Star Wars: Rogue One -- Fighting Evil, Hoping for the Impossible, and The Dirty Dozen

Photo: Star Wars: Rogue One poster, from this IMDB.com page

If you've seen the original Star Wars--known as Episode IV: A New Hope, now that there's a canon--you've probably wondered what that woman meant when she said, and I paraphrase here: "We've had to pay dearly to get this information. Very dearly." She was talking about how the Rebellion got the plans for the Death Star that showed where the weakness was--a purposeful weakness, it turns out. (I'd always thought it was just a mistake in design. You know, just kind of there. Some smart engineer in the Rebellion would see that, and think, Hey, if we hit that, it'll cause a chain reaction that will destroy the whole damn thing! I mean, for a purposeful weakness, the original Death Star engineer made it kind of hard to hit, right? Remember the difficulty and failures at the end of the 1977 film?) Anyway, this is the weakness that Luke Skywalker hits in 1977, after putting the machinery away and just using the Force. Incidentally, this is a strategy I recommend for those who think they need rear cameras and cars that just stop themselves. In this world, we call it focusing and paying attention. And perhaps a little intuition.

But I digress. At any rate, if you've been wondering what that statement meant in the original film--Well, here's your answer. Remembering that line (or my good-enough paraphrase of it) and using a little common sense, I was able to figure out the destiny of the main characters while watching the movie. That made it all a little weird for me (as was the final moment, when we see Carrie Fisher's 1977 face at the very end, and then my friend leans over while the credits are running and shows me that Carrie Fisher had died; very, very disturbing), and I hoped I was wrong. You will, too, because Felicity Jones does such a great job with her character that you'll hope for the impossible.

Photo: Felicity Jones and Diego Luna from Rogue One

Which is a nice segue for the point of this movie: Hoping for the impossible. And using that hope to fight back and make change. That's a nice idea--taken to extreme lengths in a recent article from a major magazine (forgot which one, but I read it) that said it perfectly mirrored what some of us feel about the next regime coming in, and I use that word purposely. But I disagree with that article. No Star Wars movie has ever been very political, even after Reagan named his space defense system plan after it. (And after the Red Sox brass referred to Steinbrenner and the Yankees as "The Evil Empire.") The Star Wars universe has always been overtly un-political and very fantastic. It's not meant to refer to our present day, or our history. (Though it's not too far wrong to see the Empire and the Stormtroopers as Hitler's Nazis and the SS Troops. You can't tell me that the baggy pants and Peter Cushing's Nazi-like stance in 1977 were happy coincidences.) But Rogue One is not a political movie, exactly, much like the original trilogy wasn't. Its point--like the point in The Hunger Games, and many other Dystopian epics, and in other fare like The Lord of the Rings--is that when true evil rears its ugly head, you fight it. And when true evil gets a weapon as powerful as the Death Star (or a little gold ring), then you destroy that weapon. By doing so, you're helping to destroy that evil. It's really that simple. That message, more than any other, is what this film is about. (May we never see the day we have to act upon it.) To do so, you need a ridiculous amount of hope, because by definition, the good guys are in the minority, and they face overwhelming odds. Much like two hobbits scaling the landscape, and a volcano, to destroy a weapon that is sought by immense evil.

It is in this vein that Rogue One was made. It is essentially a WWII-type action movie, and in fact becomes a little too Dirty Dozen for me at the end. But it does so in a good way, the point being that the destruction of this evil weapon, and fighting against this evil, is more important than any one person's life. Or several persons' lives, for that matter. And so this is a war movie that essentially moves from the (often perplexing) set-up, to the present evil, to the battle scenes in that war. All of this happens with the incredibly beautiful special effects you'd expect, from a director you've already seen them from before. (He directed the very good Godzilla reboot.)

Though a very good movie, it is far from perfect. It's too long, at 2 1/2 hours or so. You may wonder, as I did, why Forest Whitaker's character had to be there. Some very good characters are given a lot of life, a lot of very solid character-building traits, for an ending you may, or may not, grow to love. (But, like me, you probably see it coming. Remember the "great sacrifice" that the Rebellion had to "pay dearly" for to get the plans.) You may find the ending to be a bummer. The beginning is rather confusing, as it jumps all over the place and introduces you to a great many characters. (Yes, Vader does show up. And he's got a real nice, kick-ass montage near the end. But though he's got James Earl Jones's voice again, you may notice as I did that his build, and his armor and mask, seem less.) Also, Felicity Jones looked a little to me like Daisy Ridley for awhile, until I remembered that Ridley's in Episode VIII and Rogue One is maybe Episode III and 3/4. That took a little while for me to wrap my head around, not to mention that I got there five minutes before the movie started, so my friend and I were forced to sit in seats a little too close to the screen. I didn't get neck strain, but I thought I would.

