Going Rogue VI: The Release

to start shooting in January.

“I'd just finished uni a few weeks before and had gone straight into full-time work.”

But through the day I kept ducking into the break room to check CNN as on the other side of the world, the US election unfolded. Saying it was a bad day, kinda undercuts the just steady swell of dread, broken up by intense focus on silly little scripts for a silly little show. I kept thinking about earlier in that year when one of my British co-workers had watched

the Brexit referendum results slowly dripping in with the same kind of frozen, dissociated horror. Australia had its own unexpected conservative election victory in 2016, although our truly unhinged

Trump equivalent had either already gone or was yet to come, depending on how you rank

Prime Minister's. But like most terrible news from America, it was hard not to take the 2016 election personally.

“And feel like civilisation was sleepwalking towards disaster and there was nothing”

you could do to stop it, but it was a moral imperative to keep up with every single development of this strange new, unfamiliar world. A month after Trump's election, while much of the world was still in a fog of misplaced anger, apprehension and limp hope that actually he'd be too useless to really do anything bad.

Rogue One A Star Wars Story was released.

Welcome to the final episode of Going Rogue, a Lucasfilm story. I'm Tansy Garden, and in this episode we're going to cover the last few creatives who came on board for Rogue One, and some very stupid rumors about the reshutes, and a much larger question about whether or not Star Wars is political, and what it means if it is.

“Finally, we'll see if Rogue One was successful, financially, critically, and as the start”

of a new series of Star Wars films. And take a look at where Lucasfilm is now, 10 years after it was bought by Disney. By September 2016, Rogue One was in a sprint for the finish line. The reshutes had wrapped and now it was up to the film's three editors, Colin Gaudier, John Gerroy, and Jay Vez Olson, to put the whole thing together in just three months.

The reshutes had a ripple effect across multiple departments. Composer Alexander Desplac left the film due to quote unquote scheduling issues. Desplac's replacement, Michael Jacino, was pretty nose-tappy about the switch in an interview with entertainment weekly, saying quote, "The filmmakers were like, do you want to know what happened?" and my response was, "You know what, when all this is over, we can sit down

and talk and have a drink, and you can tell me whatever you want. I'd love to hear that story." But for right now, I feel like I'd rather just pretend nothing happened, and everything is good. Those were his exact words.

Jacino was meant to be having a holiday, between writing the music for Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, but he, like most people on Rogue One, was a massive Star Wars fan. So he took the gig with only four and a half weeks to write the film's entire score. Fun fact, long before Michael Jacino was involved with Rogue One, his music was part of the movie.

Editor Colin Gaudy was using some of Jacino's music from Lost as Temp music, which is used by editors to get a feel for the rhythm and mood of a scene before the score is composed. I don't know if Jacino knew that his music was used as Temp, but here's the cue from Lost that Gaudy was probably using.

But here's the final music from Rogue One. John Williams' iconic Star Wars score literally changed how film scores are written. He single-handedly reversed a trend towards Lena's synth-driven scores in the 70's back to big, bombastic, orchestral music, and he made light motifs cool again. One of the reasons that the sound of Star Wars is so seared into pop culture is actually

a quirk of timing. Most cinemas were upgrading from two track mono speakers to a surround sound system in the late 70's, and a new hope took full advantage of that. So John Williams' music and band-births for nominal sound design were part of a fully immersive Dolby surround mix that really put the audience in the world, and when home video

score on vinyl.

“Making Jacino's job even harder was the fact that John Williams himself had written”

the music for the Force Awakens, released just a year before Rogue One. Liam said that his work on the Force Awakens was like visiting an old friend, and his score really does feel like that. So Michael Jacino had big shoes to fill.

A lot of people incorrectly describe him as the first non-John Williams composer on a Star

Wars film, but that one actually goes to Kevin Kinner, who wrote the score for the Clone Wars, the theatrically-released movie that kickstarted the show and definitely wasn't for episode's start together in a trench coat pretending to be a movie. Like everything on Rogue One, the score had to strike a delicate balance between reverence and innovation, matching the darker, gritty atone, but still feeling like Star Wars.

