BALANCE TO THE FORCE
Rogue One hits all the right spots
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.
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.
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.
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. But we will not be any closer to figuring out why there are monsters in the station’s trash compactors.
Clearly, there are many more Star Wars stories left to tell.
Felicity Jones hardly seems like a Star Wars action heroine as she takes her interview seat. But the slim 5-foot-3 Brit leads the charge in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Jones plays Jyn Erso, who is enlisted by the Rebel Alliance to help swipe blueprint plans for the Empire’s new weapon of mass destruction — the Death Star.
The Death Star, of course, was the target for obliteration in the first Star Wars film in 1977.
But casual fans be warned: this is a standalone movie, and not part of a series.
Many viewers agree that filmmaker Gareth Edwards has concocted an edgier Star Wars tale based on a screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy.
On the Rogue One mission, Jones’ Jyn is joined by the Alliance’s Captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed). Scene stealers for the good guys also include the martial arts team of Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang), and new droid K-2S0 (voice and performance capture by Alan Tudyk).
In the beginning, we see Jyn as a child left to fend for herself when Empire forces led by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) kill her mother and abduct her father, Galen (Mads Mikkelsen) so he can help complete the Death Star.
So the payback motivation for the adult Jyn is evident from the beginning.
“Yeah, well, in Jyn’s head, it’s very clear,” Jones says. “She hates the Empire. So anytime she sees Stormtroopers she has this kind of very clear instinct to take them down. I just tapped into that and into that energy that Jyn has.”
What the actress needed most was to prepare herself physically for the part, which was a departure. After all, she had her break out with the Academy Award-nominated role of Stephen Hawking’s wife in The Theory of Everything.
An intense workout regimen for Jones was coupled with kung fu training for months before filming began in and around London by the late summer of 2015.
“I’d never done that kind of thing before, so it was very new, the whole kind of physical preparation, that side of acting,” Jones says.
On set, she applied what she had trained for while relying on the professionals around her to give her confidence and make her moves convincing.
“I’m kind of used to lots of, you know, talking in corsets so it was really nice to be running around with a blaster and a baton to bash Stormtroopers with,” she says.
Edwards felt the same way as Jones. But his movie journey led more directly to Rogue One. He impressed the industry with 2010s independent flick Monsters and his studio reboot of the special effects film Godzilla in 2014.
Still, the director, an admitted Star Wars fanatic, cautiously embraced the new technology and high definition camera formats available for Rogue One. In fact, he was more subtle in his approach so the new Star Wars entry would have a visceral connection to 1977’s inaugural production.
“We had the difficult task of kind of making a period piece as well,” Edwards says. “We’d say to the crew and the designers, imagine this is set in 1977 and don’t do anything we couldn’t have done back then in terms of esthetic, and that applied to the camera work to some extent.”
However, nostalgia nearly overwhelmed the cast and crew when Darth Vader appeared.
Indeed, Mendelsohn as Krennic, Darth Vader’s Dark Side cohort, has some key sequences with the Star Wars icon of evil.
“So the first thing you have to do is just get over the fact that you’re doing a scene with Darth Vader,” Mendelsohn says.
“And that took me a while, because, you know, I’m a first generation fan boy.”