[This article is about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and is SPOILER FREE]
Star Wars has always been one of the driving forces of my pop culture background. My parents took me to see the Special Edition release of A New Hope when I was ten and since then I have been a diehard fan. I own expanded universe books. I have Star Wars Posters. I’ve written Star Wars fanfiction. I even have Star Wars tattoos. When The Force Awakens came out last year it rekindled my deep love of all things that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and my experience seeing Rogue One this past week was no exception.
The thing about Star Wars I find so important, especially now, is the quintessential story that runs like a thread through all of the films, and that is a persistent message of the significance of hope. Beyond the original first film having the word in the title, the entire original trilogy tells the story of a group of people brought together in one way or another through their desire to make their hopes of a galaxy free from tyranny a reality. The prequel trilogy does the same, and the two most recent additions to the franchise further continue that trend.
I mention this because hope is both an elusive quality in the current political climate, and something that gets a bad reputation. The word brings to mind a kind of blind idealism, a tendency to convince ourselves that things aren’t actually that bad and ignore the fact that the world is falling apart. This isn’t the kind of hope I’m talking about, and it’s not the kind of hope we see in Star Wars either. The hope Star Wars provides is that of a unification, a putting aside of differences for a greater cause, and it is this kind of hope we see in the latest installment of the series, Rogue One.
Rogue One takes place immediately before the events of A New Hope, which means we get a true inside look at the heart of the Rebel Alliance and their actions against the Empire. The setting and plot are timely, almost alarmingly so, as the characters face enemies in an atmosphere that, apart from the CGI aliens and droids, could almost be pulled directly from a news report. Star Wars has always been political, with the Empire and the First Order’s visual analogies being obvious representations of the Third Reich, and Rogue One is the most openly political of all in that it makes no secret of its true genre.
Rogue One is a war film, released for an audience living in a war zone. Nothing about this war is traditional, but the wars of post-9/11 society are a far cry from the battles fought in the mid-20th century. The wars we fight are those we encounter daily in instances of racism, discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, in fear and uncertainty. The struggles we see the main characters of Rogue One go through are not unlike our own. We too have lost family, friends, faith, and we have trouble getting past the darkness as it threatens to consume us.
I will refrain from spoiling the film, as it’s not been out long, but anyone familiar with the Star Wars universe knows that the story of the rebels stealing the plans of the Death Star is not one filled with victory and cheer. That’s reserved for A New Hope, and that makes Rogue One the darkest Star Wars film to be made thus far. This is by design and necessity, as the story being told is one of resistance, sacrifice, and fighting for the greater good in dangerous and desperate times. We see the main characters come together from diverse backgrounds, some born rebels, others defectors, still more unsure of their place in the galaxy and the rebellion. Star Wars has always cultivated this kind of storytelling, of the interweaving of characters from different walks of life. In A New Hope we see Luke Skywalker, a plucky farm boy eager to join the fray, accompanied by cocky and jaded smuggler Han Solo, and eventually joined by hardened rebel Princess Leia. These three characters couldn’t be more different, yet by the end of even the first film they are all united in their desire to fight the Empire, in one way or another.
This is what Star Wars does, both on-screen and to its audience. It encourages diverse people to come together and unite, to find the things they have in common and to fight for them despite differences. The Force Awakens did this to some extent, but Rogue One makes the stakes even higher, the danger all the more significant. For those of us who have grown up in a galaxy far far away, this reflects our reality, where we have seen darkness and have trouble seeing any light of hope ahead of us.
We play games, watch movies, read stories, to rekindle the hope we’ve lost, and Star Wars is the quintessential light in the darkness, the Force that helps us combat the dark side. Many of us who grew up with the stories of space princesses, lightsabers, and spaceships are looking around at the state of the world and asking ourselves, what can we do? How can we resist like our fictional heroes? How do we find our hope again?
The answer, for me, is simple: we participate. Content creators push back against a bleak present and help design a brighter future. Media consumers and fans speak with their choices, engaging with the stories that give them the drive to persist, to resist. Teachers bring ideas into their classrooms that go beyond a kind of rhetorical idealistic hope, focusing in on that foundational hope that seeds determination and progress. Citizens speak out against injustice and cruelty, coming together to build something strong and united. We may not be the Rebel Alliance flying X-wings across galaxies to battle TIE fighters, but we have many battles to fight on a 21st Century front, ideological, spiritual, and political ones. To fight them we need inspiration, we need motivation, and we need a kind of hope that can move us to act.
Hope in Star Wars manifests in a determination to make a change, to rebel against oppression and violence. With the state of the world as it is, I think that we need Star Wars and the characters it shares with us more than ever, and Rogue One goes beyond delivering that, it provides audiences with a new paradigm for hope, a foundation we can build from as we continue to move forward in the wake of our own darkness. Last week I talked about survival, and one of the most powerful tools a survivor can have is this kind of hope. By hoping, we are all rebels, and Rogue One reminds us that by harnessing our hope and using it to make real change, we can resist the darkness.