“Jacino's score for Rogue One actually reminds me a lot of Kevin Kinner's work on the”

Clone Wars. It's at its weakest when it directly riffs on John Williams. Take for example their fan-fares, he is Kinner's opening theme for the Clone Wars, and he is Jacino's title theme from Rogue One. It feels wrong.

There isn't a better word for it. It's like biting into a jam donut and realizing it's full of tomato sauce. It's not what you're expecting, and while this new combination of flavors might be something you can get into, you're going to struggle to swallow it. It doesn't help that there is an entire industry around royalty-free knock-offs of famous

themes, and this feels like one.

“The rest of Rogue One's score is pretty functional when it's not playing with familiar”

themes in a barren stain-bears kind of way.

I really didn't like it when I first heard it, but it has grown on me over the years,

especially some of those marimba themes on Jetta, and like the rest of the film, the last 10 minutes of the score is really good. Your father would be proud is a really delicate, poignant cure that ties together the end of Scarif in spite of the massive visuals with a real quiet intimacy, and it stands on its own because it doesn't try to be John Williams.

The same can also be said for Kinner's music. It's great when he's able to break new grounds, like with a so-called theme from the Clone Wars, or Sabine Ren's Darksaver theme from Star Wars Rebels. While we're speaking of scores, I also have to mention John Powell's work on solo, which is easily the best part of that film.

But Powell was able to spend six months on that score, as well as collaborating with John Williams on a new theme for harm, and Powell weaves the original Star Wars music into his score in a much more whole cloth way, without the modulations or changes that Jikino and Kinner used. Jikino did write a different version of the Rogue One fanfare, which wasn't a direct riff

on John Williams' music, and it's included in the 2022 Expanded Edition of the Score. Full disclosure, I don't like this one either, but part of that is probably just

because I've got used to the Jikino score, even if I didn't like it on first listen.

It's also worth mentioning that the film's not quite John Williams' theme plays over the title card for Rogue One, which comes eight minutes into the film thanks to the decision to mix the opening crawl. Jikino goes hard on the film's unexpected crawl-free opening, with a string sting that is basically a jump scare. It's a very hard and fast reminder that this is not like other Star Wars films, and

it's music won't be either. Still on first watch, the music is yet another thing that feels slightly uncanny, caught between Star Wars and the generations of knockoffs it inspired. Jikino finished writing the music for Rogue One in mid-October, but he still had to record and mix the whole theme.

The last months of Rogue One were a scramble, with the three editors and two directors all in different locations, supervising different parts of the final process. While John Gilroy finished the cut at Skywalker Ranch, Colin Gowdy reviewed the film

ILM. The once promised 600 VFX shots had turned into 1700, and officers across the globe

“were working on the film as well as multiple other contracted VFX houses.”

Even then, they were under the pump, but Disney had committed to a December release, and Rogue One was coming out in December, no matter what. Here's Colin Gowdy describing the vibe on the film Human Terriens podcast. I was there from the first to the last, and I finished the day before the world premiere. I mean, again, you know, you took out deadlines and things.

It was a moment. There was a moment when one of the people very high up at Luke's film said to me, "You know, every time we say whatever we can make it, this could be the one." And I was like, "Wow, because I wasn't used to working on anything, that's going." And obviously we did make it, but it was right up to the wire. I mean, we were still cutting BFX shots in right up to the last day, nearly.

And while all of that was happening, the film's cast and Garra Thedwoods went out on a press tour.

“The heavy secrecy around Rogue One meant that interviewers couldn't really ask many questions”

other than what the film was called when it was being released and where it fit in with the other Star Wars films. But that last question caused enough confusion to warrant a massive amount of press just clarifying what Rogue One was. The cast, who probably didn't have a good idea what shape the film was in given the reshoots and re-edits, decided instead to create a huge amount of organic content that lives rent free in my head.

From Mads Mikkelson, opening a bottle of vodka, mid-interview, to Diego Lunar's obsession with touching job at the heart.

"Yaba, I always wanted to touch him. I like the texture of Yaba is something I need to discover."

And the texture, and just like the texture, I'm very curious to actually touch that texture. It's quite an interesting character, and I don't know, that texture of his skin is just something that obsesses me.

“And then I'm obsessed with the texture of Yaba.”

