This content analyzes how the existential dread and geopolitical anxieties of the Cold War, particularly the fear of nuclear annihilation, profoundly influenced George Lucas's creation of the Death Star in Star Wars, and how the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story sought to re-center that original thematic weight by grounding the narrative in the gritty realities of war and sacrifice.
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This video contains disturbing images presented in an educational context.
This video also contains spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
- George Lucas remembers the Cold War.
He remembers proxy conflicts around the globe, from the Korean War to Vietnam.
He probably remembers the duck-and-cover drills he had to take in school.
He remembers the threat of communist espionage; or at least the movies made about it.
And he remembers that which was impossible for so many to unremember:
the fear of all-out nuclear war. Mutually-assured destruction.
Death from above.
Did he fear it himself? Maybe not.
But like so many of his generation, Lucas grew up in a world that had been
utterly reshaped by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Not only the most destructive weapons in the history of the world,
but the most effective psychological weapons too.
The fear of nuclear force alone played a vital role in securing peace in Western
Europe after World War II, and it was a fear that America alone could inflict.
For about 4 years anyway.
In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully exploded its first atomic bomb. Soon after,
the United Kingdom, France, and the People's Republic of China
followed with their own successful weapon tests.
The gun that once only America could point at the world could now be pointed back at them.
A reality that would grow terrifyingly apparent for all Americans by the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962, where the presence of Soviet-deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba
led to a tense confrontation between the two world powers and their respective leaders:
President John F Kennedy and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev.
"Cease the delivery of weapons to Cuba, or we will cease them."
"Oh yeah America? Deactivate the missiles you have deployed in Turkey, and then we can talk."
In the end, America withdrew its naval blockade of Cuba,
and the USSR its nuclear weapons. Armageddon was averted.
Even still, the legacy of the crisis lived on in the American mind. A fear that,
in the words of "Star Wars and Politics" essayist Nick Desolage,
"people had almost no influence over the fate of the world..."
From these nuclear fears, the Death Star was born. An intergalactic superweapon
capable of destroying entire planets, in the hands of a tyrannical Empire.
Just as George Lucas drew inspiration from westerns,
samurai movies, and mythology, Star Wars was also inspired by history.
The dog fighting of World War II; the asymmetrical warfare of Vietnam; and the nuclear weapons
that defined the Cold War. An era that, in itself, was too ongoing to even be history.
It's by no mistake that the first on-screen victim of the Death Star
was a world visually reminiscent of Earth. Star Wars may very well have
been a silly space opera, but that didn't mean it couldn't be relevant.
- I consciously set about to recreate myths and the, and the classic mythological,
uh, motifs. Uh, and I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that existed today.
- That even in a world engulfed in nuclear tensions and imperialist aspirations,
there was still hope for a better tomorrow.
Some, such as President Ronald Reagan,
might have interpreted that hope in the building of more weapons.
His strategic defense initiative, announced in 1983, called for a
missile defense system that could destroy nuclear weapons from space.
Critics argued it recklessly flew in the face of established nuclear policy
and would reignite an arms race. Some even called it the "Star Wars" program;
a name with pop culture cache that Reagan would wield to glorify his endeavors.
But Star Wars was not about wielding weapons, building thermonuclear bombs,
or beating your opponent with even deadlier technological force.
It was about turning the technology off, destroying the nukes,
and by the end of the Original Trilogy, learning to lay the weapon down.
Of course Lucas was no politician-- and barely a historian.
The idea that any first world power would just give up the nuclear arsenal for the
sake of humanity was a childish one, but not a serious suggestion either.
At its heart, Star Wars was a mythology; designed to assert the value of trusting
in something deeper and more powerful than any weapon. The Force. A mystical energy field that,
of course, bound the universe together, but also represented a steady conviction in moral,
selfless, and at times, nonviolent action.
In a wider sense, it represented faith.
Whether or not that meant anything to the audiences of 1977, what the force
allowed Luke Skywalker and his rebel allies to accomplish certainly did.
For a brief, magical moment, they were allowed to forget the gun pointed at their heads...
In time, we'd all forget. By the decades following the Cold War,
anti-nuclear movements like Nuclear Freeze helped reduce weapon stockpiles
and established treaties banning nuclear weapon testing around the world.
The genie never went back in the bottle,
but the age of nuclear fear, relatively speaking, was over.
Some of those who were children during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even just the duck-and-cover
drills, grew up to make films about the threat of nuclear apocalypse. So much so, it practically
became a trope, normalizing, or even fantasizing, the idea of nuclear threat for newer generations.
Arguably, even Star Wars did this by building another Death Star.
The real world significance of Lucas's mythological super weapon
got lost in pop culture and buried by time...
Until... they dug it back up...
