STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Although this gawjuss thing isn't the poster you'll likely have seen - it is an official poster, not fan art.  It's by a fella who, if you ask me, is the heir apparent to Drew Struzan ... Paul Shipper, ladies and gentlemen.  Find him here: http://paulshipperstudio.com/

There’s gonna be some spoilerage in this review.  Serious spoilerage.  So, if you haven’t seen The Last Jedi yet, go away and do so.  I’ll see you after ...

These days, the first few moments of a Star Wars film make me tense ... Is it going to be Empire good, Phantom Menace bad, or Force Awakens okay?  ...  The first few minutes usually tell.

Where J.J. had to spend some time, with The Force Awakens, introducing a whole new cast of characters and a (slightly) different galaxy - Rian Johnson, in this film, gets to hit the ground running. 

Interesting, then, that he sets off by offering us some mixed messages: The opening line is delivered by ... Ade Edmondson.  Really?  They have Sir Adrian Dangerous on a Star Destroyer?  What could possibly go wrong.  And he’s answerable to Domhnall Gleeson, who’s still playing Hux as an eye-swivelling maniac with a light sabre stuck up his ass.  But, thankfully, writer/director Rian Johnson takes care to do what J.J. failed to do - and that’s let the audience in on the joke:  Hux is meant to be ridiculous.  Phew.  That’s a relief.

Throughout this film, there is interplay between genuine humour, knowing nods to the audience, and edge-of-the-seat drama.  It’s quite a balancing act but, as Luke tells Rey, the secret to The Force is that’s all about balance.

Ehm ... Nope.  I got nothing.

When Oscar Isaac turns up as Poe Dameron, he’s just one guy in an X-Wing, facing off against an entire Star Destroyer.  And, when he talks to Gleason, it’s still hard to reconcile these performances with the ones the two actors gave in Ex Machina (2015) ... But that’s good, it shows the range they both have.

After this comic moment - suddenly there’s flying and shooting and shouting and lots of explosions.  The opening ten minutes is frantic seat of the pants stuff during which, they essentially restage the entirety of Rogue One (2016).

So, after the first few moments - the nerves are singing, the senses tingling - and things are looking good!

The film manages to successfully balance several tones - from tragic to comic by way of dramatic - and several different plot threads, which proceed at wildly different paces and often in entirely different directions.  Yet, it is to the credit of the writing and the editing, that it is all perfectly explicable.

There are visual and thematic contrasts here ... Snoke’s audience chamber is a sterile red and black affair, while the landscape over which the Rebellion stages its last stand is sterile red and ... white!  The last film began with us following Rey, all alone, living life by her own terms, and surviving on her wits - yet full of hope for the return of her parents.  This film brings her into contact (finally) with Luke Skywalker, who is all alone, living life by his own terms - but full of despair. 

The contrast, and the emotional affect Rey and Skywalker have on each other, is the emotional crux of the story - as Skywalker’s training was the emotional crux of Empire.

This week on 'Escape to the Country', legendary Jedi, Luke Skywalker and Miss Rey Nosurnameyet have picked out this secluded and detached residence on the planet Ah-Choo.  Don't they look happy.

Over in the Rebellion’s part of the story, Dameron’s gung-ho attitude, which a younger Leia tolerated in Han Solo, stretches her patience and she is constantly reining him in.  They’ve done something interesting with Leia.  Firstly, they’ve given her hair which isn’t nearly as silly; but they’ve also given her genuine authority over her troops.  Secondly, they have created a brilliant and heart-breaking moment for her - which pays homage, wonderfully, to the legacy of Carrie Fisher.  It shows the power Leia has been restraining all these years.  I actually wept.

But then, they unravel it all and proceed as though the sequence never happened.  That was an odd choice.  They create the perfect send-off for the character, then have her come back from it.  Odd.  However, this does feed into a motif which runs through this film more obviously than it has through the others (although, it’s really always been there) which is the way in which, for those who are strong with the Force, death is a temporary inconvenience, rather than a permanent state of affairs.  Bear that in mind when you see a certain person cut in half by a light sabre.

Where Force Awakens was, essentially, a tribute remix of A New Hope - which slavishly reproduced most of the first film’s key elements, from the desert planet beginning, to the Death Star Trench ending - this film mixes in ingredients from both Empire and Jedi, too many of them, if I’m honest, but does so efficiently and energetically.