Yaba, come on, touching his belly, it's like, oh, it's so tempted. In November, with six weeks to go until Rogue One's release, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States of America. People didn't know how to feel. A lot of people still don't, but at the time there was this weird sense of hopeless solidarity. There was a rise in reported hate crimes and assaults

in the days after Trump's victory, which felt like a terrifying glimpse at the next four years.

And from this strange uncertain environment came, what always comes from strange uncertain environments.

Tokenistic gestures. In particular, the trend of wearing a safety pin. Both as a sign of solidarity with the victims of bigoted abuse, and as a coded symbol to tell people that you would not stand for racist misogynist or homophobic abuse. It was crimped from a similar movement in post-Brexit Britain, and in retrospect, the whole

thing was pretty performative, putting on a badge that says, "I'm one of the good ones" and it probably didn't achieve anything. But at the time, it felt like something. And Chris White tweeted out the rebel starbird symbol with a safety pin through it, and the comment, "Please note that the empire is a White supremacist, brackets human organization."

Gary Weida replied to the tweet saying that the empire was also opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women, and a whole group of the worst people on the internet lost their damn minds, and started the hashtag "Dump Star Wars", calling for a boycott of Rogue One. Right wing internet sewer dweller Jack Pessovic decided to jump on the hashtag with the outright lie that, quote, "The Rogue One writers rewrote and re-shot Rogue One to add

in anti-Trump scenes, calling him a racist." This very silly controversy often gets forgotten, in discussions of dumb, alt-right Star Wars controversy, since it pails in comparison to basically everything that happened around the last Jedi. As someone who trades in the finest, most well-resourced Rogue One reshoot rumors, I've

basically only included this whole thing, because it's funny to think about Tony Gilroy directing Felicity Jones to look down the camera and say Orange Man Bad. But this was a precursor of what was to come in terms of manufactured outrage to drive alt-right recruiting through Star Wars and the amorphous algorithm.

The rewriting ripply podcast did an incredible in-depth debunking of the idea that the

last Jedi was a divisive film, which found that almost 40% of negative YouTube videos about the last Jedi were from radical, right wing, or alt-right accounts, and that they use the algorithmic boost that discussing Star Wars gave them to push people towards radicalization. The article is called "In plain sight, how white supremacy misogyny and hate targeted

But it's also kind of weird how blatantly bullshit all the racist Trump reshoot rumors were.

“Jack Pessoa could come under fire only weeks before this for a bad faith attempt at debunking”

the comic ping pong pizza gate conspiracy theory, which basically turned into him doing

it conspiracy theory live stream from the restaurant. No one should have ever taken him, or his dumb made up Rogue One reshoot seriously. But people did take it seriously. The cast were asked about it in interviews, and well after the film's release, Gareth Edwards was still being asked about it, joking in an interview with Daily Beast that he didn't

believe anything he read on the internet, and that once something had been copypasted 25 times, people acted like it was true. But on the Rogue One red carpet, Disney CEO Jo Bob I got responded to these very clearly fake rumors by saying that Rogue One was quote, "not a film that is in any way a political film."

There are no political statements in it, at all.

“Star Wars has a long and complicated relationship with politics, the boils down to the fact”

that it's basically "shroading as political allegory." Most of the non-specific nature of the empire and the rebels basically any intergroup conflict can be mapped onto Star Wars, to make yourself the hero and your opponent the villain, whether you're a climate change activist fighting against a corrupt capitalist system that is willing to sell your future for short-term profits, or someone who keeps getting banned

from Twitter for tweeting slurs. Star Wars can be read as anti-government pro-democracy, fascist, communist, hard-right, hard-left, and everything in between.

George Lucas always struggled with political imagery and messaging in his films.

From blunt pessimism about drugs and personal control in THX 1137, to the optimistic good old days nostalgia of American graffiti, a film that rather notably has no black people in it, since they weren't having such a good time in the 60s.

“As Lucas's most successful film, Star Wars also got the most political blowback, with reviews”

at the time branding it mindless, meaningless, and politically regressive and conservative. Lucas, who's a moderate-left kind of guy, was hurt by these criticisms, and tried to make stronger political points in his later films. From the pro-North Vietnamese vibes of the Ewoks, which is a whole other thing to unpack, to the explicitly messy boring politics of the prequels.