Almost 40 years after Lucas first introduced the world to the Star Wars galaxy, a pitch
for a new kind of Star Wars story passed through the company halls of Lucasfilm, recently acquired
by Walt Disney Pictures. And surprisingly, it didn't come from a writer or a producer.
It came from Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, who may have been too young
to experience nuclear fear in the same way Lucas did, but not duck-and-cover drills at
school. Or even how he felt reading the words of the Star Wars opening crawl for the first time.
In 2013, he'd present his pitch to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy
and Senior Vice President of development Kiri Hart as a seven-page story treatment.
It was called...
Star Wars: Destroyer of Worlds.
A World War II-inspired heist film about the Rebel spies that stole the secret plans to the Death
Star. Something like Mission Impossible meets The Hunt for Red October, but with Rebel pilots,
a double agent, two very tall aliens, and a battle-hardened captain named Jyn Erso.
Many things would change about The Destroyer of Worlds over its months-long pre-production period,
but Jyn would change the least. She was the heart of this story.
One that sought a new perspective on the most iconic superweapon in cinema.
After a months-long search, Knoll and Lucasfilm would find that perspective in Gareth Edwards.
As the writer, director, cinematographer, and one-man VFX crew of Monsters,
his directorial debut in 2010, Edwards was no stranger to intensely visual filmmaking.
His sense of scale, already signature to his work,
was ultimately rooted in grounding things from the most terrifying perspective possible.
But Edwards had also worked as a digital artist on the BBC docu-drama about the Hiroshima bombing,
and-- at the time Lucasfilm hired him-- was nearing the end of post-production on 2014's
Godzilla. A story about the monstrous repercussions of abusing atomic power.
If anyone could put the nuclear fear back in the Death Star, it was Edwards.
- When it came to this super weapon metaphor of the Death Star, which is really like,
nuclear bomb, right? Oppenheimer-- like who's Oppenheimer, right? Who's the
Oppenheimer? Especially because we couldn't have Tarkin necessarily the way we wanted.
So it felt like the designer of the Death Star was someone that should be in our movie,
or could be in our movie. And then he became the dad, and-- and that felt right.
- Though Edwards and his team were essentially making a prequel to the original Star Wars,
they never had to play by the same rules as George Lucas's saga.
Something that screenwriter Gary Whitta would
take and run with right from the start of breaking Knoll's story.
Destroyer of Worlds begins without an opening crawl, and instead with a flashback.
Told from the perspective of ordinary people in the Star Wars galaxy,
it's the first Star Wars movie without Jedi and without direct evidence of the Force.
There isn't a single wipe or fade cut in the entire film.
And where the parentage of other Star Wars heroes is typically shrouded in mystery, Felicity Jones's
Jyn Erso knows who her father is... - Whatever I do,
I do it to protect you. - And condemns who her father is.
Most crucially, Destroyer of Worlds defies the thematic
clarity of Star Wars iconography and the moral binary it often presents.
The hero is not a plucky, aspiring adventurer dressed in white, but a
grime-covered, world-weary survivor with an impressive criminal record.
- Possession of unsanctioned weapons, forgery of Imperial documents,
- Rebel Captain Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, is not some altruistic rebel Robin Hood,
but someone willing to put the Rebellion above everything... even his own soul.
His co-pilot is not the familiar protocol droid or astromech, but a reprogrammed Imperial security
droid: K-2SO, played by Alan Tudyk. - Doesn't sound so bad to me.
- The most heroic act this early in the film is carried out by, of all people,
an Imperial pilot: Riz Ahmed's Bohdi Rook.
Conversely, the Rebels he meets-- the first we see in the film-- are all alien or wearing helmets;
unlike the Rebels of the original Star Wars, who were not just human,
but were immediately sympathetic to the audience because of their humanity.
These are the Partisans, an extremist Rebel cell led by Forest Whitaker's Saw
Gerrera. Someone who was trained by Anakin Skywalker, encased in a suit of armor like
Darth Vader, and equipped with a breathing apparatus that sounds just as familiar...
At just about every turn, Destroyer of Worlds blurs the line between good and evil,
portraying a version of the Stars universe that is less mythological and more in-line
with what production coordinator Neil Lamont called a "docu-war film."
Down to its DNA, this was a war movie. Like The Guns of Navarone,
Where Eagles Dare, or even The Dirty Dozen.
The film's intro was inspired by Inglorious Basterds,
while Saw was reimagined as a Colonel Kurtz-type character from Apocalypse Now.
Director of photography Greg Frasier, fresh off of Zero Dark Thirty,
opted for a more improvised shooting style than the franchise's traditionally composed imagery,
combining handheld camera work with 360° sets to achieve a more neutral,
ground-level perspective of the Star Wars universe; almost like a documentary.
