Star Wars goes Rogue (and hits the sweet spot for balance)
Latest in Star Wars saga finds perfect balance, writes Chris Knight.
It was right there in the opening crawl of Episode IV, 40 years ago next May: “Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armoured space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.” Well, how do you manage a thing like that?
Rogue One tells us. Foregoing a new crawl, which would just beget more questions — like who names a trading outpost “the Ring of Kafrene”? — it plunges us into the story of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones). As a little girl, she watched as agents of the Empire kidnapped her genius father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen), to work on a weapons project.
Many years later, Jyn is now a young woman with no particular political affiliations: She remarks cynically that living beneath the flag of the Empire is “not a problem if you don’t look up.” But the Rebellion has an interest in her: Rumours of a planet-killing space station have surfaced, and Jyn could be the key to contacting and/ or assassinating Galen.
She may also be able to reach out to Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who has broken ties with the Rebellion because of his overly violent resistance methods. Clearly, the Rebel forces are not without their factions and fractiousness. (Hey, that crawl did say it was “a period of civil war.”)
So while this “Star Wars Story,” as the title calls it, takes place in the shadow of the original movie, the tone is quite different. The nearest analogy would be to a Second World War movie — there’s even a speech, delivered inside a twice-stolen Imperial shuttle, that wouldn’t be out of place on a landing craft during the D-Day invasion of Europe.
Jyn’s Dirty Dozen (give or take a few) include Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, who gradually earns her trust and learns to reciprocate; Donnie Yen as a man who literally has blind faith in the
power of the Force; Wen
Jiang as his wingman; Riz Ahmed as an Imperial pilot who’s switched sides; and Alan Tudyk as the voice of K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial robot leggier than Geena Davis and more annoying that C-3PO. (If there’s one thing droids love, it’s giving people the odds of failure.)
The film also includes several cameos from well-known (and some barely known) characters. Darth Vader, whom we’ve come to expect from the trailers, has a few powerful moments in which he adds injury to insult while meeting with subordinates. Technical wizardry brings some other characters to life, and I think I spotted a guy who has the death sentence in 11 systems.
But the front-and-centre baddie is Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic. He snatches Galen in the opening scene, pushes for the construction and use of the Death Star, and has ambitions for Grand Moff-dom (he clearly goes to the same tailor as Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin from the first Star Wars film).
Directed by Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla) and written by a quartet of writers, Rogue One hits a sweet spot between familiarity and novelty that many thought was missing in the beat-for-beat Star Wars retread that was last year’s Episode VII. (Full disclosure: I loved that one.) There are X-wing fighters, slice-of-pie Star Destroyers — and more evidence that Imperial architecture, with its skinny catwalks over bottomless chasms, was designed by someone who never even heard of vertigo.
But the new characters are nicely fleshed out, particularly Jones as Jyn, whose initial cynicism gradually morphs into a steely resolve, its seed planted by the memory of her father, but watered by the idealism of the Rebellion.
The story’s setting also makes for an interesting tension. It’s no spoiler to say that those Death Star plans are going to wind up in a certain R2 unit for delivery to the Rebel leaders, but there’s no telling what will happen to Jyn and the rest of the newly introduced characters. With no sequel announced, no one is safe.
Along the way, we will learn why Jyn’s father nicknamed her Stardust, and even discover just how the Death Star managed to contain a flaw that anyone who could hit the broad side of a womp rat could exploit. We will not, however, be any closer to figuring out how or why there are monsters in the station’s trash compactors.
Clearly, there are many more Star Wars stories left to tell.