Rogue One is Two And/or the Series

Rogue One is Two And/or the Series May 31, 2022 11:48:38 GMT Cryogenic, stampidhd280pro, and 1 more like this

Post by Ingram on May 31, 2022 11:48:38 GMT

On numerous occasions have I referenced Rogue One as my outstanding favorite Star Wars production of the Disney era. I think it time my reasons be put to record. My proclivity towards the film is not without apparent ironies that I've since made a go at squaring, as it represents upfront a departure from George Lucas' airy pulp-faring that at least by equivalent I've held so critically against the ST and Disney+ series' alike. Kismet, perhaps, that I'm essaying this film in the wake of Obi-Wan Kenobi; the modern conventions they share, might I then look more favorably upon the latter? That conclusion is still four episodes away.

Were one to tally my general complaints against the current custodianship they might figure soundly that Rogue One could easily stand for me as a nadir of Star Wars stripped of all its whimsy and B-serial lilt, for indeed does the film in no small aspect lean furthest in the spectrum of dour faux-dramatic-realism. From probing this paradox I've spliced two questions, what Star Wars has meant and what it can mean without too great a sacrifice of artistic merit. I already know the answer to the first.

Janus

Rogue One is actually, well, two movies. Sort of. One side of it serves the terms of its central protagonists while the other side is beholden to its villains. What I think worth arguing, valuing, is just how sharply this divide is drawn by the shifting story team John Knoll, Gary Whitta, Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, and especially the director Gareth Edwards.

Both first and takeaway impression any moviegoer might have of this film as a negative would be its band of heroes lacking any real gee-whiz personality likened to those from the Original Trilogy (and ST in a certain forced light) or classical formality of those from the Prequels. Neither Jyn Erso or Cassian Andor for instance are exactly bouncing off the screen with charisma nor do they make for cognitively striking archetypes; both are scrawny, visually nondescript, unremarkable in prowess and glum throughout the proceedings. If a touch of dry comic relief orbits them via a motley crew of buddy homeless Guardians, a pilot defector and an enforcer droid, this too seems intentionally subdued, clear that the filmmakers staked their claim in a version of Star Wars racked with internal ambivalence and were committed to the bit.

What systemically results is a burden of ennui taxing the film across a stretch of its Rebel-affiliated interactions that within any given scene nearly stagnates the flow of narrative with muted line readings and histrionic hand-wringing meant to pass for moody realism. The opening flashback sequence on Lah'mu as a derailment of the traditional live-action Star Wars experience is like biting into a Hershey bar only to realize you're eating baking chocolate, and this chalky taste permeates countless plot/character setups through the first act. The performance of Saw Gerrera as a prime offender wallows in bizarre art-house method and when Jyn Erso finally sees her father's hologram message we're treated to a blubbery tear-fest, as if actress Felicity Jones thought she was playing a British journalist in an Iranian war drama.

The film has had some five years to settle and I give ardent Star Wars fans benefit of the doubt that most of them on some basic level understand the creative logic constituting these less-than-radiant heroes; abridged, everyone gets that they're not supposed to be pulp, but procedural; not space-adventure so much as space-thriller. Yet I feel it necessary to drive this idea beyond the film's tonal disposition to its very structure: despite the title, Rogue One doesn't even really belong to its heroes.

Remember, this whole thing began courtesy of Knoll as the lone Star Wars pitch not predicated on a fan-favorite character being revisited or strands of the Skywalker saga being repurposed for new hero myths but rather a mere logistically-driven premise behind Episode IV's plot-point MacGuffin, the Death Star plans. Elementally speaking, it's not chiefly a movie about...characters, not to the reach Star Wars has been otherwise traditionally. More accurate to think of it as a Reader's Digest underscoring of galaxy lore long since taken at face value where themselves the mission and the Death Star are the totemic center of the story, not unlike how we in real life elevate cliff notes of, say, WWI with a sense of memorial awe, venerating factors and seismic outcomes on their own without the need for accompanying heroic arcs. This comparably disassociating prism achieves a couple things:

1. Over excusing the film's protagonists with a dismissive wave, allows for me at least to better appreciate their limitations. Midway through during Erso and Andor's onboard tiff en route to Yavin 4 he rebukes her sanctimony and in the process best defines the stark fatalism that will eventually claim them all:

"What do you know?! We don't all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something. Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Some of us live it. I've been in this fight since I was 6 years old. You're not the only one who lost everything."

