All the Wrong Lessons: Rogue One

Rogue One is two stories, or maybe three.

Onscreen, it’s the story of flawed heroes: finding a shot at redemption, looking for a second chance, finding hope in the darkest moments.

Offscreen, it’s the story of a troubled production that managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat; it’s also the story of a successful movie that taught executives all the wrong lessons.

This dark little gem of a movie made over a billion dollars on a (probably) $280 million budget.¹ Not too shabby, especially considering it started its life as a TV script and got retooled behind the scenes after being developed as a feature film during production.² (You may recall that one of the more memorable lines from the teaser trailer was cut: “I rebel,” Jyn Erso says in that teaser, and never again.) This was the first, and possibly last, troubled production that Lucasfilm managed to parley into success, and it’s worth taking a closer look at the why.

Here are some lessons Lucasfilm and Disney appear to have taken from Rogue One:

• People like diverse casts!
• Maybe someday there could be queer characters in the franchise and the world wouldn’t end.³
• People really wanted comprehensive explanations for every tiny detail in the Star Wars universe.
• People really wanted to see Darth Vader and multiple Skywalkers in every single installment of the franchise.
• It’s fine to make major changes and still hold to your release date! Nothing will go wrong at all.

I don’t think you need me to tell you that not all of these lessons were, perhaps, the right ones.

The decision to hold on to release dates no matter what was probably the worst takeaway, but the idea that every fucking little thing needs explaining is also a strong contender.. No one even really needed to learn there was a defect deliberately built into the Death Star; that’s just a good detail to hang a story on. Remember story hooks? Let’s bring those back.

Here are some lessons they could have taken away:

• It’s okay to cut stuff the fans like. “I rebel” was a fantastic line, but the final movie didn’t need it.
• It’s okay to let things end. (No one in Star Wars has ever, ever seemed to learn the phrase “always leave them wanting more.” What a shame.)
• Don’t bother trying to make everyone happy.

To be fair, the extremely divided reception that The Last Jedi would receive just a year later probably meant that last lesson was never going to be internalized, but they didn’t have to go quite so far as The Rise of Skywalker, a prime example of the futility of trying to please everyone.

I think a huge part of Rogue One’s success is that it’s a story, just one story. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yes, the end ties directly to A New Hope, but you could watch this as your first Star Wars movie and have no further curiosity beyond ‘wow, I hope that girl at the end came out okay.’ It’s got more in common with The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai than The Empire Strikes Back: there’s a bigger world around our characters, but that’s not what the movie is about. Empire gives us a new chapter in an installment, while Rogue One ends with the final frames. The characters live (and die) within the world of the film. 

This seems obvious, but it’s pretty rare for Star Wars. A New Hope was introduced with a crawl like the old-time serials George Lucas was riffing on, indicating it’s part of a larger story, neither the beginning nor end. Most of Star Wars canon has become a rat king of overlapping timelines and cameos; tie-in novels, video games, comic books, television series, throwaway copy on action figures incorporated into canon. (I find it hilarious that the Disney era definitively cut off the original Extended Universe to clarify the timeline, and then almost immediately began building a new big old mess.) Rogue One is definitely part of that giant cluster or continuity, but it nods at it. It doesn’t stop the movie dead to make sure we all learn how Han Solo got his name. Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera was in the 2012 Clone Wars cartoon, but you didn’t need to know that. Very little is set up for an ‘aah’ of recognition. The movie works without any ‘aah’ at all.

A lot of long-running canons run into this problem, trying to find the balance between a connected universe and an overstuffed universe ready to collapse under its own weight. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboots itself every once in a while, and the fans generally make their own Frankencanon out of whatever appeals to them. Marvel and DC comics often have little notes to the reader referring to events that took place outside of the issue at hand. Sony did…what it did, and the MCU is struggling with balance as awkwardly as Star Wars.

That makes it all the more rare and commendable that Rogue One managed it. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a ton of canon material on the Guardians of the Whills; they’re just space monks whose temple and purpose has been destroyed, and while George Lucas created a long and overcomplicated backstory for the Whills themselves⁴, he didn’t seem to have ever drilled down much beyond their successors. Rogue One doesn’t bother with any of that; the Guardians worked to guard the temple, the temple was destroyed, and its former protectors have been struggling with the aftermath of that loss ever since. That’s all you really need to know. It’s not overexplained, and it doesn’t need to be. The actors do the work to establish the characters and their dynamics, and the script gives them time — not a lot, but enough — to let them work together, tease each other, fight together quite literally to the bitter end. No one gets bogged down in mythos. Andor and K-250 have a history, but the broad strokes are all we need. Bodhi Rook put his head down and did his work until he met Galen Erso, and everything changed. Orson Krennic is a power-hungry bastard working for another power-hungry bastard. Jyn Erso’s own journey and backstory has the biggest focus, but her story is also pretty streamlined:

A girl loses her family to a cruel and tyrannical government. She grows up alone, fighting to survive, in a world where morals have become a luxury. Years later, her father sends her a message: the tyrants are preparing a terrible weapon, but he knows how to stop it. He trusts her to stop it. And she does, along with a ragtag group all seeking their own redemption, or at least a little peace.

They die, but their death is not hollow. Their death brings hope.

That’s it. Beginning, middle, end.

Since Rogue One, several characters have shown up in one format or another. The Star Wars franchise has just piled on more sequels, more tie-ins, even a prequel spinoff to Rogue One itself in Andor on Disney+. I don’t think it weakens Rogue One, but I don’t think it did it any favors, either. I am terribly fond of The Guardians of the Whills tie-in novel⁵, but if it hadn’t been cheap on Amazon that one time, I wouldn’t have read it, and I would have been fine.

Looking back from almost a decade later, it seems like even more of a small miracle that Rogue One made it to screen, much less that it was the commercial and artistic success that it was. Like the rebels themselves, the movie managed to beat the odds…but the cost was pretty heartbreaking. 

So it goes.

1. Best estimates here, because who knows what happened in some balance sheet somewhere? ↩︎
2. This is also what happened with Solo. Can’t win ’em all! ↩︎
3. It was very sweet and kind of funny to see how quickly a good chunk of fandom just accepted Baze/Chirrut as canon and moved on. (Wikipedia describes Baze as Chirrut’s “longtime companion,” which was a euphemism so commonly used for romantic partners in obits during the AIDS crisis the phrase got its own movie. Nice job, Wikipedia editors) Greg Rucka’s Guardians of the Whills does just about everything to treat them as a couple aside from having them share a bedroll. Back in my day you had to ship uphill both ways in the snow, this was practically a DIY kit. Anyway, Lucasfilm never did much with this outside the comics, but there was a moment of hope there, and I would like to recognize it. ↩︎
4. The Whills themselves seem to be some kind of immortal…something or other. I decided it was best to not think about it too much, but if you want to spend three hours on Wookiepedia, come back and tell me. ↩︎
5. Again, Greg Rucka. You can tell that guy wrote The Old Guard, that’s all I’m saying. ↩︎