How is the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One? How the hell should I know? Does it even matter what you or I think of it? Will any negative feelings we have prevent us and our children and our children’s children from seeing the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that—and on and on until someone in the emperor’s government realizes that investing most of its defense dollars on a single giant Death Star is a highly questionable way to allocate precious imperial resources?
I found Rogue One pretty boring, for the most part, especially its first hour, which features no fewer than four opening sequences running back to back to back to back. Still, in the hands of the very gifted director Gareth Edwards, it’s absolutely fantastic to look at. The sheer density of the background visuals designed to transport us from the theater and make us feel as though we are in a galaxy far, far away is staggering.
But the story is never even remotely involving. Apparently, after Edwards’s first cut, Disney went and hired the writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) to make it more interesting, and he didn’t get the job done. Unfortunately for Gilroy, the entire movie is structured around a fairly minor plot point in the very first Star Wars. So if the question that’s haunted you for 39 years has to do with how some stuff got inside R2D2’s floppy-disk drive, rest assured you will learn that origin story. Most of us, I’m afraid, couldn’t care less.
Even so, Rogue One is certainly a respectable piece of work and never for a second embarrassing. For that reason alone it is leagues better than George Lucas’s three prequels. As the plot did not engage me, and as its script was nowhere near bad enough to grip me with any hilariously awful dialogue, I spent my time in the theater thinking about the decisions Disney made as it went forward with the picture.
Production on Rogue One began before The Force Awakens—the seventh Star Wars film and the first since Disney paid George Lucas $4 billion (a) for the rights to his galaxy and (b) to make him go far far away—was released. Even so, it plays like a purposeful variation on The Force Awakens, which is a little odd. After all, The Force Awakens was hardly a classic model, given that no one had seen it yet and it might have been a dud. Besides which, nobody went to The Force Awakens for the plot.
What the two movies truly share is that they are franchise commodity products designed for the largest possible global mass market. So the stories matter less than the fact that they are carefully calibrated masterpieces of demography. Both have a semi-orphaned female protagonist—Felicity Jones in Rogue One, Daisy Ridley in The Force Awakens—who teams up with a member of the Coalition of the Ascend-ant (John Boyega in The Force Awakens, Diego Luna here) in a suggestively presexual military alliance. They are aided by a gorgeous mosaic of supporting players: the Hispanic actor Oscar Isaac there, the Asian actors Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang here, along with the Anglo-Pakistani Riz Ahmed.
The casting of the wonderful Ridley and the charming Jones suggests Disney is consciously following the guide map set in the 1980s and 1990s by James Cameron, who figured out that since a good action adventure movie would get the boys by default, putting a woman at its center (the first two Terminators, Aliens, Titanic) could turn a success into a blockbuster.
As for the multicultural casting, you could look at the efforts to fill most of the smaller parts with ethnics as a form of penance for Hollywood’s problematic past in this regard. It put me in mind of a hilarious Richard Pryor bit in the 1970s about going to see Logan’s Run and Pryor realizing that Hollywood simply assumed there would be no black people in the future. (Yes, I know Star Wars is supposedly set in the past; just go with me here.) But really, they are just reflections of the global marketplace at work.
So is the other conscious piece of antidemography. While the original six Star Wars pictures revolved around white males—Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Hayden Christensen—the white males of the new pictures are its villains. Adam Driver is the Darth Vader of The Force Awakens, while the great character actor Ben Mendelsohn is the ambitious construction executive tasked with building the Death Star in Rogue One. According to news reports, the “alt-right” has been inveighing against Rogue One for this very reason. But in the new Star Wars universe, it’s not bad to be white at all, so long as you’re female and have an English accent.
Free associations like these are what can happen when a movie doesn’t have a good plot.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
