‘Rogue One’: A Star Wars Prequel Without Magic, or Even Life

Maybe we all get the Star Wars we deserve. In which case, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, as it is so quaintly termed, is the film for the hour. What ought to be a raging call for rebellion sputters and coughs and then finally lapses into stupefied incoherence.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this film is not good. 

All the ways in which it fails to be good will soon be delineated in reviews and comments sections aplenty. Opinions are already clouding the air with fuming contrariness (see this versus this.) One may soon tire of the endless debate and want to move on, but while it is still fresh and steaming, let’s talk about it.

For those of you who live in a cave or under the sea, or for anyone else who may have somehow missed the onslaught of ads, trailers and obscene amounts of product tie-ins (everything from luxury cars to t-shirts), the newest addition to the Star Wars compendium is a prequel, leading up to the place where it all began.

“This is where I came in!” I thought, along with an entire generation of folk raised on a diet of the Rebel Alliance versus the Empire. However many iterations of the story, be it as the Sith or the New Order, the song remained the same. Scrappy underdogs fighting a last ditch battle against an overwhelming enemy of Third Reich proportions. Rogue One appears to be singing along. But do not be fooled, young Padawan — this film was made by an empire for an empire.

If you have any lingering doubts about the real reason that a new Star Wars film rolled out for the holiday season, don’t. Money and power are at the root of it all, and the film is designed, tested and marketed down to bone. Still, one holds onto hope that magic will somehow persist, and find a way through corporate control, to wrestle out some small semblance of real human emotion.

That does not happen.

The most egregious of the film’s faults might seem like a minor quibble, but it indicates something more complex and troubling. Rogue One suffers from a distinct lack of charm. I mean charm in the larger sense of the word, not just a facile likability factor (although that is a problem as well) but an inability to convince, to seduce, to beguile. Ultimately, it fails to create any kind of investment in the people onscreen and their plight.

No matter how many cameos, epic battles, or stirring orchestral strings are loaded on, there is no magic in Rogue One. No sense of being catapulted back to an earlier, more vivid moment when a film could shift your very sense of identity, suck all the “you-ness” out of you and replace it with a new identity, one that slipped inside your skin almost without effort. Suddenly you were Darth Vader, filled with a suppurating swirl of darkness that coiled around your ruined flesh, radiating out in invisible waves of violence. I remember stalking across the playground as a child, with a towel around my shoulders and someone’s motorcycle helmet on my head, feeling imbued with the same malignant darkness that I imagined must run through old Darth himself.

I have written about the initial experience of seeing Star Wars as a child. The memory of being taken over by the film is still as vivid as it was in 1977. Partly it was the shock of the new, of never having seen anything quite like it before, from the Storm Troopers with their chock-a-block white suits to the overwhelming figure of Darth Vader.

One can never really go home again, except that in a film, you actually can. Nostalgia is a kind of homesickness for what once was; you can return to those places in films, again and again, although the original experience gets layered over with subsequent viewings, each replete with its own time and place until the film comes to resemble a palimpsest crisscrossed with lines and scratches, some deeper than others. Still... at certain angles and in the gloaming of the evening, a magic hour of time and space, you can climb through the veil of the years like you might push through the back of a wardrobe and find yourself in Narnia, or trudging along with Sam and Frodo into the bowels of Mordor, or aboard a tiny spaceship streaking across the galaxy, bearing a princess, a droid and some secret plans.

We need our epics, our mythopoeic odysseys — they complete us. For many folks, the original two films in the series, and to a much lesser extent the final third, were exactly that. Even the world’s worst Christmas Special couldn’t dim the glow that much.

So, why is Rogue One so terribly disappointing? The dreariness is more than the sum of its parts. Certainly the characters are thinly drawn, bordering on dull. The plots thuds along like a poorly tuned engine. Everything feels off and wrong, the dialogue is uninspired and the staging and timing of scenes have no logic or rhythm. Everything jars, or far worse, bores. Familiar characters show up with all the subtly of Borscht Belt comedians, doing their shtick on cue. It is strangely embarrassing, like a horrible medley of songs you once liked.

Most of the time I wasn’t even invested enough to care about why we, the audience, were being hauled off to this barren moon or that prison complex on the planet blah blah. As the hero of the hour, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) pouts and stomps, but there is no spark of genuine joy to add life and zest to the action. The supporting cast of characters — Diego Luna as scruffy rebellion pilot Cassian Andor, blind swordsman Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), and Mads Mikkelsen (Death Star scientist Galen Erso) — do little to enliven the proceedings. The only character who appears to be having any fun at all is a dyspeptic robot voiced by Alan Tudyk (familiar to space fans from Firefly).

But the truth of the matter is that every Star Wars film lives and dies on the strength of its villain. Which leads me to the least terrifying evildoer in the history of the saga. Ben Mendelsohn plays Orson Krennic, a blandish middle manager of the Empire’s weapons division who resembles a cross between your friend’s stepdad and Martin Mull. I have rarely been less frightened by anyone in my life.

The only moment when the audience reacted in the film was at the glimpse of something old. But even that was strangely compromised. Rather than sparking joy, there is a necrotizing quality, as if what was once living flesh and blood had been embalmed and then horribly re-animated.

In the screening I attended, the sight of a familiar face was greeted with a round of desultory applause. Few could work up the energy to be happy at the introduction of old friends. Rather than inspiring a surge of warm feeling, this scene made me recoil in horror. It reminded me of something that Adam Curtis talked about in an interview with the New Statesman, about zombie culture. (Sorry to keep bringing up Curtis all the time, but he so often gets it right.)

Says Curtis: “All culture always goes back and feeds off the past, it can’t help it, but there are two ways of doing it. Either you can go back and get inspiration from the past and create something genuinely new, which is the whole history of all sorts of things — not just art and music. What bothers me at the moment is that you get a very different sense out of pop culture, which is that it is literally like a form of archaeology. It’s going back and rebuilding it almost as a sort of work of art in itself... It’s almost like a terminus railway station in a city where all the trains just keep on arriving and nothing ever leaves.”

Although this interview is from 2014, it is worth reading in its entirety, especially for how it relates to the current moment in time. What Curtis was anticipating in 2014 and what actually happened feels like a bit of horror show, but the man remains hopeful in the face of our post-truth moment.

Which leads me to the most horrifying thing about Rogue One. It feels post-human. Without resorting too much to spoilers, although those will come soon enough, the decision to centre the story around a waxy, re-animated simulacra feels strangely like a betrayal. Or maybe a lie.

I have had it up to my eyeballs with lying. I would like a little truth.

Filmmaker Penny Lane recently made a case for the critical importance of documentaries in her column in Filmmaker Magazine, but I think her argument applies equally well to all genres of film.

Writes Lane: “I have argued that stories are what allow for civilization to exist: narratives, even totally fictional ones like the ones in the Bible, bind us together and allow us to co-operate on a grand scale. I have argued that it is not our much-vaunted rationality but our deep attachment to story that is our most salient quality as a species... We know we need stories to cope with pain and justify our beliefs and remind us of how beautifully mysterious it all is — and we also desperately need stories that love, seek and defend truth. We need true stories.” 

So bring on the films that do just that. Next up, True Stories.