Lucas wanted to depict an ancient Roman style handover of Democratic power to a dictator, but when combined with appointed disdain for George Bush and some baffling racism, he ended up with a political morality tale that wants to say a lot and often unknowingly says the opposite. Padme might be a bright-eyed, true believer in democracy, but she's also an appointed senator,

not an elected one, although she is appointed by an elected queen, which is a position she had previously held. The Clone Wars are framed as something similar to the American Civil War, with separate estates breaking away from a central republic for reasons that aren't really explored, but do, on at least one planet, include slavery.

But it's the Republic, the Union Analog, that becomes the Empire. So in this mostly slavery-free retelling of the Civil War, the South was kind of right. Rogue One is much more explicitly political than previous Star Wars films, partly because by removing the Jedi, the idea of divine power over your enemy is gone. The rebellion is no longer a clear cut scrappy underdog, it's mired in political squabbles

that can be broadly mapped onto the idea of respectability politics. Jin is raised by Sorgarera in an extremist terrorist cell, and if that isn't made clear and Rogue One, it is in the Clone Wars where Sorgarera's brand of political revolution is explicitly referred to multiple times as terrorism.

Rogue One was the first Star Wars film to really show everyday life under the Empire.

While Tatooine had a stormtrooper presence in a new hope, it was too out of the way to really suffer under Imperial rule, an end-or-investment of planets that the Empire has intentions to colonise, but haven't fully occupied yet. Jedder, on the other hand, is being stripped-mind for natural resources while its people are displaced and the cultural significance of the stolen resources is ignored in the name

of building a genocidal weapon. Given its desert location and non-specific Middle Eastern styling, it's hard to read Jedder as anything other than a contemporary political allegory. But even then, what political allegory is it? Are the Empire the Taliban or the US military?

In his book Star Wars After Lucas, Dan Golding points out that the Empire's violence in

Something which audiences are able to recognise as historically wrong, without thinking too

“much about how colonial violence continues to this day.”

Science fiction, especially space fiction, has a difficult history with colonialism, initially endorsing it in the Edgar Wright's Barra's era before taking a more thoughtful approach in the 60s. Star Trek really kicked it off with a prime directive, which actively forbade interfering with cultures that weren't technologically advanced, and therefore avoided any hint of conquering

the quote unquote uncivilised. More recently, you have post-colonial sci-fi critiques, like Avatar, which managed to simultaneously be about the horrors of colonialism and also how that makes a white guy feel bad. Colonial violence has incorrectly been filed away in the collective consciousness as a

thing of the past, a weapon of a less civilised age and not something that is actively

and continuously being practiced across the globe. It has a lot in common with modern feminism, where past forms of oppression and violence

“can be looked at as an objective horror, by most of society.”

But that looking back in horror is kind of used as a "smoke" screen to avoid thinking about the ongoing impacts and mutations of that oppression, and the fact that it still affects a majority of people on the planet. As an Australian, I live on land that was violently stolen and continues to be colonised to this day.

That dispossession is tempered by layers of elected government, market capitalism, and historical whitewashing, but it's still true and it's still happening.

Even Star Wars after Lucas, Dan Golding also points out that to shoot the scarous sequences

of Rogue One in the Maldives, Disney both cooperated with and tacitly supported the regime of President Yamene Abdul Geyum. In February 2015, Yamene's government launched criminal proceedings against previous President Mohammed Nasheed on politically motivated terrorism charges, and sentenced him to 13 years in prison.

“In 2018, human rights watch report on the Maldives found, quote, "increasingly autocratic”

measures are eroding fundamental human rights in the island country, including freedom of association, expression, peaceful assembly, and political participation." Recent government decrees that block opposition parties from contesting elections, the arrest of Supreme Court justices, and the crackdown on the media, all reflect government steps to silence critics.

Multiple journalists went missing or were killed during President Yamene's reign, which lasted until 2018. There was also a rife political corruption, an Al Jazeera investigation from 2017 found that the Minister for Tourism was imbezzling millions of dollars invested in the Maldives by multinational corporations.

