The hoopla behind Rogue One finally died down enough that we got a chance to go see it tonight. Even with it coming out last year, we were still in a full theatre. Rogue One is the story of a very reluctant man forced to work with the empire to build the Death Star. If not because we know this is science fiction, every scene ends in death and destruction, this would totally be a depressing movie. Disney might end up squeezing the Star Wars franchise like a dirty sock to get all its nutty footy flavor out, but it is something we seem to crave. There are tons of stories in this universe that could be dissected, and I hope they do. A movie a year sounds great to me, never mind George Luca's timeframe of a trilogy every two decades.
This story follows the architect behind the building of the Death Star. Galen Erso is the mastermind behind the Death Star but he has gone into hiding, and wants nothing else to do with its construction. He is found, his wife in a lame attempt to save him, gets killed and the daughter manages to run and hide, ostensibly until the next scene where she has been captured and is on her way to some prison lands. On the way, she is rescued by Cassian Andor, a rebel, so she can be used as bait to kill the dad. While this is happening, an empire pilot, Bodhi Rook, is given a message to give to a rebel Saw Gerrera by Galen. All of them join forces in Jedha, where they are all imprisoned while Saw Gerrera determines who is who. The empire to show their weapon is fully operational, decide to destroy the village/city of Jedhu with one shot from the Death Star. Saw Gerrera chooses to die at that point, for no reason, other than he is tired of running.
There is a side trip to a planet where Galen is all of a sudden tried for crimes against the Empire, he is found guilty and just as he is about to be killed by the Empire, he is accidentally killed by a rebel ship randomly shooting at them. Father and daughter have a touching moment, but it is too late for him. Jyn goes and meets with the rebels and she cannot convince them they must try and destroy the Death Star, but enough individuals agree to join her and go on a suicide mission to planet Scarif, where the Empire holds all their data on files. It is a suicide mission of grand proportions, and although grandiose and kind of cool because we see AT-ATs walking around in a beach setting and the original X-wing and Y-wing fighters.
Everything leads to the original first scene in the original New Hope Star Wars in 1977, where Princess Leia has the schematics, and feeds them into a then unknown R2 unit which started this whole universe we now accept as totally plausible. The movie was very human, and that was part of the problem, for me, there were no jedi, no mystery men with mystical powers. This was just a group of humans preventing something from existing that should have never been made by another group of humans. A group as scary as the Empire should never have something as powerful as a planet destroyer because they had no qualms about using it. They used it to destroy two cities in a very short time. The effect was like dropping a nuke and having everything just mushrooming up and out of existence. In a New Hope, they do eventually destroy a whole planet. It is a good thing the Rebels existed and disarmed the Bullies.
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