To the untrained eye, this might appear like a restaging of the Battle for Hoth but, no, nothing could be further from the truth.  Oh, okay, yes it is.

There’s two (count ’em) restagings of the attack on Hoth, there’s the Jedi training in a primeval environment, there’s yet another Cantina scene (this time in a casino), there’s the obligatory we-have-to-turn-off-the-transmitter plot from Jedi and even the Millennium Falcon flying through the tunnels whilst pursued by TIE fighters.  But, y’know, as overly-familiar as these elements were while I was watching them, none of them are on screen long enough to spoil the fun.  With so many different plotlines rattling along, it’s not possible to get bogged down in any one moment.

It is ironic, of course, that Ren's major piece of advice to Rey is to abandon the past, because that's the only way to move forward.  Maybe that was Johnson subtly nudging J.J.'s elbow, now that Mr. Abrams is back in the director's seat for Episode IX.

While Kylo Ren, in Force Awakens, was essentially a spoiled brat long over-due a thick ear; here, Adam Driver gives the character some real depth and pathos.  There is a connection between him and Rey.  The film never explicitly says this, but it seems to be heading in the direction of revealing, in the next film, that they’re related.  Brother and sister, maybe.  That would be vintage Star Wars.  But Ren and Rey are conflicted, both trying to find themselves, both being given advice by Jedi masters they don’t entirely trust.  She is being told two narratives - one by Skywalker, one by Ren.  Which does she believe ... Or will she synthesise them and make her own mind up?

Watching Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens just made me want to put him over my knee ... But, here, he is thoughtful and serious and poignant, a really layered and nuanced character.

Ren and Rey's scenes together (even though they’re rarely actually together) are intense and soulful and aren’t full of the meaningless hokum they spouted at each other in Force Awakens, but actually develop the characters and push the story along.  And there’s a moment, when they are in Snoke’s chamber together, a moment of epiphany that is the equal, in its grandeur and drama, to the sword-fight between Vader and Skywalker at the end of Jedi.  Genuine hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff.

It’s worth mentioning - this year of all years - that the original Star Wars was notorious for the short shrift it gave its female characters (all one of her); well, the new films have done a lot to redress that, now we have the entire Rebellion being run by them.  Clear eyed and calculating, they are strategic and unemotional in their stewardship of the war. 

Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo - offering strong and stable leadership.  Ahem.

As Laura Dern's Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo says to Poe “Hope is like the Sun, if you only believe in it when you see it, you’ll never make it through the night”.  Which is a helluvan important message to soak up in these trying times.

Over on the side of the First Order, they have an entirely male command structure, and they’re constantly bickering, getting distracted, getting emotional, and trying to get one over on each other.  Hope, then, is female, while despair is conspicuously male.  Interestingly, when impetuous fly-boy Poe (briefly) takes over as commander of the Rebellion, his plan - whilst very noble - is really stupid and guaranteed to lead to lots of explosions and dying.  He is motivated by despair - he feels that he must act now to avert disaster.  Cooler heads have a plan that will take slightly longer to unravel.  It’s genuinely enlightened to have an alpha male be proven wrong and be sidelined in this way, by an alpha female.  Refreshing!

Wonder when they’ll let a woman actually direct one of these films?

Anyway, given the way the plots rattle along, they’ve managed to find time to shoe-horn in a huge amount of fan service - not much of which serves any purpose.  They bring back Yoda (see my previous comments about death not being permanent), so he can offer Luke a few well turned homilies such as “failure is the greatest teacher” (an important lesson all creative artists have to learn the hard way).  C-3PO is there, of course, taking up room.  R2-D2 shows up for one scene, simply so he can play Luke the original “Help me, Ob-Wan” hologram, which created a lump in Luke’s throat, and mine.  They even bring Maz Kanata back for about 30 seconds (presumably because Lupita Nyong'o had it in her contract).

Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Finn (John Boyega) blending in perfectly in the billionaire's playground of Canto Bight.

She sends Finn and new-recruit Rose on a side mission to the casino city of Canto Bight.  This sequence, in the middle of the film, is really just to give Finn something to do.  It's his chance to remember that he's supposed to be a hero, shamed into this revelation by Rose, a young woman who has no business giving a damn when it isn't her turn.  This whole sequence doesn’t add much to the film, but it is fun and delightful to look at and, of course, provides a plethora of new characters Disney can turn into toys.  It doesn’t really serve the narrative or the characters, but it will certainly serve the Disney coffers.  Funny, but I typically resent this - creating characters and locations as product placement - but, in this film, it takes up so little screen time, I didn’t really have time to mind.