To be clear, I am not saying that Disney's money ended up lining the pockets of an increasingly autocratic regime that they tacitly endorsed so that they could film in the country thanks to the personal intervention of a president who was installed in something that closely resembles a coup. I am not saying that.

I'm just saying that all of these things happened around the same time. Rogue One also filmed in Jordan, a kingdom that is slowly improving its human rights record, but it was still two years after Rogue One filmed there that the country abolished Article 308 of the penal code, which had previously allowed rapists to avoid punishment if they married their victim.

At the time, like the Maldives, Jordan had issues around freedom of expression, including detention of journalists to silence anti-government criticism. And in 2017, Jordan deported hundreds of registered Syrian refugees. And that's without talking about England. The country where a majority of Rogue One was filmed and the country responsible for the

most independent stays around the world. I want to make it clear, it's impossible to film somewhere that doesn't have ties to colonialism, because the legacy of colonialism affects every country on the planet. The issues of colonialism also run deep in filmmaking, particularly through westerns, where films were used to rewrite history and create a whitewash narrative of civilization

and savages, which is a discussion that could feel an entire different podcast. But Rogue One's use of the aesthetics of colonialism, as essentially set dressing, don't sit well with me. Especially since the character's body, turret, and bays are all from Jedder, which means that the film's three Asian cast members are all not only subject to colonial occupation,

but also the sole survivors of the genocide that is just kind of swept past by the plot. The destruction of their home planet is barely mentioned again. The only reference to Jedder by the rebellion is Jen using it as a warning, and one ADR'd line during the arrival of new troops to the Battle of Scarif.

Ikements against Ike's stance that there are no political statements in Rogue One tended

“to focus on the on-screen representation politics, of having a female lead and a racially”

diverse cast. The political messages that many people ready into Rogue One were more a result of timing rather than the film being a direct critique of the US backslide into autocracy. Because as Owen Bliveman wrote in Variety, if it had been a deliberately political film, Rogue One would have just been another didactic liberal message movie.

It would have been the prequels, updated for 2016 with an orange-heart named Chido from or something. The diversity of Rogue One's cast is often seen as a strong political statement, centering women and non-white perspectives, but the film does kind of have it both ways. Much like how Jen was written without a gender, the Rogue One characters are largely written

without racial identities. They just exist within a space galaxy where racism doesn't necessarily affect them, even though

“the empire is coded as white supremacist.”

It's no coincidence that the victims of colonial violence in the film are almost entirely people of color, but at the same time, that also means there's an unfortunate implication that all of these diverse rebels needed to sacrifice their lives so that the day could be saved by Luke Skywalker, the whitest of boys. There's also a financial imperative to have a diverse cast.

UCLA's 2016 Hollywood diversity report found that films with a 40 to 50 percent non-white

cast earned around twice as much in global sales as films with a 90 percent white cast. There's been a ton of other data in the years since that has found audiences hungry for representation and actively seeking it out when it's offered. There has been an unsettling undercurrent of racism to many quote-unquote criticisms of recent Star Wars films, but it's only in the last few months that official Lucasfilm

social media and messaging has begun actively pushing back against this racism. Starting with a wide coordinated response to attacks on Moses' Ingram for her role in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. This was in stark contrast to Lucasfilm's inaction when Kelly Murray Tran and John Boyega was systemically targeted and harassed basically off the internet by racists.

To the point where John Boyega feared he would never work again after speaking at a black

lives matterally after the death of George Floyd. Rogue One had its world premiere at the Pantage's Theatre on the 11th of December 2016 to a crowd of around 2700 people, just three and a half years after it was first pitched by John Long. This was the first public screening of the film, which had only been finished the day before,

when the final VFX shots were added. George Lucas saw an early cut a few days before the premiere and apparently he liked it. This was a much kind of reaction that Lucas had to the Force Awakens, which he publicly compared to seeing your children sold to white slavers. And even after walking back that language Lucas still said the Force Awakens was retro

and for the fans. This is a response to Rogue One was far less public. We only know his reaction via Garatha Edwards, who said, "We got to show George the movie and I don't want to put words into his mouth, but

“I can honestly say that I can die happy now.”

He really liked it, maybe so. It meant a lot. So be honest, I know a thing that's anyone here.

It was the most important review to me.