The soft focus and lower contrast of every frame amplifies moral ambiguity, where
the difference between right and wrong either never comes into focus, or is lost in the gray.
There's something noticeably different about the way the characters move
through the frame or even just the way they breathe. As if there's an extra
layer of humanity now weighing down on them in this ultra-realistic Star Wars setting.
No actor ever hams it up for the camera nor leans into cartoonish
villainy. These are people; every bit as complicated as you and me.
- Any idea where he's been all that time? - I like to think he's dead. Makes
things easier. - Easier than what?
That he's been a tool of the Imperial war machine? - I've never had the luxury of political opinions.
- Of course injecting realism into a franchise lauded for sci-fi worldbuilding had inherent
appeal. But Edwards and Whitta's intentions ran deeper than curiosity.
In bringing Star Wars "down to earth," It also brought Star Wars closer to
its historical influences, and thus to the realities of war.
The Imperial garrison on Jedha becomes a colonialist occupying force,
extracting the raw natural resource of Kyber.
The armored tanks rolling through the streets evoke a Nazi-occupied Paris in 1940,
while the officers and generals commanding these forces are cut
from the same cloth as the Nazi and fascist commanders of World War II.
Meanwhile Rebels become unkempt guerilla terrorists-- at least, in the eyes of the Empire.
The bouts of street warfare seen early on evoke the fighting between IDF and Hamas
forces in the 2014 Gaza War, which occurred at the time of the film's development.
And Saw Gerrera lives up to a little bit of his namesake in Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
There's no righteous path to victory, no morally-convenient acts of resistance,
and no consensus on even the validity of these ideas. Especially among the Rebellion.
- Galen Erso is vital to the Empire's weapons program. Forget
what you heard in there. There will be no extraction. You find him-- you kill him.
- These characters are made to feel the boot of living
under an oppressive Empire. And through Edward's direction, the audience does too.
Optimism is in short supply. Trust, even less so.
For the consequences of misplacing your trust could get you shot in the back.
- Why does she get a blaster and I don't? - What?
- I know how to use it. - That's not the point...
Where'd you get it? - I found it.
- I find that answer vague and unconvincing. - Trust goes both ways.
- While a single act of bravery, no matter how courageous could cost you your life.
- What's wrong with him? - I brought the message I'm the pilot.
- If your aim is long-term survival, there's only one logical course of action: compliance.
Do as the Empire says, stay out of trouble, and find enough scratch to get by.
If setting up a meeting between Saw Gerrera and the Rebellion achieves that for Jyn,
then that's all that truly matters. It's not much of a life but it beats living in a cave.
The boot isn't so bad.
- You can stand to see the
Imperial flag reign across the Galaxy. - It's not a problem if you don't look up.
- But that's where Jyn is wrong.
This isn't a life at all, and it never will be. The power to negotiate her level
of agency with her oppressors is-- as it is for everyone-- not even limited,
but nonexistent. A complete illusion.
One that will soon be shattered.
- If you are watching this then perhaps there's a chance to save the Alliance. Perhaps there's a
chance to explain myself, and though I don't dare hope for too much, a chance for Jyn.
- When the Death Star is complete, it will yield the same psychological power
as the atomic bomb in the years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A gun pointed at the world, capable of inducing as much fear as firepower.
It will realize the fears of our Cold War,
and absolve whatever democratic power remains within their Imperial Senate.
Rule not by force, but by the fear of force.
What Jyn and the Rebels do have is that which is so insignificant to the Empire,
massive and indomitable in its scope, that they couldn't possibly think to
notice. A resource they can't mine, can't exploit, and can't hold at gunpoint.
Hope.
- It's just so hard not to think of you... think of where you are... my stardust.
- Hope that compelled Galen Erso not to take his life,
but to push through pain and suffering and anguish to give the Galaxy a chance.
A wager on faith in the daughter he raised that she too will push
through inevitable torment to save the Galaxy from eternal oppression.
A sacrifice that will cost everything ,but will save everyone.
That's all she has.
Not something you can pick up and fire, and not a mystical energy field. Not a knight in
shining armor, and much less a Jedi Knight. Only that which she cannot see nor touch.
No one else is coming.
The institutional safeguards against corruption, greed,
and the consolidation of power already failed a long time ago.
All that remains is yourself.
- Get us out of here!
- Come on!
- Oh. It's beautiful.
- Destroyer of Worlds would go by many names over the course of its production.
Gary Whitta would suggest titles like Shadow of the Death Star or
Star Wars Rebellion while breaking the story.
On set, the movie went by the code name "Los Alamos,"
referencing the site where J. Robert Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb.
But when the script reached writer Chris Weitz in early 2015,
it had a name that would last longer than most.
Star Wars: The Dark Times. A title that may have not reflected the mission to
steal the Death Star plans, but did reflect the grounded story that Edwards was crafting.