But hang in there. Will a borderline fan of the series, or a non-fan, enjoy it? I think so, but I'm not sure. The soap opera is gone, as are most of the marketing, and marketable, characters. I'll give a tentative yes for the borderline or the non-series fan. This movie is worth seeing, and it really picks up the pace, the tension, and the relevance. You get the feeling that something really important is going on, much like the way I felt watching the end of the (otherwise unnecessary) last Lord of the Rings film. Evil must be fought. Planet-killing weapons must be themselves destroyed. (And, if you're LucasFilm and Disney, money must be made.) 

Someone's got to stand up. These folks do. Would you? Would I? If we're not appreciated, or even remembered, does that matter? This film makes you wonder those things. Hopefully we never have to find out. Turns out, these folks are not mentioned, and therefore not remembered, in the series that comes. Without Spielberg's movie, would Oskar Schindler be as well-known? Undoubtedly there are hundreds, if not thousands, of real-life heroes throughout time who have saved dozens, if not hundreds, of lives--all themselves lost to history. Does that matter? The righting of wrongs, the fighting of evil, the destroying of too-powerful weapons in the hands of devils and lunatics--all are more important. May we all remember this, and act upon it, if that time should ever come. 

Signs You Have Too Many Books

Photo: The Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, Manhattan

I realized recently--okay, I've had this "realization" frequently over the years--that I have a book-hoarding problem.  You know, like those people on the show Hoarders, who have psychotic breaks when a professional therapist, visiting the squalid house, tells them that pooping and peeing on their stereo speakers because they have too much stuff in the way to make it to the bathroom is not a normal thing?  Well, I'm not that bad, as my floors and hallways are mostly bare, but I have lots of piles of books in the living room, on the table, and on the kitchen table, and in my office on my desks and chairs.  I have books in seven bookcases in the house, and in about nine boxes in the garage, and in a giant bookcase in the spare office/bedroom downstairs, which has ten deep bookshelves.

If this sounds like you, these are signs enough that you have a book-hoarding problem.  But here are a few more signs that you have too many books:

--You find yourself reading six books at once, and yet you still look for more things to read.

--You realize that fifteen bookcases are not close to enough to hold all of your books.

--Your reading material in your bathroom impedes your path to your "favorite chair."

--And you look forward to needing to go to the bathroom so that you can read.

--You read much more than you need to in order to research your novel or story.

--You have so many books that you actually consider opening your own free library, somehow.

--Except that you don't want anyone else reading your books.

--You have so many books that you end up getting duplicates at yard sales or library sales because you forgot you had them to begin with.

--You buy books that your friends want to borrow from you because you don't want them to read yours.

--You own every book ever written by Stephen King, and Robert B. Parker, and Jonathan Kellerman, and Mickey Spillane, all of whom have written at least 40 books each.

--You've forgotten which books are in the seven or eight boxes in the attic and basement.

--You have about fifty anthologies of short stories, poems and short novels.

--You still have all of the books you ever needed to read in college, and you majored in English and Philosophy.  That's a lot of required reading.

--You tell your friends that they should ask you if you have a book before they buy it, even though you have no intention of ever letting them borrow one.  (See the comment five bullets above.)

--You have to instigate a policy of no book-buying for yourself.

--You promise yourself that you'll just get new books from the library, so that you can read them without being driven to keep them.  And you know you won't follow through with this.

--You say to yourself that you won't buy anything new until you've finished reading all of the books you have, even though this couldn't possibly happen during what's left of your lifetime.

--You realize that you'd rather stay at home and read a lot rather than go to Disneyland or some such thing during your vacation.

--You think that the best thing about summers is the reading you can do on your house deck or in your house in the central air.

--Your favorite characters are more endearing to you than are your favorite people.

--You realize that you like more characters than you do real people.  And you're okay with this.

--You think that e-readers of any kind are blasphemous.

--You have books by Wilkie Collins on your computer desktop.  Unread.

--You think that one of the best things about finishing a book is the review you'll write on Goodreads.

--Or for the blog entry, of course.

--You've considered wall-papering a wall with small posters of your favorite book covers.

--You can actually tell someone why the white bookcovers of the post-1990 Catcher in the Rye is a sinful, crying shame compared to the classic red carousel horse and NYC skyline of the original.  And you sound like a lunatic doing so, and don't care.

--After you've recently shelved literally hundreds of books into your new library, someone says to you, "Are you actually keeping all of those?"  You say, "Yes," and don't realize their incredulity until over an hour later.

--You've been in minor branches of public libraries with fewer books than you have in your house.

--You have five favorite genres.

--One of your favorite places in Manhattan is the New York Public Library.  And an actual wish is to have one that's just as beautiful, if not a little smaller, in your house.

--You have three different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works.  And you're not getting rid of any of them.

--You realize you have more books in your home than some of the more poor schools do in their classrooms, their bookrooms and their libraries.  Combined.

--You have over 30 bulleted reasons about why you have too many books, including this one.