It's probably worth mentioning that George Lucas almost certainly signed a non-despareagement agreement during the sale of Lucasfilm, which would have prevented him from saying anything really critical of the new films. An agreement that he almost certainly violated with his white slavers comment. He did not repeat that mistake on Rogue One.

Four years after the sale, George Lucas was finally starting to accept that Star Wars was no longer here's to do with as he pleased. Rogue One got an overall positive reaction from critics and fans. Everyone loved the Darth Vader card or scene, and most people were genuinely surprised by the decision to kill off the main cast, with Disney's squeaky clean reputation allowing

them to actually subvert expectations for once. It got a lot of clout for being a topical, political film, no matter what Bob Igaset. Writing for the Atlantic David Sims had the most charitable reading of Igas comets, saying that Iga meant that the film didn't deliver a treat as against Trump's electoral platform. Nor were any ex-wings spotted sporting an eye with her bumper sticker.

But Sims still said that Rogue One had a more forceful edge than the Force Awakens, and

relevant movie of the year.

“Thanks to its quote, "explosive topicality," which feels both accidental and inevitable.”

In April 2017, the home entertainment release got some free press from reporters on Air Force One, who were watching Rogue One when Trump stuck his head in to make some comments during the film's first Darth Vader scenes. The context-free images made for some good memes, although they are a bit cooked when you know that he was talking about the Assad regime's chemical attack on civilians in Syria.

And whether or not it was a political film, Rogue One made money. Boat loads of it.

The #DumpStar Wars boycott was a categorical failure, and the film made around $500 million

in North America, and the same again internationally, for a total of more than a billion dollar gross. It sits weirdly in between box office years as it was released late in December, but it was effectively the second highest grossing film of 2016.

“After Captain America's Civil War, and followed by Finding Dory, Zutopia, and the Jungle”

Book, meaning that the top five films of the year were all Disney. The three biggest films of 2016, Captain America, Rogue One, and Finding Dory, were all made by companies that Disney had bought under Bob Aegas leadership. Bob Aegas retired as Disney CEO in 2020, although the pandemic meant he ended up sticking around for longer than intended as Disney's executive chairman, overseeing the new CEO Bob

Chapeck and, in some people's view, undermining Chapeck and setting him up for failure. During Aegas 15 years as Disney CEO, the company's market cap increased by 400%.

One of his last moves as CEO was to buy 20th Century Fox for $73 billion.

With a final production budget of around $200 million, plus the same again in advertising and marketing costs, Rogue One made more than twice what it cost, and that's without merchandising or licensing, which admittedly Rogue One had far less of than the force awakens. A rumored $5 million of the Rogue One budget went to Tony Gilroy for his work on the last six months of the film.

Rogue One also ended up being the cheapest of the Disney Star Wars films. Solo, the other spin-off slash anthology slash Star Wars story, ended up costing at least $50 million more and returned a much lower box office. Disney share prices went up around 6% after Rogue One's release, massively outperforming the Dow Jones average at the time. The one place Rogue One underperformed was China, where

it grossed just $69 million.

Nice. But for comparison, another American film, co-starring Donnie Yen, Triple X Return of the Ender Cage, was released a few months after Rogue One, and it made $164 million in China. The UK box office for Rogue One was $81 million, with one 20th of China's population. Rogue One was nominated for two Oscars for Sound Mixing and Visual Effects, but it didn't win either. Men again, that particular Oscar year was a bit of a shit show, when they accidentally

read out the wrong best picture winner and gave Suicide Squad an Oscar. So Rogue One was, by most metrics, a success, which brings us to a question that I have been avoiding. Do I like Rogue One? The honest answer is, I'm not sure. Coming out of the cinema after the midnight screening in 2016, I was as uncertain about the film, as I am now. Even

trying to put it in more objective terms like, "Is Rogue One a good movie?" I get caught

“on how loaded and complicated it is to pretend to be objective. So here's what I think”

about Rogue One. I think it looks great. I think the performances are all pretty good, partly because I like all the actors, and often because they're giving a lot with very little. But I also couldn't name most of the characters after the first, or even second or third time I watched the film. I like that Jin looks like absolute shit by the end of the movie, that she's bloody and

bruised and beaten, and that she carries the weight of the rebellion and can't just levitate past it with the force. But I also still wish that she was more like those glimmers of a sharper, more clearly drawn character. I also really like that Jin and Cassian don't have much of a romantic dynamic, but I also wish that there was less of what there is because the uncertainty about whether or not it's romance gets distracting.