In a galaxy of broken trust, how did the normal person find the strength to survive?
This was one of many questions Weitz wanted to answer when
Edwards and Lucasfilm hired him to write the first screenplay-- along
with how Lucasfilm could simplify the story to reign-in the budget.
Very quickly, he would find that all his dilemmas could be solved by the same answer: Jedha.
In Whitta's story, Jyn began her journey on the planet of Ord Mantell,
looking for an arms dealer that would take her to Saw Gerrera, who was on a moon named Yared.
Eliminating a whole planet from the script, Death Star style, would save development time
and money. And thus the story of both planets were combined into a single new planet. Jedha.
A cold desert world where the Jedi themselves are gone,
but conviction in the faith they stood for, The Force, is not.
Stripped of the mystical power seen so often in the rest of the Saga,
the Force now serves the same purpose faith would serve us.
Lending a sense of meaning to the plight of the common man or woman.
A candle in the darkness, where the adage "there are no atheists in
foxholes," resonates with the armed insurgents making violent skirmishes against the Empire.
- Is he a Jedi? - There are no
Jedi here anymore. Only dreamers like this fool.
- Chirrut Imwe, a blind Zatoichi-inspired nomad played by Donnie Yen was Weitz's
way of confronting the characters-- and the audience-- with the value of faith.
As Jyn struggles to earn Cassian's trust, Chirrut places his in Jyn seemingly on a whim,
viewing her as something of a "Chosen One" to his religious order, the Guardians of the Whills.
- The strongest stars have hearts of Kyber.
- Conversely, while Jyn questions the value of hope,
Chirrut fully embraces the will of the force. Essentially, the will of God.
Both resources that can neither be seen nor touched,
rejected at every turn by our most agnostic characters.
- We give her your name and hope that gets us a meeting with Saw.
- Hope? - Yeah.
- I'm beginning to think the force and I have different priorities.
- Especially Jiang Wen's Baze Malbus, the C-3PO to Chirrut's R2-D2. Or vice versa.
- The Force did protect me. - I protected you!
- This is the challenge of the Dark Times's second act.
The challenge of faith itself. Is it even real?
- How could a candle in the darkness ever compare to the power of a thousand suns?
If the "Force" Chirrut blindly puts his faith in has no tangible evidence or utility in the fight,
how much more valuable are the ramblings of a thief One who's no doubt desperate
to redeem the one and only connection she has left in the galaxy after Saw Gerrera?
- Where's the message? - It was a hologram.
- You have that message right? - You don't believe me.
- I'm not the one you gotta convince.
- Of Cassian, The Dark Times also asks similar
questions. Not about the religion he places his faith in, but the cause:
the Rebellion. And whether or not his faith in it would be better placed in Jyn.
- Tell him my orders still stand. We have no idea what he's building for
the Empire. We have to kill Galen Ersa while we have the chance.
- The tension at play doesn't just make for more interesting
character dynamics. It underscores the difficulty of nurturing a belief
in anything to begin with. The strain of authoritarianism on collective action.
- What autocrats and authoritarians want the most is for citizens to be uninformed and to
control critical thinking, appeal to humans worst traits, and offer lies and opaqueness.
They do not look out to improve the lives of others and they fear so much humans desires
to join together to express their views and preferences and demand accountability.
Out of that fear emerges repression as a way to control the flow of information,
and to ensure that there is a hyper asymmetry of information. And if they can get away,
opt to be opaque rather than transparent.
- How much farther? - I don't know,
I'm not sure, I never really come this way!
- While our characters drown in their uncertainties,
a feeling exasperated by Eadu-- clouded with rain, fog,
and darkness-- the Empire unleashes firing squads on their most dissenting elements.
For as long as they can pit people and movements against each other,
the Empire will accumulate even more control.
If they can pit people against the truth, even better. It will only
further enshrine the Emperor as the sole voice of reason in the galaxy.
The only "force" anyone should believe in.
- There is no Death Star. The Senate has been informed that
Jedha was destroyed in a mining disaster.
- Some might believe otherwise. That the Emperor's authority is brittle.
Some men, like Director Orson Krennic,
played by Ben Mendelsohn, might have the ambition to rival Palpatines's eminence.
But the story Edwards's team was building challenged this notion as well, and again,
hearkened to real world dictatorships.
To Krennic, the Death Star never matters for its firepower, psychological power,
or how it'll be used at all. Only how it will advance his career and standing with the Emperor.
A goal that, by design of the Empire, is shared by each and every bureaucrat moving up the ranks.
Including Grand Moff Tarkin, played by a robot.
Tarkin not only threatens to snatch supervision of the Death Star from Krennic, but wisely
withholds the intel that allows him to continue calling Krennic's authority into question.
