Nostalgia Wars: The Problem With Rogue One

I remember where I was when the news broke. My girlfriend at the time was plating up some stir fry. I was a Fresher at University. We sat down to eat just as it popped up – Disney had bought the rights to Star Wars (well, all of Lucas’ properties). I said to my girlfriend that we’d always remember where we were when that news broke.

I remember each trailer for Episode 7. I remember waiting to go in to see the movie at IMAX. I remember thinking to myself throughout – ‘this isn’t just a movie, this is a NEW STAR WARS MOVIE’. It was a rare moment of knowing you were a part of a historic event as it happened.

During Rogue One, I fell asleep. After the movie, I shrugged and said to my brother that it was alright. He preferred it to Force Awakens. And during the drive home, I thought to myself, surely I’m mistaken, right? Disney wouldn’t put out a mediocre movie, they wouldn’t actively ruin yet more of the pre-established Star Wars canon, let alone non-emo teenage Darth Vader? But then I read reviews, I checked Reddit threads, saw the divide. So here’s my point, anyway.

Rogue One isn’t a good film.

To begin with, we need to acknowledge the biggest flaw with Force Awakens, that being the fact it’s ultimately a reboot of A New Hope. And the reasons why are clear – Disney needs people to like Star Wars again, needs to wash JarJar from our collective consciousness. There’s a reason no allusion is made to anything from the prequels. There’s a reason the main characters are a woman and a black guy – and it isn’t creative integrity.

Force Awakens was designed from the ground up to win back as many people as possible. There’s the original trio (albeit a limited presence of Luke), the force is back to being a wishy-washy magical thing, the Falcon is back – hell, we’re once again for some reason seeing the empire as a much larger and threatening presence than the side of the good, who are hiding away in backwater planets or being blown up by the all new death star.

But fine, it served its purpose. Episode 7 was a massive success, it’s up there for me as one of the best in the series, and the general consensus was that we’d be seeing Disney start to experiment more and shake things up going forwards, with their new foundation established. Rogue One, we imagined, was the beginning of this.

“It’s standalone!” Except, no, it isn’t. The context and plot are completely reliant on the moviegoer knowing about Star Wars and episode 4 in particular. It’s a movie about some people getting the plans for a weapon that doesn’t exist and then all dying. It’s the middle of a sentence.

“It’s darker and more mature!” Is that what people were asking for out of Star Wars? I certainly don’t speak for the entire viewer base but I get enough gritty, dark reality here in “reality”. Star Wars is a light-hearted space fantasy about larger than life characters who use magic and lightswords – Rogue One’s insistence that we see everyone we care about die and watch soldiers zap each other as if it were the D-Day landings doesn’t work. And while we’re at it, Rogue One wasn’t even internally consistent. It’s played for laughs that a blind man hits stormtroopers in the head with a stick, but we’re also told to see these soldiers as literal Nazis.

Rogue One isn’t new and it isn’t interesting. The highlights of the movie are things from other movies. AT-ATs, the Death Star, a CGI Peter Cushing, Darth Vader. We have a Darth Vader who cracks puns as he chokes a man, big action scenes that have no effect, fan favourites, Admiral Ackbar, and a cameo from C3PO and R2D2. This feels more like a fan film than an entry in one of the biggest film franchises of all time.

But of course, none of the characters are interesting. Our female lead is a blank slate who seems incapable of expressing emotions or caring. We have our token Asian, token Latino, and a smart talking robot. I couldn’t tell you the names of the characters as I walked out of the theatre. Why would we want interesting or dynamic characters like in Force Awakens? Generic ‘action movie’ types are what Disney decided this universe needed.

Disney’s misuse of poor old Annie is as bad here as his adventures with sand in the prequels – it’s not about character development, it’s not about his threatening presence, it’s about pointless and hollow fan service. Why do we watch Darth slash his way through a row of rebels? Oh, right, because he’s Darth Vader and isn’t it so cool when he uses the force and thrashes his lightsaber about.

Rogue One is an exercise in nostalgia, the same as Force Awakens. But while the latter felt like a homecoming of sorts, Rogue One is a slow, boring trudge through an area we’ve already cleared. It’s a literal fetch quest to pass some time while the game loads a new level. I am beyond excited for Episode 8, but Rogue One feels like an accidental warning from the Disney think tank. Star Wars is the fairy tale of our time. It’s the story everyone knows. It’s good vs evil. It’s the light versus the dark.

But fairytales survive because they adapt, they evolve. Fables become feminist interpretations, become graphic novels, get rewritten and understood in new ways. How many Death Stars can we blow up? How many times can the rebels fight the empire/new order? Something has to change in the universe far, far away.

It used to feel like the Star Wars universe never ended. There were seemingly infinite planets, people, stories to tell. But Disney may be realising that it’s a very small universe in the end, one where audiences demand the same stories, the same colours, the same sound effects. And with plans supposedly running into the 2030s, how many times will those same audiences turn up for the same universe, stuck in a time so long ago?