And just like I thought, this movie was just a cash grab for Disney. Sure, there were some amazing visuals, and there was great action, but overall there really wasn’t a purpose for the movie. It doesn’t advance or otherwise inform the greater Star Wars saga. There wasn’t a particular message or theme that the movie was trying to say as an independent piece. It doesn’t seem as if the creators had any reason to make this movie other than ‘Disney said make a movie about the team that gets those Death Star plans.’
Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, was a movie about attachment and the experience of what disruption of those early attachments can mean for future relationships. Starlord is ripped from his parents at an early age, and this theme of how that affects his ability to connect to other people is revisited regularly throughout the movie. He ultimately is able to move past this impairment, ironically, by helping another group to deal with their own problems initiating and maintaining relationships. As Bork g as a film that may sound, we get tons of action and hilarious dialogue to build on that core story she’ll. In Rogue One, we have a protagonist with a similar set up: doesn’t really know her dad, mom dies while she is young. Yet, this whole set up is never explored throughout the movie. No theme is explored throughout the movie that I can tell, other than the straight forward story: “good guys need to get the plans to the Deathstar simply because they’re good guys.” And even the character revelations are weakly plotted; “the guy who designed the Deathstar was really a hero because good guys.” We have no insight into the man’s heroism; we don’t know where is comes from or at what cost it is to him to maintain it. Like his daughter, we just know that he’s a good guy and therefore he does good things.
That being said, the characters in this movie had a lot of potential, and I would have loved to have seen them explored more. <–SPOILER–>
I actually wish that a few of them would have lived. I personally don’t think it would have taken anything from the film if one or two would have survived to make the events of this film relevant to the greater story. As it is, only the plans survived, and that’s all anyone cared about. Even in the final scene, Vader is gutting rebels left and right, tons of life. Tons of life lost everywhere, yet Leah gets those plans in her hands and she’s all smiles. Fail. Major fail of an ending.
(It was a nice allusion to the title of the next chapter in the story- but the mood was all wrong).