The featureless natures of Erso and Andor become their very meaning as those malnourished of the songs heard at campfire instead of those destined to having songs written about them, while their scripted flaws are not so much remedied as they are redirected to a nobler aim, with her iconoclasm and his shameful past deeds together inverted into a kamikaze resolve. The bland stoicism of friends (quasi-lovers) Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus as discharged keepers of the faith by the same token affords them grace notes of humility that don't overstep their moments on screen. Bodhi Rook seems nothing other than a dramatically ineffectual non-character until one realizes that such is the very thing driving his constant neurosis; he then becomes a fleeting expression to the notion of valor without conscious glory. And K-2S0 snide pessimism is nearly the film mocking its own short term inevitability. All of them die sans ceremony—alone, thoughtless, their age-old faiths scattered among ashes, or two of them literally whited-out of galaxy lore into oblivion.

2. The film's structure dichotomizes unromantic heroism with romantic villainy even down to cinematic style. Where the purview of our de facto Rebels is heavy with downtrodden 'method' takes from the cast and proximal hand-held camerawork, the Imperial vantage is one of grand theater inadvertently hosted by Orson Krennic. It is the latter where Rogue One is closest to being interchangeable with not only the austerity of Imperial command as depicted in the OT but even the regal carriage of the Prequels. Its three principles, Krennic relayed between Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader, contrast all the aforementioned modernism with the same tenor of Space Ruritanian Romance that for Lucas was steadfast across his twin trilogies, and here likewise are scenes staged with poised maximum framing wherein characters move like pieces on a chessboard, their dialogue delivered as centers of gravity and charged with provocation.

Rogue One gives us the Empire, uncompromising, unrelenting. Are Tarkin and Vader glorified fan service? A tempting reduction, but, no. It's entirely logical for starters that they would be present in some fashion for the Death Star's maiden voyage onto the galactic battlefield yet moreover expedient for putting Krennic in his place as a character concept, for without as much he by himself as our sole antagonist would risk the Empire coming off militarily like a preening ass—that error was left alone to the ST. The fun thing about Krennic is that he's a bitch. The Empire's hierarchical cannibalism can't realistically make apex predators of every member, and thus Krennic embodies that caustic crybaby who feigns godhood and spills blood only from behind Imperial might, blowing up cities with giant space lasers as compensation for his figuratively unimpressive dick size. There's juxtaposition between he and Îmwe as well. Each are (were) middle-management to their respective devotions, the difference being that one is without vanity while the other is nothing but. Krennic spends much of the film desperate to see, behold with awe, the 'decider of things' that is his Death Star and that others see him in return whereas Îmwe is of course blind and at relative peace with his Guardianship of the Whills having since been diminished to janitorial status, "the Force of others" as both a source of virtue and a mystic sight being all that he requires in this world.

That Krennic with a Death Star to his name still grovels before his superiors only highlights that much more the sheer despotic mastery that is essential to the Emperor's second in commands, and in turn Rogue One reinvigorates for me an adoration for Tarkin as a legacy Star Wars character who nonetheless up to this point had been left with comparably paltry screen time. He's a great villain and in some ways is the Empire incarnate even above Sith sorcerers & cyborgs: greyed, prim, cool, collected, classical yet streamlined to the standards of galactic reichs ...impossibly British. Tarkin has it all without the Dark Side, only the rule of his intellect and persona. When it's Krennic's super-weapon no more is because the Death Star is a god itself who demands temerity, and Tarkin's expropriation is so swift, so indifferent, as to illustrate in pure form the heartless machine that is the Empire. I never for a minute found it gauche, either, the alternative to recasting the character in favor of a digital likeness resurrection, as Tarkin is for me a story component too strongly immortalized by Peter Cushing to continue beyond the actor's lifetime as anything other than a kind of 'movie magic' phantasmagorical entity; how geekishly lyrical to his Hammer Horror cred that Cushing as Tarkin is made corporeal again with CGI as something ectoplasmic. Use visual FX to tell the story -- to express the abstract -- conventional sacredness be damned. That's the Lucas way.