Also, importantly, we return to Canto in the film's coda, and we see the impact that Rose and Finn's visit has had; how it has inspired the next generation.  Slave children tell each other of the heroics of The Last Jedi, and that will fuel their imagination as they grow to become the hoped-for future.  The spark of Episode IX is lit at the end of Episode VIII.

The character arcs between Ren and Rey intersect with him telling her: “Your parents have no place in this story,.  You come from nothing.”  He is instilling in her a belief that she is self-made, immensely powerful even without tuition - like he is himself.  But, to say the parents are irrelevant, is to fly in the face of The Monomyth, the story that all these epic narratives draw from.  So, I’m going to say that he was either wrong or lying.  If he is right, and she isn't any kind of chosen one ... That could be the single most radical creative decision in the whole film!

But there is an interesting development, when Rey looks into the black pit which represents the pull of The Dark Side.  Luke warns her that she went straight there, fearing that it might consume her.  Might that be a pre-cursor of the direction she chooses to swing in the final film?  More likely, is that she - unlike either Anakin Skywalker or Luke Skywalker before her - can access The Dark Side without being overwhelmed by it.  Both she and Ren are pulled by both the Dark and the Light ... And they don't see either of these as being right or wrong, just different.  That's the way to not be defined by the past; that's the way to shape your own future.

The story ends as it began, with one man, hopelessly out-gunned, facing down the First Order alone.  This moment also had tears pricking at my eyes.  And the resolution to this sequence is nothing short of genius.

The show-down on planet Crait is visually arresting, because it takes place on a battlefield completely unlike Hoth.  See, that's not ice - it's salt.  Totally different thing.  But, under it, there is a red crystalline substance which may very well be frozen blood.  How's that for a gothic Star Wars location?

This film is far from perfect, but then all of the Star Wars films have holes you could fly a Star Destroyer through.  It's part of their charm and has nothing to do with how much we love them.  Here, the characterisation is compelling, the broad strokes of the story feel right and, overall, The Last Jedi earns my respect.  Where Lucas’ prequels earned my contempt and The Force Awakens earned my disappointment, this film earns my trust and my enthusiasm.  It doesn’t proceed without a misstep and - clocking in at over two and a half hours - it certainly has a few too many fake endings and plot-reversals; but the wider sweep of the story is overwhelmingly positive.  It’s exciting where it needs to be, emotional where it needs to be and there are even one or two moments which are simply spine-tingling in their perfection.  I was twelve years old again, having my mind blown again, as I did in January 1978, when I first saw Star Wars.

It’s also worth mentioning that John Williams is on barnstorming form.  His music for Force Awakens was ... Okay.  But it lacked the epic heft and the hummable themes that one associates with his greatest work.  The music here has the heart that Force Awakens had, but it also has the drama of the original trilogy.  It is a delight when the old themes for Skywalker and The Force and The Falcon float through, like a memory, fleeting then gone, but leaving a warm sensation behind them.  I hope he is hale and hearty enough to complete his great work - by providing the music for Episode IX, in two years time.  When he’ll be 87.

So, how good is The Last Jedi?  Is it Empire good?  No.  As inconceivable as this may be ... After just one viewing, I’m pretty sure that The Last Jedi is not the best Star Wars film since Empire.  It’s the best Star Wars film.  Ever.

Annie Leibowitz' portrait for Vanity Fair is impossibly poignant now.

Written & Directed by Rian Johnson

Dur: 152 mins

Cert: 12A

ROGUE ONE - A Star Wars Tale

                Rogue One is the best Star Wars film in 36 years.

                There y’go.  If you read no further, you know everything you need to know.  Rogue One is the best thing to come out of the Star Wars universe since Empire.

                You still here? 

                Right, well, in that case, you probably want me to elaborate, to explain why I’m so blown away by the film.  Why did I wait ’til I’d seen it twice before putting finger to keyboard?

