Rogue One – A Star Wars Story (2016): Disney’s best entry in the Star Wars franchise stands proudly next to the original trilogy

Christian’s Grade: A

If you take a survey asking a large group of people what their favorite Star Wars movie is, approximately 90% would respond, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). That has been the common consensus for a very long time, and it’s a completely legitimate opinion. The honor of that top spot had remained unchallenged for 36 years. And then, in 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was released, and suddenly, there was a new contender.

I was shocked, as any long-time Star Wars fan might be, when I came to the realization that Rogue One was my new favorite of the franchise, but I couldn’t deny it. It was a near-perfect entry that nailed the nostalgia factor, delivered meaningful fan service, and was an awesome story that fit neatly within established Star Wars lore. Relatively fresh director Gareth Edwards was a surprise pick for the job. He gained career momentum with his two previous movies Godzilla (2014) and Monsters (2010), which got him noticed by Lucasfilm. 

However, the theatrical cut of Rogue One, while excellent, is a product of two cooks. As the story goes, when Edwards finished his director’s cut, the studio felt that what they saw was too grim for the Star Wars brand and hired the amazing Tony Gilroy to fix the perceived issues and make a more presentable film. After taking over post-production and some extensive rewrites/reshoots, Gilroy gave us the movie we have today. 

I love this film, but it’s hard to say we got the best possible version as there is clearly a very different Rogue One locked up in the Disney vault that we will likely never see because the final film was great and made a ton of money. Also, those involved in the making of this movie have been pretty tight-lipped over the years. Whenever one of them, like Tony Gilroy, gives an interview and the subject of what happened on Rogue One comes up, we get cryptic answers that hint at a lot of drama but don’t go into any detail.

Regardless of the drama circling the production, the man truly responsible for giving us this gift of a movie is John Knoll, who conceived of this story and pitched it to Kathleen Kennedy. Surprisingly, Knoll is not a writer but has a lengthy background in visual effects and has worked on many huge movies. The genesis of Rogue One comes from Knoll being a Star Wars fan and wanting to answer a burning question that was only hinted at in the text crawl at the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), what happened to the rebel spies who stole the plans to the Death Star?

It was a brilliant idea and a fresh approach for Star Wars as it’s a spy thriller/heist movie set right before the events of A New Hope and leads directly into the opening of that film. It has a cast of characters that haven’t been seen in previous films in the series and is classified as a spinoff story in the world of Star Wars. But the events in this film are strongly tied to A New Hope because, without Rogue One, the Death Star doesn’t get destroyed.

The story’s main focus is on the character of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), who gets drafted into the rebellion because her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), is the engineer who helped build the Death Star. The rebellion wants Jyn’s help to find and retrieve Galen so he can testify to the senate about this superweapon capable of destroying planets. Felicity Jones is excellent as a rebellious 20-something who’s mad at the world, hates the Empire for destroying her family, hates the war for making everyone’s life miserable, and deeply loves and misses her father. 

The rebels see Galen as a collaborator, but Jyn knows that he had no choice but to cooperate, in much the same way Jyn herself is forced to cooperate with the rebels. From her point of view, there are no good guys and bad guys. There’s just the war, and if you get too close to it, you end up getting sucked in by one side or the other. Her frustration with the situation she’s in and the people she’s forced to work with is easily felt, and Jones plays it perfectly with just a hint of restraint. 

As the story progresses, the real Jyn starts to surface as we see her save a child from a shootout between a rebel faction and a squad of stormtroopers. Later in the movie, as she finally understands the stakes of the mission, we see that this experience has revived a bit of the younger Jyn who fought alongside Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a rebel extremist who has fought in this war for a long time and has no love for the Empire. Jyn now knows she has to pick a side and delivers a couple of short speeches that show how much this fight has changed her and how important it is. 

But for me, Jones’ single greatest moment as an actor in this film is when Saw Gerrera shows her the hologram message from Galen explaining not only how he designed a flaw in the Death Star that will be the path to its destruction but also how much he misses his daughter. Jyn sees this and says nothing. She’s dumbstruck by seeing and hearing her father for the first time in 15 years, and all she can do is drop to her knees and let the tears roll down her face. It was an immensely touching moment elegantly performed by Felicity Jones, and it serves as the turning point where Jyn rises out of her apathy and sees a chance to save her father and restore what’s left of her family.

