Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (review)

After the release of Revenge of the Sith (Lucas US 2005), the third film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, George Lucas and Lucasfilm had no public plans to add further feature films to the multi-billion-dollar franchise. This was in part because fans of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83) hated the prequels, and because Lucas was now interested in television, starting with the animated series The Clone Wars (2008–14, 2019). When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they announced a new trilogy extending the saga of the Skywalker family, and several standalone non-saga ‘anthology’ films to fill narrative gaps in the universe; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the first of these anthology films. Its position raises important questions about the contemporary state of the transmedia sf franchise, while its narrative looks at the limits and possibilities of sf blockbusters’ political work.

To provide an easy entry into the franchise’s storyworld, Rogue One offers a cast of new characters that fit (and slightly modify) well-known franchise types: protagonist Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), for example, pairs the scruffiness of Han Solo with the paternal drama of Luke Skywalker; Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) takes on the Jedi mystique and mentor role of Obi-Wan Kenobi; K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) is the non-human, comedy-relief sidekick, a cynical update of C-3PO. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), however, stands out thematically, mixing the scoundrel qualities of Solo with the risky charm of Lando Calrissian, and bringing a moral ambiguity to the normally black-and-white world of Jedi and Sith; perhaps these qualities have led to Andor’s being named as the protagonist of one of the upcoming Star Wars series on the new streaming service Disney+.

Rogue One exists to solve a narrative problem: namely, the convenience of the Death Star’s too-good-to-be-true design flaw: a small hole large enough for a single proton torpedo to detonate the entire moon-sized space station. Rogue One is thus a two-hour exercise in retconning. It begins with a prologue that establishes Jyn as a tragic figure whose mother is murdered by stormtroopers at the order of Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), director of the Death Star build, and whose father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), is forced to return to work as a designer of the Empire’s superweapon. The family, we later learn, had been ensconced in the Imperial technoscience bureaucracy, but fled the Empire for political reasons, building ties in the process with what became the Rebel Alliance. The prologue stresses the tight bond between father and daughter, a heartstring on which the entire plot plucks. Her parents gone, Jyn is left with Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who raises Jyn as a Rebel before discarding her; her parentage is a liability.

Following the prologue, a breakneck first act flits back and forth between characters and scenarios to familiarise the political stakes of the film’s present. Jyn is rescued from a work camp by the Rebels and joined with Cassian to search for Bodhi (merely a MacGuffin), who bears a secret message from her father, and is in the hands of Gerrera’s Rebels on Jedha. The act nicely summarises the fallout of Rogue One’s well-documented production woes. Lucasfilm chose indie director Gareth Edwards, previously responsible for the sf feature Monsters (UK 2010) and the successful franchise reboot Godzilla (US/Japan 2014), to helm Rogue One, aiming to revitalise Star Wars’s auteurist credits while also hedging with a director already versed in franchise filmmaking. But Edwards delivered a film that required extensive reconceptualisation; the original cut was rearranged, key scenes shown in early publicity were reduced or dropped, and significant portions were newly written or reshot, mostly by credited co-writer Tony Gilroy. The first act is a microcosm of the chaotic result, a slapdash attempt to make sense of ill-fitting puzzle pieces, strung together to induce narrative whiplash and flatten potentially interesting...