                Well, a large part of my appreciation lies in the way that this is a grown up Star Wars film.  It’s still only a 12A (or PG13 for you colonials) like every big budget film has to be to stand a chance of earning big profits.  It also suffers somewhat from the modern malaise of having thousands of people killed at a stroke - all off-camera.  But you don’t need to have blood, sex and swearing to be a grown up.  You need to treat your audience like adults, expect them to be able to keep up, to follow complex plots, and to understand deftly-sketched emotional character traits.

                The characters in it are not children.  But, y’know, when I was a kid, I didn’t need all my protagonists to be my age ... I liked the sensation of bigging up, of getting a glimpse of the adult world through the eyes of an adult hero. 

                Apparently some younger viewers have been complaining that this film is too slow and too dark for them.  Good.  It hasn’t been made just for them.  Star Wars wasn’t made for children back in 1977; it was made for adults who were nostalgic for Flash Gordon.  Rogue One has been made for adults who are nostalgic for Star Wars!

                So, this film is perfectly safe for kids ... It just won’t talk down to them or wait for them to catch up.  If that’s not what they’re used to ... Well, it’s about time they learned.  Once or twice it explains more than it needs to (like why the droid K-2SO has a sarcastic personality) but mostly it trusts the writers, actors and audience enough to leave them to fill the unspoken gaps.

                When Star Wars came out, I was eleven.  There was none of this A New Hope malarkey then, it was just Star Wars.  I, like everyone else, needed guiding through the Hero’s Journey because I, like everyone else except George Lucas, was unfamiliar with it.  But Star Wars (A New Hope) changed all that; and pretty much every big budget movie released since then has taught us the lesson afresh.  So, do we really need to have everything explained to us?  No.  We know this territory now; we can find our own way.

Just so were clear (for later on) this photo is obviously a publicity shot, not a frame cut from the fillum.

                The film knows this from its opening scene where Jyn is (apparently) left orphaned.  We know these characters need to be orphans.  Them’s the rules.  But, when your audience knows the rules, that gives you the opportunity to play around with them.  To confound expectation, to surprise and delight.  And this film does - from its first frame.

                There’s no Star Wars fanfare.  But, there wouldn’t be, those legendary themes are associated with Skywalker and the rest, and this isn’t their story.  There’s no slow crawl telling us the story so far.  But there wouldn’t be, this film doesn’t present itself as a myth.  We’re not on Tattooine anymore!

                This film comes across as a gritty, contemporary war film featuring a bunch of desperate characters thrown together by circumstance and who are given little or no time to get to know each other, they just have to work together and trust each other or die trying.  I’ve asked around and a lot of the people I saw this with have no idea what most of the characters are called.

Now don't tell me ... There's the blind kung-fu Jedi, and his mate and ... Forrest Whitaker? 

                This is partly because clumsy names like Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus and Saw Gerrera don’t exactly trip off the tongue - and they are as unfamiliar to most viewers as Obi Wan Kenobi and Grand Moff Tarkin were 40 years ago ... But that doesn’t matter.  The characters are visually distinct, the actors sufficiently charismatic and the relationships between them so deftly written that we know them and like them even if we can’t name them. 

                Do you know the names of the characters in The Magnificent Seven (the proper 1960 version, not this year’s remake nonsense)?  All of them?  I don’t; but I know their strengths and weaknesses, they are memorable, charismatic and (that much over-used term) iconic and, partly because of this, the actors who weren’t already famous (which is to say pretty-much everyone except Brynner) went on to become stars.

                In the heat of battle, alliances are forged out of people’s actions and loyalties, not their names and races.

                And what races there are.  In-keeping with Lucas’ original vision, this is a patchwork galaxy made up of a diversity of races, from the Cthuloid creature Jyn shares a cell with at the beginning, to the Wampa in the rebel army in Jedha, to various throw-forwards to Star Wars (like the walrus faced Ponda Baba who will soon pick a fight with a kid in a bar on Tattooine ... with messy results).  

                These bits of fan service are unnecessary but - with the exception of the obviously-grafted-on-at-the-last-minute cameo from R2D2 and C-3PO - they don’t jar (jar) and they don’t interrupt the narrative.  This film doesn’t really require prior (or subsequent) knowledge.  It tells you what you need to know as you go along.  There’s an oppressive military Empire, there’s a disorganised but well-meaning rebellion, there’s lots of different planets with daft names and some people believe in this defunct religion called ‘The Force’ ... That’s really all you need.  Everything else is just gravy.

