As I was settling in to watch Rogue One it occurred to me that Harry Potter had successfully launched a second series in the Potter Universe before the Star Wars franchise could. I don’t count any of the proposed 9 as a second series. That is in fact the same story spun through as the original books constitute a single arc. Then it dawned on me. Rogue One is but a footnote in that arc, framed effectively by Star Wars 3 and 4.
Actually, I’m wrong there. Rogue One is a continuation of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. Since Disney took the reigns, they’ve turned the two rather well written ‘toons into canon for the film. Characters from the Rogue One movie make their first appearances in the cartoons and continue their often vibrant lives on the big screen.
This in no way indicates that Rogue One is good… or bad. Rogue One hit me in much the same way that the Magnificent Seven remake hit me. I knew what was going to happen. I knew who I was supposed to like and dislike and in spite of that I chose to enjoy the people I felt were cool or particularly well told. This includes the expected empathy for the ‘villain’ and a whole lot of oooh for Darth Vader.
Rogue One deserves a better review than this and that is coming. There are a host of characters to discuss and major Star Wars plot lines that were reintroduced and, in some cases, tied up. The film does its job, which is ostensibly to tell the human story of the people who constitute the rebellion without being that same old story we know. It had to do all of this without playing like a round of Battlefield Star Wars.
For the most part, it pulled it off.