- I'm afraid the recent security breaches have laid bare your
inadequacies as a military director. - The breaches have been filled.
- You think this pilot acted alone? He was dispatched from
the installation on Eadu. - We'll see about this.
- By the time Krennic confronts Darth Vader, the Emperor's personal enforcer,
Krennic's sense of control or authority is still intact.
But by the end of their encounter, Vader shatters this too. This is not how the Empire works.
- Be careful not to choke on your aspirations Director.
- Authoritarian regimes may actively inflate internal rivalry in government
processes to prevent complex policy actions from being coordinated from the bottom up.
As the system grows more fragmented, the autocrat becomes the only actor powerful
enough to cut through turf wars and strategic bargaining to direct
ambitious policy initiatives from the top down.
- In this way, the bureaucracy of the Empire keeps men like Krennic
from ever obstructing its competitive design; always seeking the Emperor's
approval rather than dismantling the very system that pits director against Moff;
and much further down the social ladder, spy against thief.
- I'm coming with you. - No. Your father's message.
We can't risk it. You're the messenger. - That's ridiculous, we all got the
message. Everyone here knows it. - One blast to the reactor module
and the whole system goes down-- - Get to work fixing your comms!
- If Jyn can't rally the support to rescue her father, then maybe she can lead by example.
Where she previously resisted all attempts to connect with anyone or anything beyond herself,
Jyn now charts a path of her own through Eadu. Both to recover her relationship with her father,
and to get that much closer to destroying the weapon that first spawned their rift.
- Get back down there and find us a ride out of here.
- What are you doing? - You heard me.
- You said we came up here just to have a look. - I'm here. I'm looking. Go!
- Cassian too is devoted to a mission of his own, but there's nothing noble about his intentions.
From a distance, he sees Galen Erso: the Death Star scientist and creator of nightmares to come.
But through the scope of his rifle, Cassian sees something... different. Something familiar.
Something we can't see, but understand perfectly--
as a crisis of faith.
That maybe his cause is not a candle in the darkness, but a loaded gun, ordered to carry
out something he knows is wrong. The myth that shattered for Jyn slowly shatters for Cassian.
And all the same, there's nothing he can do about it.
- Jyn. No!
- Fear divides, encourages distrust,
and pushes two armed factions ever closer to war. All the while, the fight for individual
freedom that Cassian first enlisted for gets lost in the flames and fog on Eadu.
This is war. And unlike the one we see in Lucas's fairytale, faith has no place in it.
The grim reality that Edwards, Whitta and Weitz were so keen to
capture about the Star Wars galaxy is brought closer than ever before.
And as ever... it's not fair.
- I have so much to tell you...
- Jyn believed in her father, and she was right to do so.
Even still, that belief wasn't strong enough to stop the Empire from taking him
away. From stealing all their time, and all the memories they could have made together.
In many ways, there was nothing they could have done. There was never a chance at all.
Why suppose that's any different now?
- Risk everything based on what? - What chance do we have?
- "Death Star," this is nonsense! - Because maybe, there's always a chance.
- What chance do we have? The question is what choice! Run,
hide, plead for mercy, scatter your forces!
You give way to an enemy this evil with this much
power and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission.
- Democracy was never bulletproof. Something that the senators present on Yavin 4,
unable to reach consensus and disillusioned by 19 years of Imperial lies, perfectly illustrate.
That even in the face of impending doom, liberal arrogance prevents them
from accepting that the Empire will soon abandon democracy altogether.
But people on the other hand? There's something about people that defies expectation.
People that, when joined together, could be capable of moving mountains.
That might be worth believing in... if not giving a shot.
- And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget,
I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in.
Without that, we're lost. Everything we've done would have been for nothing.
I couldn't face myself if I gave up now.
- They may not have the Force-- not with its magical powers anyway. But what does
flow between them speaks to an idea present in Lucas's original draft of Star Wars;
exactly where Weitz got The Whills from.
The Force of Others. The original name for the Force,
suggesting that a Jedi's power came from their connection to the people around them.
Even in his mythology, Lucas was championing the power of collective action. Now in its more
grounded iteration, it is the galaxy's only hope.
- May the Force be with us.
- There's one more thing of note that emerged from Weitz's draft.
Or rather, something that emerged after it.
Dozens of names, if not more, had been thrown out during the pre-production
period of the first Star War spin-off. The Dark Times had its gritty, honest appeal.
- That's an impounded Imperial ship! What's your call sign pilot?
- But by the start of production, Edwards and Lucasfilm elected for something shorter,
more hopeful, and more faithful to the spirit of the film...
- Rogue....
Rogue One! - Rogue One?!
There is no Rogue One! - Well there is now!
