Rogue One uses this to its advantage, occasionally tossing in familiar characters or visual references to Episode IV purely as a bit of fan service, rather than because it’s important to the story this film is telling. If you’re a Star Wars fan, some of the most effective moments in Rogue One may be those times when familiar characters from Episode IV show up, because we’ve already developed an emotional investment in those characters.
And when major characters die, you can almost feel the film straining to generate some powerful emotion that it hasn’t earned because it hasn’t taken the time to develop those characters. So as visually impressive as they are, the film’s space battles and ground skirmishes aren’t as absorbing as they would be if we felt more of a connection to the characters. The film is so densely plotted, so busy advancing the particulars of its story or plowing through one of its many visually impressive action scenes, that it rarely takes the time to breathe and let us get to know the people who are doing the fighting. It’s refreshing to behold, and it highlights the fact that the original Star Wars, and most films out of Hollywood before and since, function to center and glorify whiteness, marginalizing people of color in the process.īut while Rogue One succeeds in the big-picture sense of depicting a crucial moment in the rebellion’s struggle against the mighty and oppressive Empire, it fails to make us care about the individual characters who are swept up in this conflict.
In Rogue One, the rebellion really does appear to be an alliance of people from a range of places and cultures, desperately united against a common enemy. In A New Hope, the headquarters of the Rebel Alliance on Yavin 4 is populated almost entirely by white people. It is wonderful that, 39 years after the release of that film, Rogue One rectifies this issue to some degree, giving us a vision of a galaxy far, far away that more closely reflects the diversity of humanity here on Earth. In it, Sagan noted the fact that the people who populated the fictional sci-fi setting of the film were almost entirely white.
Shortly before Rogue One was released, a clip of the late, great Carl Sagan discussing the original Star Wars made the rounds on social media.
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