                I was impressed by the casual diversity of the film too.  In common with Force Awakens, it makes a damn fine fist of compensating for the sausage fest that most of the existing Star Wars films have been (Carrie Fisher often mentions that she was the only girl in the boy’s club - although recent revelations suggest she made the most of the opportunities this offered to a young liberated woman).  So here we have a young female protagonist, one who can fend for herself, who casually takes out several stormtroopers with a stick (shortly before Îmwe makes a meal of doing much the same with his bigger stick).  She doesn’t need rescuing (although Cassian insists on doing so towards the end anyway) and her team is made up of a Mexican Han Solo, a couple of Chinese warriors (which will be money in the bank when the film opens there next week) an English Pakistani pilot and a Texan robot who thinks he’s Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon.  That’s pretty bloody diverse!

Leonard, Penny and Sheldon, Star Wars style.

                Rogue One doesn’t really look like any Star Wars film, either.  Yes, the design elements are familiar, buildings with rounded roofs, Imperial vehicles that are all corners, characters wearing hoods and robes ... But this is all in the background, you can either notice it or not.  There are echoes of the films and stories we know - but they are distant echoes, like the sparse strains of the melodies we know which appear briefly and sparsely.  Like the chatter of foreign voices and the crowds of alien faces.  Like the shattered statue half buried in the sand, betraying the existence of a magnificent Jedi culture ... which passed away a long time ago.

Even Liam Neeson's Jedi wasn't that stony faced.

The colour palette is subdued - sandy browns and chilly blues - making the film look like most any ‘gritty’ film of the last ten years - and the camerawork is noticeably hand-held and messy - like any thriller or war film since Bourne and Private Ryan (Matt Damon has a lot to answer for) - because this is a dirty, glamour-free universe.  These characters are not designed to sell toys (even though, let’s face it, they will anyway) they are designed to tell a story.

                Essentially, what the film-makers have done is go back to first principles, to the ambitions Lucas had for this universe when he first invented it.  Don’t forget, Lucas is the one who wanted to make Apocalypse Now as a 16mm documentary rather than a sprawling epic.  He wanted to make his Star Wars film in, essentially, the same way, to show the universe as tatty and second hand.  We aren’t at the centre of the action, we’re out in the boondocks, seeing worlds that are not dwelt upon, but are quickly sketched-in.  It’s a real, vivid, lived-in universe, just as George wanted.  He didn’t want to concentrate on lingering shots of beautiful impossible vistas (as 2001: A Space Odyssey had) but instead to tell a pacy story in which most of the characters have unpronounceable names, speak made-up languages or wear masks throughout.

                Like Lucas’ vision, the universe we see here is a bit clunky and not terribly pretty and populated by a wide variety of British bit-part actors.  It is to the credit of Edwards and his team that they have slavishly copied Lucas’ process and intentions rather than his actual films.  This has made Rogue One truer to the feel of the original Star Wars.  This film reached out to my inner eleven year old, much more than last year’s Force Awakens did, that was little more than post-modern pastiche. 

                I really love the way that this film changes the way we perceive the Rebellion (and this must surely be Tony Gilroy’s input) as disorganised and riven by in-fighting.  Even though he’s on the same side as them, they see Saw Gerrera as a threat.  Even though they’re supposedly the good guys, when they send the X-Wings in to attack Eadu you find yourself wanting them to fail because they’ve been given the wrong target at the wrong time.  When they have their big council meeting, they are revealed to be cowardly and indecisive and hobbled by political posturing.  So, as always, the scrappy kid with nothing to lose has to take matters into her own hands.

                Of course, the Empire aren’t much better.  They are all so busy stabbing each other in the back and clambering over each other to attract the eye of the Emperor, that they don’t notice their catastrophic mistakes.  These are summed up in the trajectory followed by Director Krennic. 

Oooh, I'm so evil I can wear a white cape and not look camp!

                Ben Mendelsohn’s performance is pitch perfect, he comes across from his first moment as an eminently reasonable and level-headed megalomaniac.  He exudes the casual confidence of the genuinely evil yet, in the film’s opening scene, he makes the mistake that will lead, eventually, to the death of his beloved Emperor and the collapse of the Empire, oh, and to his own death.  He forces his old friend Galen Erso to come back and continue working on the Death Star.  To motivate him, he kills Galen’s wife.  This gives Galen all the impetus he needs to build a weakness into the Death Star and leave the instructions on how to exploit that in the all-important plans.