["Rogue One Theme" Plays]
- Rogue One kicked off its globe- trotting production on August 8th, 2015.
Over the next 6 months, the crew would travel from Iceland, to Wadi Rum in Jordan,
the Masada Fortification in Israel, the London Underground,
and the islands of the Maldives, where the final act of Rogue One was filmed.
The Battle of Scarif.
- This shuttle should be equipped with an access code that'll allows us through. Assuming the
Empire hasn't logged it as overdue. - And if they have?
- Then they shut the gate. Then we're all annihilated in the cold dark vacuum
of space... - Lovely.
- Ever since his story treatment,
John Knoll wanted to see things that he had never seen before in a Star Wars film.
On Scarif, Edwards and his crew would deliver.
The film's final battleground would be shot in broad daylight on a tropical beach;
an uncommon theater for sci-fi warfare.
It both evoked the World War II battlegrounds in the Pacific or luscious jungles of Vietnam,
and conveyed a renewed clarity of purpose for Jyn and her allies, after the uncertainty of Eadu.
Thousands of designs new, old, and iterated upon would finally converge on one multi-planed
battle directly inspired by the multiple planes of action in Return of the Jedi.
But different outcomes and versions of the battle would also emerge from
filming. Both out of a desire for wiggle-room in the editing stage,
and because of what happened after Lucasfilm saw Edwards's first cut of the film.
Sometime after the end of principal filming in February 2016,
Lucasfilm reached out to the man who would become Rogue One's fourth-credited writer.
Scribe of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Ultimatum, Tony Gilroy.
His task, along with his brother's-- editor John Gilroy-- in so many words
was to "fix Rogue One." A process that involved five weeks of re-shoots and
enough script touch-ups to score Gilroy a screenwriting credit in the final film.
He streamlined the plot, reworked the mechanics of the final battle,
and added in scenes that redefined characters in subtle, but meaningful ways.
Nowhere was this more apparent than with Cassian Andor.
The double agent in Knoll's original story treatment? That was Cassian.
His decision to back Jyn before the final battle was originally a moment of redemption,
rescinding his Imperial loyalty to go after the Death Star plans.
Instead, Gilroy wanted to emphasize the toll of the Rebellion on Cassian,
amplifying his ideological conflict with Jyn Erso.
He even wrote a new introduction scene for Cassian at the start of the film.
Something about Andor compelled Gilroy. Something that stirred a lot of thought,
but also engaged even more directly with the historical and political nuances of the film.
- Are we blind?! Deploy the garrison!
- Though rumors circulated that Edwards's original cut was a mess and that Gilroy was
the savior of Rogue One, Edwards would be the first to acknowledge that this
wasn't true-- and was always contrary to how he wanted Rogue One to be assembled.
Since the beginning, Rogue One was a relay race.
Each writer passed the baton off to the next writer to expand the story.
Each artist passed off their art to the next artist, who would then iterate
and iterate until an all black C-3PO became a new Imperial Security Droid.
Even composer Michael Giacchino had to take up the reigns of writing the
score after Alexandre Desplat dropped out for a scheduling conflict. Giacchino then
miraculously wrote his score in a single month.
It may have not been part of the plan, but it was nonetheless fitting that
Rogue One reached its completion how it began in its inception:
as a widely collaborative endeavor, touched by as many hands, and expressed
in as many voices as possible, but always under the oversight of Gareth Edwards,
who was present all the way to the very last scene of re-shoots.
There was no other way Rogue One would succeed.
- If we can make it to the ground, we'll take the next chance. And the next.
On and on until we win... or the chances are spent.
- It aligned perfectly with what Rogue One themselves were about
to embark upon on Scarif: uncertain odds, the possibility of failure,
but also windows of opportunity that could only be afforded by mutual help.
At every turn of the final battle, Edwards and Gilroy are keen to reiterate these very obstacles.
- You're only way out of here. - We will make it no more than 33%
of the way before we are killed. - This isn't working K!
- Right hand! - They've
closed the shield gate. - What does that mean? We're trapped?
- Every inconvenience; every force in the universe feels like it's working
against these characters. As if the Death Star plans are not meant to be stolen,
like the nuclear genie that never went back in the bottle.
Rogue One shows a stubborn refusal to accept the odds all the same.
All traces of doubt and distrust were left behind on Yavin. And before long,
the Rebellion itself learns to leave it behind too.
Their greatest challenge now is no longer what it will take to believe in Rogue One,
but how in the world the Rebellion's collective forces can finally and fully come together:
in the Citadel, on the beach, and in orbit.
- What's going on down there Lieutenant? - Unknown sir. We can't reach them. All
rebel frequencies are blocked!
- Where the Empire has never been more successful than when they could divide
people with fear, the key to stealing the plans to
the ultimate terror weapon is embodied in the mechanics of the final battle.
