Every critic reviewing Star Wars should open with an honest disclosure of the degree to which their heart is accountable to their head. So here is mine: I’m a Star Wars person. I go in wanting to love it. I’m also a Christmas person, and I have observed that there is a high degree of overlap between fans of these two venerable institutions (though the point at which they literally meet, the Star Wars Christmas Special, is one of those bizarre cases in pop culture where two cool things cancel each other out, like Robert de Niro holding an electric guitar). But in general, I find that if you can get excited about Star Wars, in all its lore and tradition and spectacle and earnestness, you probably also thrill a little to the sound of sleigh bells.
Despite my affinity, I don’t hold it against people for whom neither Santa nor Vader ring any emotional bells. To enjoy either it helps to have grown up with them, to have an appreciation for kitch, a high tolerance for commercialism, and a sophisticated ability to ignore the bad in favor of embracing the good. (I will wade through a thousand saccharine Christmas carols for one desperately sad rendition of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and all three prequels for one Empire Strikes Back.) Imperfect though they both are, Stat Wars and Christmas are also two of the only cultural institutions big enough to unite broad swathes of people, offering as they do a vague philosophy of light held against darkness, in comforting and affirming repetition. They’re songs we can all sing along to.
I was afraid that neither the Christmas nor the Star Wars spirit would find me this year, given everything. Even without the crushing forces of authoritarianism bearing down on us, it just doesn’t always work. The colors can be too bright, the cheer too forced, the greedy hands churning out the merchandise too difficult to ignore.
But thankfully, the magic worked this year–just in a different way. (Spoilers to come, obviously.)
Right from the start, Rogue One positions itself outside the trilogies that preceded it. There’s no text crawl to fill you in on the backstory, the score is the first not to be composed by John Williams (had to happen sometime), and the opening shots are more concerned with the vastness of space than the ships threading their way through the darkness. These differences are all to the good, because Rogue One’scentral message is different from the trilogies, and better suited this moment, as we steel ourselves for the next four years.
The film’s first half is much weaker than the second, because it is when we are introduced to our characters, and even though they are remarkable, Rogue One isn’t really about them. They are compelling individuals but the film is about limits of individualism and the necessity of collectivism. Rogue One‘s entire moral universe exists, not in opposition to, but as a complement of the trilogies and their heroes; these are the people who make those heroes possible. Seen in that light, it seems like a clear-eyed choice to make this particular ragtag band of misfits a little gruffer and harder to love than Rey, Fin, and company.
That being said, Felicity Jones anchors the film beautifully as Jyn Erso, the moody warrior whose cynicism yearns to give way to belief. I would have believed in her character even without the opening sequence of her childhood trauma (which I would gladly have traded for some of the Forest Whitaker scenes we glimpsed in the trailer but not in the final cut). Regardless, Jyn is a typical Star Wars heroine only insofar as she has the requisite dead mother and estranged father; otherwise she is darker and more worldly than Rey and Luke put together.
Jyn is dragooned into service by the Rebellion, which is not so cohesive nor idealistic as Luke Skywalker is imagining it to be while he pouts at the twin sunsets on Tatooine. The Rebellion has taken an interest in this little intergalactic April Ludgate because of her father, an Imperial architect rumored to be responsible for the Empire’s new super-weapon, The Death Star. (I have no objection to them building yet another plot around the infamous not-a-moon, because it is an icon. You can trot it out every year like All I Want For Christmas Is You and I will cheer for it every time.) The Rebellion would like Jyn to find her father and, I guess, ask him to please stop building a genocide machine.
Jyn’s guide to The Rebellion is Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), whose work as a spy and saboteur gives him a messiness we’ve never had to see in any of Star Wars‘ true believers. Luke had his faith in the Force, Han hid behind his charm, and Leia never had to get her hands too dirty. But in his very first scene, Cassian murders an ally to protect his mission, and we are invited to join him both in the horror of that choice and its grim necessity. So it’s unsurprising that, unbeknownst to Jyn, Cassian has secretly been tasked to kill Jyn’s father, not rescue him. So we’re already a bit morally compromised as we set out on our mission.