Darth Vader likewise is a point of revel over mere placation. His two complete sequences are like canvased conceptual art that backdrop his chief antagonist role in A New Hope and in tandem with said Episode isolate his villainy for its own appeal, outside the dramatic duty of Skywalker family through-lines and Prequel tragedies. He's once again just Darth Vader here, and yet cake is eaten too with a richer context inherent in his introduction in this spinoff that marks the first live-action return to Mustafar that is now home to his fortress of solitude (canonically referred to as Fortress Vader!) along with obscured shots of a bacta tank that fuses Revenge of the Sith hellscapes and Kershner-era OT weirdness into a single visual coupler. If his scene opposite Krennic does not necessarily forward the immediate plot, it remains instructive on the bigger picture state of affairs where even the Empire must play cards close to the vest with military secrecy and maintain a certain degree of optics regarding an impressionable Imperial Senate; Krennic being chastised for the gaudy destruction of Jedha possibly implies a third point of contention personal to Vader himself as one still retaining some bent respect for the Force and its monuments averse to the "technological terror" that is the Death Star. Lastly, the scene is Darth Vader enjoying his Sith-respirator days as best he can with once again a reserved application of macabre wordplay:

- "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

- "Apology accepted, Captain Needa."

- "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am."

- "Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director."

...the ultimate twisted version of 'dad humor'.

His second appearance at film's climax is perhaps a tougher sell for anyone cynical of the entire enterprise as but a glorified excuse to devolve Star Wars into a string of console game cut-scene fan services, a cheap indulgence in brutality for nothing greater or more meaningful than its own sadistic thrill. Critics said the same thing about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With the Empire as its muse, I don't mind Rogue One exploiting the more lurid, shock-violence potential of Darth Vader in his most elemental state. Honestly, what else is he supposed to be? Lucas stopped short the actual depiction of padawan slaughter per Anakin's saber because its very brevity made for careful rhythmic closure to his Order 66 montage and left such horrors more affectingly to audiences' imagination. But the whole idea of Darth Vader the Berserker is to NOT look away, that "glory" in the strictest sense is not synonymous with "good". Vader at this juncture is the dragon, the male gorgon. If his dispatch of Alderaan security is at all removed from the scene in Episode III where Separatist leaders are laid waste, it is on the basis that young Vader then was still lashing out from his own pain. This Vader is the cold machine, the absolutist.

Not-So Bad Motivator

I plainly get my own odd kick out of this film's plot servos being so strictly reliant upon difficulties in hard data logistics. Something as simple as Galen Erso's recorded confirmation of the Death Star's built-in Achilles' heel could have spurred the Rebel Alliance into action against Scarif from the start had said hologram message not been left in haste with the destruction of Jedha. It makes for a credible error that forwards the narrative to its next-level challenge in attempt to retrieve Galen himself from the facility on Eadu and thus bringing into physical/dramatic range a father 'n' daughter reunion along with Cassian's questionable alignment between soldier and assassin. That the facility is then bombed-strafed due to absent communique incidentally leaves Galen to the fate of collateral damage and where absence of such proof, then, later functions as Jyn's impasse in convincing the Alliance Council the worthwhile prize on Scarif; orders disobeyed being the direct outcome now justifies the film's very title. If not brilliant or even particularly nifty, such thankless plotting provides the narrative a sensible line of cause & effect that elsewhere in Disney's Star Wars is severely lacking.