Every switch, plug, misaligned antenna and climb is set up for the sake of restoring communication.
- We just have to get a signal strong enough to get through to them and let
them know that we're trapped down here. I can patch us in over here, the landing pad,
but you have to get on the radio, get one of the guys out there to find a master switch.
- If people are free to link arms, fear can be overcome.
But as Edwards and Gilroy have reminded us, time and time again, the Death Star plans are
not meant... - K!
-- to be stolen. - Goodbye.
- There was no version of Rogue One where K-2 survived. Not in
The Dark Times, and not in Destroyer of Worlds.
Someone had to die, and the droid-- never keen to do as he was told-- was not long for this Galaxy.
But sometimes, unspoken ideas also pass from one person to the next.
An idea so cruel for Star Wars, Whitta and Edwards hesitated to put
it in their first run of the story, convinced that Disney would say no.
But when Weitz wrote his draft, he'd have the same exact instinct. And this time, he would act on it.
This was not a story where the main characters survive.
Rogue One is a story where the main characters...
perish.
Our Rebels believe in hope, but are they willing to die for it? Are they
willing to put all worldly ties aside even if it doesn't pay off?
- I'm going!
- As the prospect of sacrifice moves beyond its mythical connotations,
where it is often met with reward, sacrifice now becomes real and lethal.
The tone of the battle shifts. The skies and beaches gray with smoke and laser scorches. The
deaths of Rebel soldiers we've followed across the battle take an unglamorous and destructive turn.
Having faith used to be hard. Now...
- It just hurts. - Cassian!
If Rogue One is to restore communication, it's going to take a miracle.
The kind you read of World War II veterans who felt they survived
the battles they did because God was watching over them.
The miraculous conditions that allowed for the evacuation of 330,000 French
and British soldiers from Dunkirk in World War II.
Every once in a while in war, something happens to make one re-evaluate their place in the universe.
In Baze Malbus, Chirrut is about to inspire the same wonder.
- I'm one with the Force, the Force is with me. I'm one with the Force, the Force is with me.
- Maybe the Force is real, cloaking Chirrut in a protective field. Maybe not,
and he's just unfathomably lucky.
But the courage that inspires anyone,
blind or not, to brave overwhelming danger, is not found in the Force.
It's found in something greater than anyone's self.
The Force of Others.
- Through the Force, you will always find me...
- At the closing of Rogue One's last few windows,
Gareth Edwards demonstrates the full power of belief.
It's not a mystical energy field, nor is it something you can pick up and fire.
It can't rewind time, nor prevent impending doom.
But it will push you to extraordinary lengths, and it will never--
--run out.
["Your Father Would Be Proud" plays]
No one is coming to save you.
These days of darkness have no prescribed ending, and could very well stretch on forever.
Corruption, greed, and the consolidation of power could threaten to rip everything apart,
and no knight in shining armor could ever come along.
Life is not a myth.
But for all these reasons, and all we've witnessed Rogue One overcome,
the power to reshape the world is in your hands. All of our hands.
Joined together, there's genuinely nothing they can't accomplish.
It won't be a pretty process, fraught, as it was for Rogue One,
with no short amount of fear, distrust, and uncertainty;
the forces of oppression always at work to divide more and more
like-minded people against each other and their own morals.
But there is a way forward. A candle in the darkness, and it's kept alight by the collective
action of those who believe in something deeper and more powerful than any weapon.
It might be God, but it could just be people.
And for the first time in Jyn's life, that's not such a bad thing.
- You think anybody's listening? - I do. Someone's out there.
- For Orson Krennic, who put his own ego above the livelihood of an entire galaxy and its future,
the full repercussions of a life lived in service of oppressive power now stare down on him.
Galen Erso's revenge resigning him to a painful, lonely death.
The blast that kills him circles one final time on
the ambiguity with which Edwards wanted Rogue One to be crafted.
The blast will also kill Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor.
Two characters that, in another life, may very well have had some romantic future.
But like Galen, Jyn will never get to know Cassian, what he survived,
what he's lost, and how he once stood in her exact same shoes.
A tragedy that is far more compelling than a final kiss ever could be.
Their final moments spent in each other's embrace are then an act of
defiance. No longer will they let fear divide them from the people they love.
They can only hope the Rebellion has learned to do the same, never again forsaking the importance
of helping one another, regardless of what evil forces step in their path.
They can only hope that they will be as willing to stare doomsday in the eye,
forbid that day ever arrives.
Because however terrifying death from above could be--
-- they'd brave it all again, knowing exactly how it would all come to an end.
From a distance, it's hard not to feel like tyranny triumphed on Scarif.
That the rare sacrifices of heroes have already been
erased and will soon be forgotten, never having the chance to pass into legend.
