By Dante Spado
Over winter break, my girlfriend (a Star Wars novice) and I decided to watch all nine Star Wars movies (of course we started with the Originals. Is that even up for debate?). Having been a huge Star Wars fan all my life, it was nice to go back and watch everything in quick succession. It brought back a lot of nostalgia and good feelings of course, but the whole time I was thinking about how the writing in some is super (The Empire Strikes Back) and in others, it suffers (Attack of the Clones). The Star Wars franchise is by no means a perfect set of movies, but I think there is one movie that deserves a lot more respect than it gets from a writing standpoint.
That movie is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I saw this movie on my 18th birthday, and I’ve seen it again since, but it had been a little while since my last viewing. During my rewatch, all I could think was, “this is so. freaking. good.” Rogue One had the challenge of introducing us to a whole new set of characters in an already very-established universe. And I think they killed it. I can honestly say I cared more about the friendship between Chirrut and Baze than I ever cared about the friendship between Poe and Finn.
Rogue One is a suicide mission for these characters. And in the back of our minds, we know they can’t live. None of them were in the Original Trilogy. But, for some reason, you can put that aside and still root and cheer for them. When I was 18 watching the movie for the first time in theaters and K-2SO got shot, I remember thinking, “well they can just fix him.” I was in denial that all of these characters would die, even though it was the only logical conclusion to the movie.
Not a single one of these characters had plot armor. In The Rise of Skywalker, there’s a scene where Poe and Finn gun their way through dozens of Stormtroopers without even getting hit. I know we all think Stromptroopers are bad shots, but this was a bit much. Compare that to the death scenes of Chirrut and Baze. Chirrut successfully walks through a battlefield to flip the master switch, but right after he does, he’s killed. There’s no magical escape. No crazy, chance luck. He made a sacrifice. And it hits us hard, but it hits Baze harder. Baze’s last act of taking up Chirrut’s mantra of, “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me” is one thousand times more powerful than Finn running around screaming “REYYYY” at the top of his lungs. It shows the true love and respect Baze had for Chirrut, and he goes down in a blaze of glory, taking out several Death troopers before finally getting taken out himself. It’s a beautiful, yet deeply saddening moment, all because in under two hours the writers made us care about these characters.
The other thing this movie does EXTREMELY well is cover up the lazy writing in A New Hope where the Death Star just happens to have a hole you can shoot into that blows up the ENTIRE THING. If you ever thought to yourself, “huh, I wonder how that got built into the Empire’s prized-super weapon that they spent decades making,” well Galen Erso has the answer for you.
Galen is such a cool character. An Empire-deserter turned farmer turned Empire-hostage, it makes so much sense why he built the flaw in the Death Star, and how the Empire never noticed it. Galen was a genius, but he has a moral conscience that his old buddy Orson Krennic doesn’t. While Krennic wants the attention of the Emperor, Galen wants to be a farmer (it’s a peaceful life). He gets to do so for a while until Krennic shows back up in his life, kills his wife and separates him from his child. I mean how do you just go along with whatever the Empire wants you to do after that? Galen channels his resentments and his frustrations into stalling the Death Star’s completion and implementing said hole that Luke later shoots to blow up the Death Star. I think it’s genius writing, and I don’t think it’s something George Lucas ever had in mind when he wrote A New Hope.
Jyn, Cassian, K-2SO, Baze, Chirrut and Bodhi may have only gotten one movie, and while they’re unlikely to appear in further Star Wars projects (besides the Cassian in his prequel show), I think the impact they made on the Star Wars franchise is undeniable. I think there should be just as many kids dressing up as Cassian for Halloween as there are kids dressing up as Han Solo. I think there should be just as many little girls who look up to Jyn Erso as there are little girls who look up to Princess Leia. I think there should be just as many people saying, “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me” as there are people saying, “may the Force be with you.” And above all else, I think Rogue One is an excellent movie.