Speaking of which, it's in the third-act climax that Edwards and Co. put into motion a multi-tier set piece extravaganza that, not to pick fights, sent to the little kids table every end blowout from the ST for understanding purposeful composition over grandiose pronouncements. Interlocked planes of action are a staple of Star Wars yet Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams only ever managed to include as much habitually without quite realizing a game board beyond linear stakes and twofold objectives fashioned with showy entrances/exits. What our spinoff filmmakers drafted for the assault on Scarif borrows in rough sketch the trifectas from Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace consisting of three separate battlefields with a planet surface to orbital range; specific to the stratagems in Episodes I & VI were diversions, cannon fodder, control knockouts, capturing the flag and ritualistic melees. Rogue One hasn't any saber duels to offer but it certainly ups the ante of compounding mission objectives atomized to a point that borders on the absurd:

1. infiltrate the Citadel tower

2. locate the databank vault via on-site Imperial droid brain-jack

3. initiate diversion by detonating perimeter landing areas with bombs

4. protect the assisting Rebel fleet with Red and Gold squadron fighters; Blue squadron to provide surface air support for Rebel troops.

4a. Blue squadron to penetrate orbital Shield Gate before it closes

5. reopen the Shield Gate so the Death Star schematics can be transmitted to the Rebel command ship above

5a. locate the communication tower master switch so a message to open-or-destroy the Shield Gate can be sent to Rebel command

5b. manually connect a transmission cable from ship's broadcaster to nearby tower port under volley of blaster fire

5c. reach and throw master switch under volley of blaster fire

5d. Red/Gold squadrons attack the Shield Gate now reinforced with a myriad of TIE fighters

6. close then protect databank vault door so the schematics retrieval can proceed unmolested

6a. once located, retrieve the plans manually by physically climbing the core storage shaft

6b. realign Citadel antenna dish at its external terminal to allow transmission

7. get the hell outta Dodge with the plans in pocket

No problem.

Edwards reigns the chaos into a clear enough editorial presentation and varies its visual style from the docudramatic wartime footage among beach palms and AT-AT walkers (echoing the battle on Geonosis in some respects) to the fluid motion of space fighter pandemonium closest in discipline to that which Lucas himself undoubtedly gave the genre. I was most engaged with this extended climax for its own sake given the director's penchant for venue immersion that brings into vibrant color a South Pacific Theater of galactic WWII combat or, from above, oceanic, photorealistic POVs per Admiral Raddus and the striking imagery of Imperial Star Destroyers delivered from hyperspace into full panoramic frame at lightning effect. But as the story's crescendo it also tilts the whole of the film into a unique disposition.

Accepting as canon, if only momentarily, the compression of plot from Rogue One into mere plot device for A New Hope hinges between elegiac and sardonic depending on which perspective you hold in that everything mounted and sacrificed for the Death Star schematics constituting a 2-hour-plus narrative is symbolically downsized to a flimsy key-card disc for an upload into a bumbling R2 unit, and whose origin is of zero storied, emotional import to the now wayward ragtags and a sassy princess trading quips and running around playing laser blast; sardonic in how the sorrow of one is for the other converted into freshly squeezed pulp.

Rogue One by this nature plays the long game as a singular gesture that arcs from a monotone opening, forward through desperate proceedings and onto a grand finale that heightens the tone of the film nearly back in line with the main saga entry that will immediately follow; at the same time counterintuitively foregoing the metered symphonic denouements of those saga films for an abrupt ending—a literal breathless escape from Vader's clutches that pauses only for a split-second before its punch to closing credits. Brass tacks, from digitally wistful Princess Leia straight to the starfield of Williams' ceremonial credits theme gets me in the feels, the emotional swell of it all leaving no time to waste. Turns out, the whole damn thing ultimately proves dour for the sake of contrast, so it can then pay tribute -- tip its hat, mail its love letter -- with celebration and exhilaration to the boyish speeds of Lucas' serial wonder tales. An about-face, if you will. Yet another kind of Janus.