At best, they'll be a footnote in an opening crawl. At worst,
they'll be overshadowed by something far more meaningless or controversial.
But to those who've learned to read between the lines of history, as Edwards, Whitta,
Weitz and Gilroy did with our own history, the outcome is always more nuanced and complicated
than it will seem to those who either mystify the past, or devise ways to weaponize it,
twisting and defacing its truth to secure power in the present.
The Empire will call Scarif a victory. But for the rest
of the Galaxy, the Myth to come will be written in the blood of Rogue One.
They'll never know what they sacrificed, but that's not the point.
A war has just begun. And the fatal flaw in the Empire's vast
and indomitable apparatus has just been exposed. If--
--you can believe it.
["Never Mess With Sunday" by Yppah plays]
Hey everyone welcome to the end of yet another ArTorr video. Congratulations on getting here and
thank you so much for watching the whole thing. It really means a lot. Um, I worked really hard
on this video and in fact I made the conscious decision about halfway through the editing process
that when this would go up on YouTube, I would not be monetizing it. Um I made that decision
for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one being, um, I just don't love having to deal
with copyright issues every-- with every single video. Um, it gets really annoying and uh, a bit
of a headache to try and find all the creative workarounds or make the appeals that I have to do
just to get the video seen and monetized in the way that I want it to. Usually it's worthwhile,
but for this one I decided-- don't want to deal with that. So the video has gone up demonetized
and with that, hopefully no ads on it. Hopefully that has made for a pleasant video experience.
And who knows I might do this again with future videos. But that really depends entirely on how
many of you are supporting me on Patreon, because this video was made possible entirely because of
contributions on Patreon from awesome members like Davie Karczewski, Gearless Mo[ta], Matt Hansen,
Michael OrionCC701, and The Art of Interactive Entertainment. Thank you so much y'all. If you
join today for just $2 a month, you get access to a whole slew of behind-the-scenes goodies
and bonus content, including a monthly podcast, a monthly newsletter, and a weekly vlog from yours
truly. Most of all, uh, you support the dreams of a small creator-- that would be me-- and
uh you help support each and every new video that comes out. Uh, normally at the end of these videos
I beat around the bush about what the next thing is, "oh you know it could be a video game--" I'm
just going to tell you straight up because I've already announced what the next video is. Y'all,
the next video is about Andor. We're going-- we're going to Andor Town on the next ArTorr video. Um,
it won't be out soon. I mean, not in the next two months anyway. But my goal is to get it out
to you this summer-- uh, sometime this summer hopefully. Sooner than later is always the,
the-- the hope. And then after that I'll also just say this too, uh, for all the viewers out there
who are patiently waiting for me to talk about a video game again on the channel. Um, after Andor
I'm doing a video on Ghost of Tsushima. So that's hype as well. I'm working on both of those kind of
in tandem right now. I also want to shout out, uh, my good friend Arken the Amerikan who just put out
a new video a lot like this one called Thus Always To Tyrants: The Politics of the Star Wars Original
Trilogy. Uh, if you know about Arken, uh, and you watch my videos it's probably because you saw
his video from a couple years ago called, uh, How Liberty Dies: The Politics of Star Wars. He is an
awesome guy, very talented creator, and I've seen a little bit of his new video, and it's awesome.
It's really rad, I-- I can tell you if you enjoyed watching this you're going to enjoy that video. If
any of you are over here from Arken's video, yo, you rock. Thank you. And if you're here and you
haven't watched Arken's video yet, go over there and watch it. Um, he deserves all the kudos. And
yeah man, uh, go check it out. The link to his channel and his video is in the description below.
Couple more things before I get out of here. Uh, I'm going to do something I don't usually tell
y'all to do and that's subscribe. We're a little over 70,000 subscribers right now on the channel
and uh we're inching ever closer to 100K. That is my goal for this year, to hit 100,000 subscribers.
Don't know if it can happen but right now wishful thinking is taking me very far. So please hit
subscribe. And if you're already subscribed, hit the like button. It's the easiest thing you
can do to get this video out into the algorithm, other than just clicking on it and watching it,
which you've already done, so thank you for doing that. Uh, other than that you can follow me on
uh, social media @ParkesHarman on Instagram and BlueSky and now on Twitch: twitch.tv/parkesharman.
Yeah that's pretty much everything, uh I'll be at uh, C2E2 in Chicago here in a couple of weekends.
I think that's like April 13th or so. So if you're in the area, uh, find me, say hello, I'd uh love
to uh, uh say hi back. And, uh, yeah I'm about to move actually as well. That's a random thing.
So this is the last kind of Outro you'll see from this location. Um, yeah so wish me luck on
that. Thank you all for watching one last time and I'll see you on the next video. Bye-bye everybody!
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