In the film Rogue One, we saw a fantastic return to the Galactic Civil War era in the Star Wars universe. Rogue One takes place in the same timeline as the original trilogy. In this movie, we observed an answer to the long-held question about how the Rebel Alliance had managed to get a hold of the plans to the first Death Star. This is a question many people in the Star Wars fan base have been debating for years, and now we finally have the answer.
In this movie, they revisit some of the old themes we are familiar with from the original trilogy where it involves family matters. We see this when the main character Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) sets out to try and reunite with her estranged father Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). Her father is an Imperial scientist who helped design several Imperial weapons, including the Death Star, and had been taken by Imperial soldiers against his will during her childhood.
Many people can agree that the character in this movie that really stole the show had to be the droid K-2S0. This reprogrammed Imperial droid captivated audiences with his dry and witty humor. In each scene, he said anything on his mind. Some would even say that this character acted as a cooler version of C-3PO.
One aspect of Rogue One that is a bit of a departure from the original Star Wars formula is the idea that some of the characters are considered grey characters. These are characters who are presented as neither pure good or pure evil, rather they are somewhere in between. We see this in characters such as Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Saw Garrera (Forest Whitaker) who in the movie both act in morally ambiguous ways. This is different from the original straight forward theme of where we saw pure good Rebels versus pure evil Imperials in the original trilogy.
One of my favorite parts of this movie was the return of several characters from the original trilogy. We saw the return of characters such as Grand Moff Tarkin in this movie. Since the original actor, Peter Cushing, died more than 20 years ago, they had someone else come in and used CGI to make him resemble Cushing. They even managed to get James Earl Jones to come back to do the voice of Darth Vader once again. Other characters from the old trilogy that were present in this movie include Mon Mothma, C-3PO, Red Leader, and Gold Leader. These characters keep the story of the original trilogy relevant today.
Disney has planned for this movie to be the first of many spin-off stories that take place in Star Wars universe. So far, I believe they are doing a fine job of showing us other areas of the series that George Lucas started all those years ago. There’s no telling how many other great stories they will be able to show us, but they are off to a great start.