I'm a lot more forgiving about the film's structure now because I've seen it so many times that I basically have exposure blindness, where knowing the flow of the action and the story means that it makes more sense. But the first time I watched Rogue One, it made me feel almost classic, like a kind of new where it was going, but I didn't know why or how. It basically

those acts has a death of the mentor moment that would normally happen in the second act

and act as your two-thirds marker for the film, and even if you're not a one-cabout screen writing, we all have such an innate sense of the three-act structure from watching movies, that the pacing feels off even if you can't exactly say why. The ending genuinely surprised me, because like most people, I assumed there'd be a cop-out survival for at least gin, and the film's strongest moments for me are it's last, when you get that big Lego Smash

shot of the two-star destroyers crashing into the shield gate, and gin and Cassian's death scene

“combined with the best of Michael Jekino's score. I think Rogue One lacks clarity,”

and it tries to do too many things, but never quite sticks with any of them long enough to land, and while it might be ambitious, it doesn't pull off most of what it's trying to do. And whether or not I like Rogue One, it fascinates me. I've now had more time to think about

this movie than basically anyone who worked on it except John Noel. And it's always felt like

there was something more to the film, to its story hidden beneath the strange pacing and promising but unfulfilling characters. There's no way I would have done this podcast on solo, even though it's arguably a better case study for unchecked corporate power, disappointing fans, and shareholders. Rogue One became the canary in the coal mine for Disney's pivot from Star Wars storytelling to content, and everything I've learned about Rogue One from its early drafts to its chaotic

shoot to its messy post-production feels like something I wasn't meant to know. The end of 2016 was an uncertain and transitional time, both across the world and in my own life. Rogue One came just as people started to accept that yes, enough people had voted for Trump or Brexit to make it a reality. It came as I finished uni and started to work full time,

“and I think that's why after all these years, I keep coming back to Rogue One because”

understanding how the movie ended up the way it did was safe. If I wanted to understand the rise of punitive and violent right-wing politics, I had to deal with the fact that more than half the voting population of the U.S. were at best willing to put their own self-interest of the humanity of others, and it was actively wanted to see vulnerable people suffer. Understanding why I felt so hollow and purposeless working full-time meant confronting the fact

that I was a cog in a machine that existed to further enrich millionaires, and that I might be that for the rest of my life. But understanding Rogue One and all the different iterations it went through and how we ended up with the final film, that didn't hurt. Researching and analyzing and reading all the interviews with editors,

“directors and the VFX team watching special features for a hint of previous cuts and assembling”

this whole history turned Rogue One into a puzzle that maybe I could solve. And if I couldn't, it didn't even matter because it's just a Star Wars movie. Garrathead Woods is to date, the only director hired to make a Star Wars standalone movie who actually was credited on the final film. Josh Trank was fired before he even started. Phil Lord and Chris Miller were almost six months into principle photography on solo

when they were taken off the project and replaced by Ron Howard. Looking back recently, Kathleen Kennedy stressed that the firing was about a difference in process, saying that Lord and Miller came from an animation and sketch comedy background, and that quote, "When you're making these movies, you can do that, and there's plenty of room for improvisation. We do it all the time, but it has to be inside of a highly structured process, or you can't get the

work done." So it literally came down to process, just getting it done. On the Skywalker side of Lucasfilm, Colin Trevorow was removed as the director for episode nine

in September 2017, reportedly due to an unsatisfactory script, but also right after the critical

and commercial failure of his passion project, the book of Henry. Trevorow's script titled Star Wars episode nine, The Jewel of Fate, has since leaked, and it's bad, but in a different way to rise at Skywalker. In recent years, Lucasfilm have made a habit of announcing interesting directors and writers who were working on upcoming Star Wars films, and then never actually making them. Tiger-Waterty's untitled Star Wars film is supposed to be coming out in December

