy-piggeldy glory. To take one tiny detail out of millions: a stall sells soup with tentacles climbing out of it. The tentacles wriggle just enough to be unsettling, but not so much that the comic effect destroys the reality of it. Yeah, you think, there's probably a creature somewhere in the galaxy that loves that stuff.
SEE ALSO:'Rogue One' director justifies reshoots: 'Star Wars has to be fantastic'About that other kind of reality: war. Well, as I said over in the no-spoiler review, it isn't a spoiler that war is hell. Think about whywar is hell, especially when you're crazy or dumb enough to want to be in the front line -- as Andor, Erso and crew are.
This is not a movie that cares for the wartime perspective of Princesses or Generals. Think about what the life of a soldier is like in Saving Private Ryanrather than Patton. (Edwards announced his movie as "Saving Private Ryanin space" two years ago; you had fair warning.)
The ultimate battle here, the Rebel victory mentioned in the crawl at the start of the original Star Wars, takes place on a beach that is the reverse of Normandy 1944, with tropical sands and bright sun. And yet the beach is no less deadly than Normandy.
At this point I'll simply quote Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy at a recent press conference: "A lot of tears. Lot of tears."
The tears are balanced by straight-man humor from K2-SO, deployed strategically like a release valve throughout the movie (you'll never hear an audience laugh with such relief; this stuff is dark, man). But even that just serves to make Rogue Onemore real: Kaytoo effectively becomes that guy in a war movie in a platoon in a foxhole who can't help but crack wise.
This doesn't get them out of the foxhole.
Rogue Oneis the first standalone Star Wars story. This had to be nerve-wracking for all concerned at Lucasfilm. And so to baptize the new film-baby, Edwards and the writers sprinkled plenty of Episode IV: A New Hopefairy dust over the proceedings. A lotof fairy dust.
Like, a lot of references. Like, possibly one or two too many. Like, there's blue milk (as drunk by Luke Skywalker, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru) in the first two minutes.
The other least spoiler-y example: at one point in a battle scene, a minor officer from the original Star Warsreprises his exact same line of dialogue. Not the modern-day actor, really, the character; he's been digitally reinserted, living his battles on a loop, an endless reprise (or is it pre-prise?).
But that's the only point at which I winced. Over the course of the film, Edwards' attention to the exact look and feel of the original 1977 movie -- to the point where extras had to grow mustaches and sideburns -- builds up an incredible sensation.
It's like the lost twin of Star Warshas been discovered, and you'll never be able to watch the classic movie the same way again.
The same holds true for Darth Vader, whom after all that hype really gets only two scenes in the movie -- but criminy, what scenes they are. You will see Vader in a whole new light. I was a little unsure about his mask in the first scene; it looked flat and unthreatening, which may have been a function of lighting or camera angles.
The power of the second scene more than made up for it.
And on that note, it's time to talk about that important character revival near the start of the film. If you want to remain in blissful ignorance, please click on this amusing story about Alan Tudyk's nether regions instead.
SEE ALSO:Rogue groin? When filming a 'Star Wars' movie went kind of NSFWStep forward into the light, Death Star supremo, Grand Moff, Governor Tarkin, played by ... Peter Cushing, late Great British legend, is that you?
I've seen a lot of valiant but failed CGI attempts to render realistic humans, going way back to the Final Fantasymovie in 2000. I've watched filmmakers struggle in the uncanny valley (where close to realistic just looks creepy) for so long, it's been hard to believe they'd ever climb out of it.
Well, I'm here to tell you uncanny valley has been bridged. Digital Peter Cushing exists, and there is barely a moment where he feels unreal. This is a breakthrough greater than Gollum in Fellowship of the Ring.
And now we go over to obsessive fandom to slug it out for what could be years -- is this incredibly disrespectful to a revered dead actor, or the greatest compliment cinema can pay?
It's a complicated situation, because Tarkin has appeared in the animated realm of Star Wars already -- in the series Clone Wars and Rebels. But never has he looked so ... well, so exactlylike Cushing.
All I know is I didn't have a chance to ponder the question of whether this was a compliment or not. I was too enraptured by this digital revival. Tarkin has risen, praise the Dark Lord of the Sith.
And that's not the only surprise; Lucasfilm has something else up their sleeve for us, but I'm not going to get even close to talking about that one. You'll have to discover for yourself. When you see it, you'll see why.
To paraphrase Chirrut Imwe, who has to remind himself of his essential belief over and over, every time he's afraid:
Trust in the Force. The Force is with this movie. Trust in the Force. The Force is with this movie.
TopicsStar Wars
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