                Finally, when he has made his weapon work, and had it taken from him by the master-manipulator, Tarkin, Krennic fails to secure those plans and, in a beautifully karmic moment, is vaporised by his own weapon.

                And let’s spend a moment thinking about that weapon.  In Force Awakens, they beefed-up the Death Star idea to make it a ‘Starkiller’ which does pretty much what it says on the tin.  It sucks all the energy out of a star and it can destroy an entire solar system with one blast.  That’s too big.  Billions of people die with one shot.  It’s too much for the audience to parse.  One can’t feel the pain of that.  It’s destruction on a scale we literally can’t imagine.

                But, in Rogue One, we see tanks rolling down bomb-damaged desert streets.  That’s on image we see every day on the news.  We see guerrilla fighters taking on a vastly superior military force with improvised weapons.  Again, that is unfortunately a daily occurrence in the Middle East.  So this is a star war with which we can identify.  It feels tangible.  Believable.  Therefore, when they unleash the Death Star weapon and destroy just one city - we feel that!  We literally feel the earthquake it causes, we feel the panic of those escaping the blast and we feel the horror of it because it has a victim count which we can, sadly, imagine and understand.

The Death Star seen through an atmosphere is truly chilling.  That really is no moon!

                No, I don’t know why Saw Gerrera sends Jyn away then just stands there and waits for the blast, but I suspect it may be because he knew he’d filled his purpose in the narrative and had nothing else to do.  Either way, the piece de resistance for this sequence, is Krennic’s irony-free comment that the explosion is ‘beautiful’.  If you didn’t hate the Empire before, you just must after that.

                Yes, thousands of people die off camera, in a PG13 or 12A-friendly kinda way, but I felt their loss more keenly than the billions who died in The Force Awakens or in any of Roland Emmerich’s global disaster movies.

                This explosion makes the escalation to destroying a whole planet in Star Wars all the more monstrous.  It helps us feel Leia’s pain as she watches her home blown away, it actually improves Star Wars for us.  It ups the ante in A New Hope.

                The heart of this film is not in the star war, but the ground battle.  And, in this case, it isn’t arrogant men in cloaks jumping athletically in the air and sword-fighting; no, this is war as we recognise it ... Boots on the ground, troopers hiding from Stormtrooper blasters (although, as Îmwe demonstrates, they probably don’t need to bother), grabbing one piece of land at a time.  Then the smoke parts, and the walkers arrive.  A spine-tingling moment of cinema.

Completely impractical all-terrain vehicle - And still my absolute favourite mode of Star Wars transport.

                I confess that I was disappointed when I heard that John Williams wasn’t doing the music.  But Michael Giacchino’s score is the best he has yet done.  It has Williams’ DNA running through every note, yet doesn’t ape any of his tunes, doesn’t copy, but rather - like the film it is part of - channels the spirit and the energy without diminishing the original.  I’d go as far as to say it’s better than the work Williams himself did for The Force Awakens.  Yes, you read that right. 

                Giacchino’s music swells and lifts the emotional highs then, when it isn’t needed - such as in the slow motion Star Destroyer crash - it just gets out of the way.  It’s the best blend of sound and vision I’ve heard in a film in a lot of years.

                As gorgeous as that mournful piano-led treatment of the Imperial March they used in the trailers was - that music isn’t right for this film,  this isn’t Vader’s story.  It isn’t Skywalker’s story.  Their themes have no place here. 

                That’s not to say that Rogue One is perfect, it isn’t.  It’s third act is a little too much like Jedi.  Key cast members are thrown away once they have fulfilled their narrative purpose (most notably Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus and Bodhi Rook).  The flagrant lack of health-and-safety in Imperial design continues - with data files safely stored over a bottomless drop, while the satellite dish has two controls, one of which is at the end of a narrow spit overhanging another precipitous drop.  This isn’t because it makes any sense, it’s simply so our characters have one more obstacle to overcome.

                Then there is the whole Cushing question.  Cushing’s face is first seen as a reflection, and that’s significant, as this isn’t the man himself (of course), but rather a CGI version of him.  The motion capture performance beneath the virtual skin is by Guy Henry whose physical and vocal impersonation is quite uncanny.  But uncanny is the word.  In some of the shots, Tarkin looks properly alive, but in others, especially around the eyes, his image falls straight down the uncanny valley.  And you’ll find a cogent explanation of just what that means here courtesy of Gizmodo.

