Star Wars: Rogue One

I saw Star Wars: Rogue One, last week for my Tuesday night movie, it was that or Rings, and well, Rings looks like it really sucks. I've been thinking about Rogue One since then and I think it just might be the best Star Wars movie made to date, although I do admit to having not seen The Force Awakens yet so that isn't definitive.

But yes, I include comparisons to the original trilogy. Those movies were awesome, in the sense that they inspired awe, they told a simple story well and spawned a mythology, even an ethos, that compares favorably with any to this day, but I don't know that they mean quite the same thing anymore that maybe they once did, well I guess that isn't really true, I just think the lessons in Rogue One might be a bit more meaningful, and relevant, to today's world.

Rogue One is at it's heart a story about hope and sacrifice, of people who have done terrible things in the service of a good cause taking a chance to grab nobility and redemption even at the cost of their life, and about struggle against an evil that must be fought, regardless of consequences, a struggle against an evil that is overwhelmingly more powerful than the rebellion, but it must be fought anyway, because even the act of fighting is in itself a victory, and even the smallest victories make the cracks that widen into the Empire's ultimate defeat.

I trust I do not need to spell out the obvious comparisons to the real world here for you all?

Reality aside, the film just did a damn good job of telling a story that I already knew the ending to, we all do really, The Empire is building a super weapon called The Death Star, the plans for it must be stolen so that it's weakness can be identified, we all know the plans are stolen successfully otherwise Episode IV wouldn't have happened, we also know that the characters in Rogue One must mostly meet their ends or be written out otherwise we would have seen them in the other episodes, and all of that is true, and that predictability is what turned me off on seeing it for a while, but it rises above that, the film makers took the effort to craft inspiring, flawed characters and to get us to like them despite the fact that the knew that we weren't ever going to see them again, which means they sacrificed marketing potential as well, not exactly something the franchise has been willing to shy away from in the past.

The actors embraced their roles, every one of them, the heroes were heroic, and broken, and fighting despite all that, the villains were very human, doing their jobs for the most part and either ignoring or delighting in the suffering they caused while supporting the Empire, and people rebel in whatever ways that they can.

I think that is the take away that I most got from it, that every act of rebellion is worth taking, even if you must work in the system to survive there are things you can do. And that some things are worth fighting against no matter the cost.

They are lessons I think that every culture learns at some point, and then forgets again until they need them. We need them now.