I am pleased to report that Rogue One still slaps
The only people who are still talking about the 5 Disney Star Wars movies are:
1) Star Wars people
2) Movie people
3) Emotionally damaged, terminally online people
As someone who fits neatly into all three categories, I can confirm that Rogue One still kicks ass.
A lot of the backlash towards Rogue One and The Last Jedi wasn't about the movies themselves. I can't believe anyone is able to watch these without conceding they are very nice-looking. These are well-put-together, expensive blockbusters. Few filmmakers can say their billion-dollar action/sci-fi studio blockbuster was a weird outlier on a brilliant career—but Rian Johnson sure can.
And how many people who will go to their graves declaring the Bourne trilogy as the greatest action franchise of all time are aware that the guy who wrote all of them co-wrote this movie? (And directed an apparently not-insignificant chunk of it after Gareth Edwards was fired—classic Disney Star Wars move.)
There are people who consider the late 80s and 90s as the Dark Ages for Star Wars, but for me, they're anything but. I came to Star Wars through the original trilogy, of course, but the video games and novels sustained me as I grew up. There were plenty of stories about the continuing adventures of the Skywalkers. But I always loved the stories of regular soldiers. The heroes of Stackpole and Allston's X-Wing novels, and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter computer games, star normal people. Even the Dark Forces series start you off as a normal soldier who never loses his blue-collar cool as he becomes a Jedi.
On top of these relatively grounded stories were countless novels about talking crystals and sentient planets and extra-galactic aliens. There were love stories and buddy comedies and young adult adventures. Star Wars was producing novels and games that felt like other movies, in the same way the original trilogy aped Lucas' favourites. Novels that felt like Jaws or Night of the Living Dead or The Long Goodbye with lightsabers and starfighters.
These weren't cash-cow paperback dreck. A brain trust was overseeing the canon of Star Wars—long before that was a word every Reddit poster had tattooed on their heart. Authors twisted their stories through the original trilogy, each others' work—and beyond.
Star Wars could be anything.
But now, after decades of concentrated marketing pressure, there is a prevailing sense of what Star Wars is allowed to be.
I know movie people, smart movie people, who are casually, contemptuously dismissive of Rogue One. People who can debate the artistic merits of The Batman or are looking forward to the spectacle of Avatar 2 won't even entertain the idea that Rogue One is #goodactually.
Why? The answer is never rational or thoughtful. "It's a tragedy" they'll say or "it's unnecessary" or—this one makes my blood boil—"I didn't care about the characters because they're nobodies."
These arguments aren't about this movie. They're about Star Wars™. What Star Wars is allowed to be.
(I did have a friend, who is not a Star Wars fan, complain the movie wasn't gory enough, that he wanted to see limbs getting blown off. I'll admit my argument against this was "Well yeah but it's still a Star Wars movie." So I admit I'm not immune to this either.)
The worst things about Rogue One are the added bits to connect the movie to the greater Star Wars canon: the weird "watch yourself" guy cameo, the C-3P0 and R2D2 cameo, the digital recreation of Peter Cushing. These are weird bumps in an otherwise really slick sci-fi espionage war flick—and how many of those do we get? And who better to make one than the guy who created the friggin' Bourne franchise?
The awkward cameos and already-dated technical flexes are especially weird because the real connections are all there. The sets, the costumes and the mustaches all evoke the gritty, improvisational feel of A New Hope—except this time it's shot by Grieg Fraser. The subtle callbacks to the original trilogy, like the clever digital insertion of Red and Gold Leaders, are delightful (and look great).
The story of Rogue One is a tragedy, but the story behind Rogue One is a tragedy too. If this wasn't a Star Wars™, people would have lost their minds when it came out. An original picture that looks, sounds and feels this good, from a script this tight, with this insane cast? Riz Ahmed three years away from a Best Actor nom? Alan Tudyk as a tragi-comic robot? Ben Mendelsohn's gross wet mouth? Mads Mikkelsen? DONNIE YEN?!?!
It would have been a sensation.
And yet, it's fitting that a story about complex underdogs, the grimy heroes of a war filled with shining examples of mythic Good, has slowly simmered into a modern classic. Now the dust has settled on these Modern Star Wars, the real heroes are shown to have been the spies and behind-the-lines troops that held up Sky where our myths were Walkers.
(But also that space battle is just, wow, I thought the little strike on Eadu was all we were gonna get and then BAM full-on fleet engagement AND air-to-ground combat. I've wanted to see X-Wings vs AT-ATs since the cover for Isard's Revenge.)