Something you should know about me is that Star Wars was a central part of my childhood. I grew up playing LEGO Star Wars on PlayStation 2 and GameBoy, and I always had my eyes out for the Clone Wars cartoon on the TV guide.
I may be an Iron Man guy now, but I was the kid on the block with the purple plastic lightsaber back in the day simply because I thought Mace Windu was the coolest (some things never change).
I don’t know when, but there was a time when I grew out of my Star Wars phase. Not sure why—maybe because it just felt like a thing of the past? They hadn’t made anything new or exciting in awhile so it just felt like something to grow out of, I guess.
I didn’t revisit Star Wars until after Disney had already started making more movies. I picked back up on Episode 8, having to go back and check out Episode 7 to catch myself up on what I had missed. I didn’t like what I saw.
I still watched Episode 9 when it came out (waited for it to hit Disney+), and was more disappointed by that than the other 2 movies combined.
I still watch some of the new Star Wars content on Disney+—mainly The Mandalorian, and I also enjoyed Andor.
But a lot of the newer stuff like Obi-Wan and Book of Boba Fett still makes me feel like Star Wars is stuck in the past and has no idea how to tell new stories, so other projects like Ahsoka and Bad Batch didn’t even kind of peak my interest.
And then I came across Rogue One.
I had friends like Thomas Carter Rochester always gush about Rogue One (but if you know Thomas, all you have to say is “midi-chlorian” for his eyes to light up—I love that about him). But I never took their advice to check it out till now.
And I loved it! Espionage, blurred lines, broken allegiances; I want more Star Wars movies like this one. It’s everything I want from Star Wars that doesn’t require a lightsaber.
I think the biggest detail that I appreciated about Rogue One is that although the diversity of the cast was arguably the best it’s ever been in Star Wars, it wasn’t the movie’s entire identity.
A huge benefit of Star Wars is that there’s only limited source material of characters that you actually have to match up in terms of likeness, so the studio has always had a huge amount of freedom to cast whoever they think would be best for the role and build the character around that actor.
The key to that formula is finding an interesting actor. I.e. Mace Windu. Rogue One had that with a large portion of its characters, and it ended up being one of its most effective components.
This movie in particular needs you to really care about its characters for it to stand on its own within the Star Wars universe—and that it does.
Something else I really appreciated was that the writing was so much better than usual. Star Wars dialogue is so distracting at certain points that it really takes me out of it. Nothing about the sci-fi elements of Star Wars distracts me; however, generic conversations just send my brain packing at lightspeed. You don’t have to say blaster rifle or imperial credits every time you use them. You can just say credits, and you can just say rifle.
I really enjoyed the fact that, although there were a lot of familiar Star Wars themes, they didn’t necessarily use that as a crutch to tell the story.
A huge downside to recent Star Wars content–even the good stuff like Andor–has a tendency to lean way too heavily into all the Star Wars terms and phrases “imperial” and “I don’t have enough credits for that.”
Nit-picky, but I dare a Star Wars writer to write a conversation without mentioning Tatooine.
These are all super lame details that certainly don’t bother everyone, but they’ve always bothered me. But nothing has ever bothered me more than the practical effects for costuming characters in Star Wars.
Rogue One, however, opted to CG all of their alien characters instead, and it looked great!
There is nothing more distracting in Star Wars than when someone’s having a full-blown conversation, but their mouth or even their entire face isn’t moving at all. Instead, they use exaggerated head-and-hand gestures that make them all look unwell—like they’ve been frozen from the waste up and have to can only communicate like a wacky-wavy-inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man (just look it up).
When I see characters like Baby Yoda, all I can pay attention to is how he’s a puppet. It irritates me that I can’t overlook it, but using CG effects to bring the Rogue One characters to life just seems so necessary to me when telling a story of this scale.
The reason I’m not mad that I waited this long to watch this movie is because Rogue One would’ve totally gotten my hopes up even more for the Star Wars movies that would come out after this one, which would not have been fun for anyone involved.
I would’ve been a giant sourpuss having just watched a movie like this one, only to see it followed by the jumbled mess of Episodes 7, 8, and 9.
I didn’t even bother watching Solo thanks to the reviews–hopefully that’s not another one I’m missing out on.
I remember watching Revenge of the Sith at the theater for my seventh birthday and thinking it was amazing. I rewatched it recently and thought to myself, “damn, this is corny as hell.”
I’m sure seven-year-old me would’ve liked the newer stuff, too, so maybe this is more about my tastes than the quality of Star Wars–but that’s why you’re only reading this a dozen paragraphs deep into my blog post.
Another reason I’m not mad is because I wouldn’t have appreciated it nearly as much in 2016 during the height of the MCU’s Phase 3. Discovering an awesome Star Wars movie during this Marvel “lull,” if you will, is much more ideal for me because I can give it the space it deserves.
I know people who don’t even want to give current Marvel a chance anymore because of some pretty terrible decisions made by the movie-making studio recently (see Thor: Love and Thunder, She-Hulk), but there are still some great Marvel gems hiding within the mess that is Phase 4 (see Shang-Chi, Wakanda Forever, Moon Knight).
It’s sad that some fans won’t discover those better Marvel projects for themselves till later on, like I did with Rogue One.
There’s no good way to end this so I’ll just say I didn’t like Book of Boba Fett at all, so Star Wars still has a lot of work left to do if they’re going to figure out what audiences want.
I’m afraid they largely did not learn anything worthwhile from Rogue One, but let’s hope I’m wrong because that is my new diamond in the rough for Star Wars.