I for the record do not shelve Rogue One as official (head)canon among George Lucas' Star Wars. It's not needed. The six-part space opera Lucas auteur'd completes itself beautifully in the form of an epic mural and with the loose anatomy of musical movements, leaving no demand for ancillary storyline presentations. I've then since come to regard the film endearingly as a kind of coffee table book accessory to Lucas' Star Wars, a concise one-ff work of conceptualism that entertains the very subject of Star Wars only through a single facet not usually associated with the latter's cinematic traditions; a series of pictorials and interpretations often atypical in nature nonetheless woven into the spectacle of a grander movieverse where super-villainy still looms and where victors like Queen Amidala and Luke Skywalker are woven into screen myth. This coffee table book allows me a mind-space relationship with Star Wars that departs and experiments to a degree without compromising what I love so much about the saga ...but not just in theory.

The film IS confident in its own identity, firm and resolute in its self-contained, bifurcated story structure, and altogether cinematic in its own right. It's a hefty overhaul of fandom DevianArt made to blockbuster in scale, crossing the threshold from geeky 'what-if' to become an archival statement of Star Wars... all for some retro vector schematics.

Two there are...

Raise your hand if you were clamoring for -- or at any point in your life post-2016 mentally contemplated the mere idea of -- a Cassian Andor spinoff series.

Anyone? Yeah, me neither. Lo, here we are

Okay then. Let me try and condense this: ~~Star Wars~~ "Star Wars" meets Game of Galactic Thrones with a tonal-aesthetic slice of Ron Fricke's Baraka.

And I'm not gonna lie, I'm actually piqued for this. Yes, piqued specifically as opposed to peaked: stimulated, vexed, irritated, interested, provoked all in one. It certainly looks bigger in production scope than everything Disney+ to date and with the title appearing as a bit of a misnomer; this comes off more as a Rebellion-to-Empire spanning ensemble piece, which makes sense given the length of the series. And yet not only does Diego Luna as Cassian Andor remain eminent, so too from Rouge One would it seem that show creator/writer Tony Gilroy is having the last word on this far edge of the Star Wars spectrum as a collective oeuvre to his own name, claiming as his own sandbox all things Rebel Alliance monograph decidedly removed from Jedi dramas and the Skywalker saga.

Far edge, indeed. While Star Wars has gone to some dark places in the past, this brings to its storied universe a holistic expression sharply hateful in timbre: They're so proud of themselves. So fat and satisfied." ...somehow I seriously doubt we'll be entertaining any Baby Yodas or tiny-tike Princess Leias running around with toy-droids. I also detected no signs of a single alien character, thus it seems this storyline will emphasize the travails of conspiring revolutionaries against an ever-watchful Empire layered over with a permafrost of cold-bloodedness that is, must be, distinctly human. And what Star Wars fan would have ever imagined seeing Mon Mothma in a cocktail dress.

The results here could teeter one of two ways: a universal play at tyranny, seething and fraught with suspense, or just conceited (translation: cheaply political) and boring. Not that I'd cry foul an effective allegory. Times being what they are, with censorship of any-and-all dissent being passed off as "order" and invasions being passed off as "liberations", this series could naturally strike a chord with some degree of acumen, intentional or not. But it's risky chancing Star Wars so close to real-world cynicism, Lucas' well-considered anthropological wisdoms writ pop-art lost to the weeds of fashionable deifying & demonizing. I'm reminded of a caution once voiced by a certain master of Jedi masters: "To a dangerous place this line of thought will carry us. Great care, we must take."

I assumed wrongly that Rogue One was an isolated experiment in a-typing Star Wars apart from even the wedged feverishness of the Sequel Trilogy and the relatively minimalist narratives of the three current streaming shows. I'm not tracking Andor as a direct prequel per se but even beyond its returning character the showrunners involved are definitely marketing the same severe milieu of disparate participants moving about the galaxy like aphids frantic to make a difference where, before, only swashbuckling pulp heroes dared tread. I'm roundly in if the show sports the same durable plotting and utility of the movie from which it has sprung.

George Lucas' Star Wars is dead, only its Force ghost remains. I don't know if it's haunting or guiding the current Star Wars in some wandering sense, if it cannot interfere or if it simply doesn't care. We're entering some new murky ecosystem of blind commerce mixed with haphazard inspiration. Massive life-form readings, though. There's something alive down there.