![]() It's not, for the most part, a film that traffics in surprise, except in the smallest sort of ways (like, the Death Star can also target individual cities, it turns out), and the easiest complaint about every prequel ever made in any narrative medium applies: since we know where this is going before it ever starts, it doesn't "matter". ![]() So, Rogue One does indeed involve Rebel spaceships winning their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star". The film ends about a half an hour or so before the original Star Wars begins, having spent two hours and fourteen minutes packing meat onto the skeleton of two lines from the title crawl first presented in 1977: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. But for the first time in in four tries (six if you count the made-for-TV Ewok movies from the 1980s, seven if you count the 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and a great many if you count the Clone Wars and Rebels TV cartoon series, but I don't know that you'd necessarily want to count any of those things), it is a prequel that actually does what a prequel is in theory supposed to do, which is to make the original thing seem even better by adding depth to the backstory. ![]() "random one-off genre exercises set in the Star Wars universe that allow Disney to exploit the brand name annually rather than wait two whole years, I mean, for God's sake, we're capitalists over here", Rogue One is a thing that has customarily not gone well for Star Wars in the past: a prequel. The first in an open-ended series of " Star Wars Stories", i.e. For those of you who just wanted the opinion & would prefer to hang back from the actual review (which will, for the record, have its share of spoilers, including the film's very last shot) until later, now you know. ![]() Like, not a fraction of a second of hesitation. ![]() It's not just that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is my favorite Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back it's how damned easy it was for me to come that conclusion. ![]()
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