spoiler-free sorta rambling rogue one review

I was more or less *a* per­fect age when Star Wars (A New Hope) came out. 

I was 3 (the ac­tu­al per­fect age would have had a decade added to that) but I have very vivid mem­o­ries of the ex­pe­ri­ence. I even re­mem­ber us hit­ting up the Taco Bell (then an ex­cit­ing new food­stuff. No, re­al­ly) on Maple St. afterward. 

The thing about that era is that we did­n’t re­al­ly have the tools yet to ex­press the things we could imag­ine. You could paint it, you could de­scribe it, but bring­ing it to life wasn’t re­al­ly a thing yet. One of the things that made ANH such a cul­tur­al atom bomb (and if you weren’t there, you lit­er­al­ly *cant* know what it was like. This wasn’t Avengers or Ti­tan­ic or even Avatar. This was a cul­ture bomb whose con­cen­tric blast waves touched lit­er­al­ly every­thing) was that all the things you imag­ined were alive and liv­ing now in real time. It was un­be­liev­able see­ing that. 

For that rea­son, Star Wars was once a kind of gold stan­dard for show­ing us New Things. Things no­body tried to show us be­cause who would even know how to any­way? This car­ried over into Em­pire in 1980. The ante was upped and per­haps em­bold­ened by the suc­cess and bankroll from ANH the raw imag­i­na­tion ex­plod­ed out so ful­ly that it re­quired mul­ti­ple view­ings to catch it all. Mar­gin­al char­ac­ters and set­tings car­ried hints of through­lines out into ex­pan­sive worlds that you did­n’t even need to make an ef­fort to imag­ine, the rich­ness of de­tail and con­sid­er­a­tion met you more than halfway. 

I like 1983’s Jedi more than some, though it does feel at times like a vic­to­ry lap: Less in­spired and more oblig­a­tory, but I don’t think even that im­por­tant piece of the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy ac­com­plish­es what Rogue One gives us for the first time since 1980. It shows us (im­prob­a­bly due to its spot on the time­line and its pur­pose) New Things. 

This isn’t a film made by peo­ple be­hold­en to the orig­i­nal saga so much as the ones *in­spired* by it. And for all of us that grew up in the bril­liant sun­beam of the orig­i­nal film, when you could make your draw­ings and your ac­tion fig­ures go in any num­ber of di­rec­tions not teth­ered to canon­i­cal sto­ry­lines, that is mas­sive. And it’s all the more im­pres­sive con­sid­er­ing that this is the one film out of all of them that os­ten­si­bly should be locked down on rails. 

There was a time when the world of Star Wars ex­ist­ed on its own terms in a uni­verse *with­out* Star Wars and I think that more than any­thing is the most im­pres­sive trick that Rogue One man­ages to pull off.

Rogue One also wins the award for Best Non-Cop Rock use of Jim­my Smits. And Jim­my Smits is not a spoil­er. I wish I lived in a world where Jim­my Smits was a spoil­er. Every day would be a new ad­ven­ture in Smits.

In con­clu­sion, yeah go see the shit.
 

up­date 20 de­cem­ber 2016
Hav­ing seen Rogue One three times since Fri­day I am both fan­boy enough to able to over­look mi­nor flaws in char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and time­line, yet still big enough man to ad­mit that not hav­ing the cli­mac­tic ac­tion mon­tage play out over Green Day’s Good Rid­dance (Time of Your Life) was a huge missed op­por­tu­ni­ty from an artis­tic standpoint. 

I re­al­ize that there is a lev­el of film­mak­ing where it be­comes less about Art and more about Prod­uct and I shouldn’t dare to dream, but this just seems like a huge and glar­ing missed op­por­tu­ni­ty on di­rec­tor Gareth Ed­wards’ part.

(If the is­sue was it not be­ing ‘space’ enough, they could have had the droid sing it)
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2016 Ja­son Malmberg.

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