Force-attuned guardians Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus are cut down by Stormtroopers after securing the data transfer. Turncoat pilot Bodhi Rook is blown up by a random grenade. You would expect a heroic sacrifice or two in a movie like this, but the final mission to upload the Death Star plans offworld claims the life of every single team member.

The last sequence of the film, which is essentially a 40-minute battle on land and in space, kills off the rest of the cast. I was a little surprised when they killed off Forrest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera rather early when the Death Star took its first baby steps and started nuking cities instead of whole planets, but that was just a taste of what was to come. Literally every character on the poster dies, short of Darth Vader. This was something untold, and now that it has been told, the body count is simply enormous. Yes, we know that this is probably going to be something of a doomed mission, given that we don’t exactly see these characters hanging around the Star Wars canon after the fact, but this isn’t the “many Bothans died to bring us this information” mission (that’s the second Death Star) and might have played out differently. This is a side of the Rebellion we have not seen before.īut past its ethical debates, I think it’s bold, rather brave move to take the extreme step of, I don’t know, killing almost every single character with a speaking part. He wasn’t just collateral damage, he was literally the target, and Jyn and her team were the ones that were almost killed in the crossfire. While he avoids being sniped by Erso’s compatriot, Cassian Andor, he’s killed in a follow-up Y-Wing bombing of an Imperial base. And even if that’s the “extremist” faction, just a short while later, the “good” Rebels commission an assassination mission against an Imperial scientist, Jyn Erso’s father.

Yes, Star Wars has always been about standing up to tyranny and fascism, and that’s certainly present in Rogue One, and yet here the Rebels bomb military convoys in ways that are immediately reminiscent of terrorist roadside attacks on troops in the Middle East and elsewhere. I know there’s been a lot of controversy about the “political” message of Rogue One, but honestly, even going in looking for one, it’s hard to find a declarative statement like that. Fans have been debating for years about how the Jedi and Rebellion are actually sort of evil and/or mass murderers in their own way, but this is the first film to actually take those ideas and run with them to a certain extent. What caught me off guard about Rogue One was both its surprising brutality, and the fact that it’s the first Star Wars film to view the universe in shades of grey rather than the literal black and white of the Empire/Sith fighting the Rebellion/Jedi.

Rogue one free