The rest of the Rebel team–who we pick up along the way–is a charming band of misfits, except the cargo pilot who defected from the Empire (Riz Ahmed) who is not particularly charming but who has the very good excuse of severe PTSD (though this does not justify his haircut). The two protectors of the Jedi temple are the movie’s spiritual anchor and deserve more backstory (and I guess can be gay if that makes it better for you), and Saw Gerrera’s whole arc feels oddly truncated, but again: the characters aren’t really the point.
What matters is the mission, which is crucial but unglamorous. It’s not “destroy the Death Star,” it’s “steal the plans to enable someone else to destroy the Death Star.” And again and again throughout the movie, what stands in our team’s way is logistics. The satellite has to be repositioned. No one knows what the master switch looks like or where it is. And most relatably: the goddamn cord isn’t long enough to plug it in. If it weren’t for Alan Tudyk’s masterful voice acting as a deadpan droid to leaven the tension, Rogue One might be overwhelmed by the constant frustrations thrown in the path of our heroes. As it is, they eventually make contact with Jyn’s father, and though Cassian doesn’t kill him, a squadron of Rebel fighters does the job anyway. Also the ancient Jedi temple is destroyed, which I will confess to finding more upsetting, but only because I care a lot about historical preservation.
Speaking of, Rogue One spares us too many knowing nods back to the original trilogy, but the ones that are there are a mixed bag. Grand Moff Tarkin and Leia’s CGI-rendered heads are physically uncomfortable to look at and C-3PO’s brief cameo has “studio notes” written all over it. On the other hand, catching a glimpse of Darth Vader’s body in the medicine bath is haunting, and offers another rich parallel between Darth and Luke. The movie’s chief villain–Ben Mendelsohn’s striving Director Krennic–offers a pointed contrast to the collectivist values of our heroes; he’s brought down by his individualistic desire to take all credit for the Death Star. That said, Mendelsohn sometimes feels a bit dwarfed by the material, though it’s not his fault he’s playing against Mads Mikkelsen and the ghost of Peter Cushing.
Eventually, the team launches a mission to steal the Death Star schematics–which contain the secret to destroying it–from an Imperial garrison. It’s one of those desperate, one-in-a-million plans we’re used to in Star Wars movies. At the end, we’d expect to see the Millennium Falcon screaming away from the wreckage in the nick of time, triumphant. But this isn’t that kind of Star Wars movie.
About two-thirds of the way through Rogue One, I turned to my little sister and whispered “none of our dudes are gonna make it.” And they don’t. One by one, each character is killed or sacrifices themself to accomplish the mission. The shell-shocked pilot is killed by a grenade, the Jedi mystics die in a hail of gunfire, Cassian and Jyn die holding each other, silently regretting a romance that might have been. Yet the mission succeeds; each individual sacrifice, though the hero may never know it, enables the Death Star plans to wind up in the hands of the Rebels. It’s tragic, but it’s not senseless. And that’s what makes it the right Star Wars for right now.
Rogue One is a message to all those who want to join a rebellion. It tells us that heroism will be required of us all, but that what heroism looks like most often is sacrifice. It is an admonishment to the main trilogies’ emphasis on Chosen Ones and Holy Bloodlines and Miraculous Escapes. It is skeptical of glory and it is skeptical of certainty, but it is no less earnest for all that. Rogue One asks us to fight fascism not in the hope of getting medals draped around our necks, or even in the hope of survival, but simply: in hope.
It is, oddly, the most heartening message Star Wars could give me right now, because it isn’t wrapped in sentimentality. Instead it is: you will die, and your friends will die, and most of the people trying to take down the Death Star will die too, but that’s okay. Because it’s not about you, except insofar as you are one with The Force.
The Force has always been one of the least satisfying elements of the Star Wars universe to me–sometimes a parlor trick, sometimes a vaguely Eastern philosophy, frequently a marketing gimmick. But it seemed to mean more this time, when invoked by rebels trusting it, calling on it, and finally joining it.
That’s a Christmas carol I can believe in.