Can we all just agree that Mads Mikkelsen is an amazingly gifted actor? As Jyn’s father and the brains behind the creation of the Death Star, Galen Erso doesn’t take up a lot of space in this movie, but every moment with him is like eating cake. It’s good, and you want more. In this role, he shows an unusual emotional vulnerability that we don’t often see in Mikkelsen’s characters. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Galen was a gifted scientist whose legacy was defined by the creation of a super weapon. He was a family man who simply wanted to live the peaceful life of a farmer and disassociate himself from the military-industrial machine that took his work and adapted it for war.

Galen carries the weight of that legacy each time you see him on screen, and it never hits home harder than in his hologram message to the rebels. He takes his one chance to undo what he has done by sending this message that has the power to change everything for the rebellion. But he can’t help using this same opportunity to reach out to his lost daughter in hopes that somehow she might see it and know that he’s never stopped loving her and dreaming of a way they might be together again. Even if this movie had nothing else to offer, at least it brought Mads Mikkelsen into the Star Wars canon as the man responsible for the Death Star. That alone would make the movie worth watching.

I mentioned before that Forest Whitaker plays Saw Gerrera, a character brought over to the big screen from the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars tv series. He’s an interesting character, and Whitaker definitely makes some… choices about how he’s portrayed. I like him, but Forest Whitaker seems to be the kind of actor that leans into the more eccentric aspects of his characters. If they don’t have any, then he’ll give them some. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it just comes off as weird. With Saw Gerrera, we get a bit of both. He seems to be the rebel’s mirror to Darth Vader, but much less menacing. He’s had a lot of body parts replaced with machinery. He strikes out at his enemies viciously and without warning, and even his allies keep their distance from him. He also has a breathing apparatus that has a Vaderesque sound to it. There’s definitely a lot of backstory to him that we don’t get. Maybe one day he’ll get his own Disney+ series, and then we’ll get an explanation as to what happened to him and why he talks like that.

The main similarity between Rogue One and The Empire Strikes Back, and I think why people like them so much, is that both stories do a great job of keeping the audience hooked throughout the runtime, but they also don’t end on a happy note for the heroes. SPOILER! In the end, the spies accomplish their mission, but every one of them dies. It’s a twist that we don’t get very often, but if it’s handled correctly, that element of tragedy makes you love those characters even more. I personally love when an audience’s expectations are subverted with a tragic ending. You have to mess with the formula once in a while to keep the audience on their toes.

The cast, as a whole, was stellar. Diego Luna was great as rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor, but honestly, I couldn’t believe his character was chosen to get a dedicated Disney+ show… until I watched it. Now it’s my 2^nd favorite Star Wars show, next to The Mandalorian, of course. Ben Mendelsohn dominated any scene he was in as Director Krennic. Where’s his Disney+ show? Alan Tudyk was awesome as droid sidekick K-2SO. It’s not just that he was funny, which he surely was, but K-2SO also provided an interesting contrast between life with the empire vs. life as a rebel.

It’s still amazing to me that a Star Wars movie can be great without any Jedi in it. But Rogue One pulled it off. However, it gave us a couple of Jedi connections via the Death Star itself by revealing how the station’s cannon managed to create a blast capable of destroying a planet, and that connection is kyber crystals. The same power source used in Jedi lightsabers. We were also introduced to Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), who is one of the guardians of the Jedi temple but not a Jedi himself. It’s that kind of connective tissue within the story that adds to Rogue One’s value. The most impressive thing it did was fill one of the biggest plot holes in A New Hope. The plot hole came in the form of a question. How can a blast from a single X-Wing fighter through a ventilation shaft blow up a space station the size of a small moon? For decades fans were forced to ignore this nonsensical leap in logic. But the answer has finally been given to us, sabotage. It works because that’s how it was secretly designed to work by the engineer who was forced to work for the empire against his will and whose work was manipulated and used only to commit murder on a massive scale. Finally, it all makes sense, and it’s canon.

Rogue One validated an idea that was hard for some fans to fathom. Star Wars can still be good, engaging, and important without the involvement of the Jedi or the Skywalkers. Granted, I realize that Darth Vader is in this movie, so it’s not entirely devoid of Skywalkers. But you get what I’m saying. Also, the scenes with Vader were such a huge treat. Especially the end scene where we get to see him crush a squad of rebel soldiers in a show of his power that, at the time, we had only seen in Star Wars video games. It was an awesome spectacle. 

It makes me glad there are people out there able to conceive of and willing to tell those stories. Because the universe is a big place, and Rogue One is just one of many Star Wars stories. And while there are bound to be missteps and shortcomings with other related movies and tv shows, at least we will always have Rogue One.