                It’s interesting that a week into the film’s release, there are still no photos available of the Cushing clone.  I’ve even been to look at the official Disney publicity site and there’s nowt there.  They really aren’t letting us get a good look at that face.

                Which brings us to the subject of advertising.  There were seismic shockwaves rippling through the internet a week ago when it was realised that so much of the footage in the film’s trailers wasn’t in the actual film.  I confess, when I was watching the film, I didn’t notice.  It was only afterwards when I watched the trailers that I saw what I hadn’t seen (if you see what I mean).  I don’t think this is an attempt to create false advertising, I think this is a very mature and brave creative decision.  Editing is as much a creative process as the writing and shooting and, during the edit, things can change.  If a line of dialogue or an image doesn’t work in the film, it has to be removed or redone - even if it looks ace in the trailer.  This is why Jyn’s eminently quotable “I rebel” line isn’t there.  That’s why Gerrera’s “what will you become” speech, that the first trailer was built around, is also gone.  Like all creative writers are taught - kill your darlings.  Those lines were the definition of a darling!

                In case you, like me, didn’t actually notice the differences, here is a handy dandy edit featuring every trailer shot that you didn’t see in the actual film.

                I know we’ll never know for sure why the film was re-shot and why the third act (particularly) is significantly different from the one we see in the trailers (because Disney doesn’t really like people to see too far behind the scenes) but - rather than a studio meddling where it shouldn’t - it all suggests that Disney allowed Edwards to make whatever creative decisions he felt were right.  He got to do the opposite of what Warners (apparently) made David Ayer do with Suicide Squad.  He re-shot and re-cut Suicide Squad to make it more like the trailer and, consequently, lost the plot.  Rogue One has been re-shot and re-cut to find the plot. 

The most oft-used image from the first trailer.  Not in the film.

Krennic going paddling on the beach at Scarif. Not in the film.

Jyn's close encounter with a TIE Fighter.  Not in the film.

Also not in the film.  Just saying.

                In that first trailer, Jyn comes across as cocky.  That’s what the “I rebel” line is about.  When General Draven asks if she understands her mission, she smirks at him and gives him an ironic “Yes.  Sir.”  But, if she starts off cocky, that doesn’t leave her character anywhere to grow.  In the film I saw, she isn’t cocky at the start, she’s defensive.  She’s been made cynical by life.  It’s a subtle change, but an important one.  Gradually, she finds a direction, a cause and, like Luke Skywalker before her (after her), she finally becomes radicalised when her family dies.  This means that her rallying speeches to the Alliance - and later to the troops on the transporter - are all the more effective, because she’s lost her cynicism and found hope.

                Cunningly, all this means that her story more closely follows the standard arc of The Hero’s Journey.  All the ingredients are there,  but mixed together so skilfully I didn’t find myself ticking them off the list (Here’s the bit where the supposedly dead character comes back to life ... Oh, here’s the bit where the old guy dies), instead, I just sat there and enjoyed it.
                Let's discuss the ending ... That ending ... it’s a masterstroke!  A perfect build-up to the first light sabre reveal (something that they got badly wrong in Force Awakens).  And did you notice they discuss ‘’hope’ a lot: “Rebellions are built on hope”.  Well, those closing moments suddenly make the reason perfectly clear.  The information they have snatched from under the noses of the Empire is a new hope.  Making this the perfect conclusion to this story and the perfect introduction to the next.  I still can’t quite believe they actually went all the way with this.  A $200 million movie with a sad - but triumphant - ending.  Incredible.

                It’s been a long time since I could just enjoy a Star Wars film.  Just bask in it, responding to it emotionally rather than rationally.  In fact, it’s been quite difficult writing about it, because I don’t want to dig too deep into what made my scalp tingle, in case it doesn’t happen when I go back to see it a third time.

As I'm putting the finishing touches to this piece in the early hours of Christmas Eve, I learn that Carrie Fisher has been struck down with a heart attack on her way home for the holiday.  She's a tough woman.  The Force is strong with her.  Get well, Carrie.  Here's hoping this becomes nothing more than an anecdote in the opening chapter of your next memoir.