Like a lot of modern superhero films, the new Star Wars films justify a lot of character development with a moral binary. That's a sharp difference from a whole movie about a melancholy loner watching scenes of devastation before heroically agreeing to turn a satellite toward the southern hemisphere. That film didn't underline Han's journey as a 'journey.' He was a cynic and a profiteer, and then suddenly he came back to help Luke. You could argue that 'awakening to some higher social conscious' was the Han Solo story in A New Hope. Rogue One is basically one long extended Tosche Station scene: The whole point of a Macguffin is that it doesn't really matter but here we are with a whole movie about the secret history of the Death Star plans (coincidentally here's my spec script for Letters of Transit: A Casablanca Story). But let's say just for fun that Mads Mikkelsen played an andro Han Solo hot for both Jones-Luke and Luna-Leia, and Donnie Yen was Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Alan Tudyk was a more catty C-3PO, and Forest Whitaker played Uncle Owen, and Jiang Wen played Biggs Darklighter, and Biggs would have a much bigger role, because no way they would they cut the Tosche Station scene today. Because like Force Awakens, this movie has one strong female lead and one strong supporting female and a lady pilot.

Like, if Felicity Jones was playing Luke Skywalker, and Diego Luna was playing Princess Leia and well, I guess, the gender-flipping game gets hard there. Īctually, during Rogue One's interminable let's-fly-to-another-planet-then-cut-back-to-Tarkin second act, I kept on imagining what Rogue One would be if the same exact cast had just re-performed A New Hope. She goes along with everything and gets sad when she sees her father on a hologram, and gets sadder when she sees her father in real life, and then she gives a speech about the importance of rebellion, and then she leads what the movie implies is the first real important battle of this whole star war. Jyn is a a thief who was forcefully pushed out of the rebellion by one father figure (Saw Gerrera) but she's brought back into the Rebellion because they need her to contact Saw, because the Rebellion needs information on her actual father. She does't get to say the most important line of the trailer: 'This is a rebellion, isn't it? I rebel!' Which makes sense, because Jyn's actually not rebellious, and she's never flippant enough to say something like that. As grown-up Jyn, Felicity Jones gives an okay performance as a character who is never allowed to be as cool as she looked in the advertisements.

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