2023, but given the "Waterty" is filming the second season of our flag means death until the end of 2022, that release date feels optimistic. Knowing my luck, it will have been pushed

untitled Star Wars movies in December 2025 and December 2027, but it's hard to say what those films will actually be. Ryan Johnson's trilogy is apparently still happening, but according to Kathleen Kennedy, he's just been too busy with multiple knives out films for Netflix. Patty Jenkins Star Wars film, Rogue Squadron, was announced in 2020, but according to Kennedy, it's been kind of pushed off to the side for the moment. Disney and Lucasfilm's dream of a

Star Wars movie every year lasted five years. Star Wars has instead moved to streaming. In 2022, Kathleen Kennedy said that Lucasfilm will now more interested in persistent storytelling, rather than trilogies. In a recent Q&A with Vanity Fair, Kennedy said, "What's unique about Star Wars

is that we're one story, basically?" George was always dealing with episodes. Ironically,

he was serialising his storytelling. He was influenced by Flash Gordon and the cliffhangers on Saturdays at the movie theater. All of that informed the DNA of what Star Wars is, which is why

“I think it's just organic that we made the transition into television. I don't think Kathleen”

Kennedy is wrong to say that serialisation is in the DNA of Star Wars. But I also think that crowded Saturday matinee cinemas are a much bigger part of Star Wars than she suggests. We spoke back in the first episode of this show about how Star Wars is arguably the one pure film franchise in Hollywood. Pure in the sense that it is or was made entirely from films with no other source material. So to see the most pure film franchise move consciously away

from the cinema and almost entirely into streaming. From crowded rooms full of strangers experiencing a story at the same time to something you watch at home with maybe some friends and family and Twitter, it's a big shift. The next Disney+ Star Wars show that's due to be released is Andor. A Rogue One prequel series about Cassian, starring Diego Luna. The series was originally going to be written by Stephen Schiff, creator of the Cold War Spy Drama of the Americans.

But in April 2020, he was replaced by Tony Gilroy. Lucasfilm apparently sent Gilroy the original idea for the show, which was Cassian and K2SO as Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid. And Gilroy sent back a long series of notes that covered why he thought that idea wouldn't work in the long run and what he thought they should do instead. He wanted the show to be ground level, human, looking at the everyday people who make up the rebellion, rather than the pseudo royal family

of the Skywalkers and the Jedi. Gilroy insists that he wasn't angling for a job that he had to kind of be tempted back to the franchise with the opportunity to do something radical. But he did

“end up writing five episodes and the only thing that stopped him directing was a pandemic that”

stopped him leaving the country. It's the first television series that Gilroy has run, although

he was a consulting producer on House of Cards and he's taken a couple of pilots to market before. The show is set five years before Rogue One and the Cassian of the series is a skivy thief who has no love the empire but is far from the self-sacrificing rebel captain of the film. He sounds like the sort of morally compromised survivor looking for salvation that Tony Gilroy loves to write. Gilroy also sounds like he's bringing his lack of reverence for Star Wars source material

to end or, saying quote, "there are certain people characters that are legacy characters that the audience, the passionate audience really feels that they have an understanding of and know." In some cases they're right and in some cases what we're saying is what you've been told what's on wookie pedia is all really wrong. At time of recording and/or hasn't been released but I have seen a couple of scenes that were exclusively included before the iMacsary release of Rogue One

because of course I went to see the iMacsary release of Rogue One. There was an extended dialogue scene between Diego Lunar and Stellan Skarskard that gave Cassian a lot more backstory in just a couple of lines and an action scene that lent pretty Jason Bourne, although more Greengrass Bourne than Lyman. The dialogue scene vived a lot like a rewrite of Jen's interrogation scene from Rogue One if it had just been between her and Cassian or her and Monmoffman. In this version

Cassian is a disaffected thief just trying to get by and Skarskard's Lutheran Rail is a true believer in the rebellion trying to convince him that this is something worth fighting for, partly by leveraging

“what's happened to Cassian's father. At the end of the day that's what feels weird about”

and/or for me. In trying to strip back Cassian as a character to make his transformation into a

rebel spy feel earned they've basically given him what was implied to be Jen's backstory.

Genevieve O'Reilly and Forrest Wittaker are reprising their Rogue One roles as Monmoffman

fending for herself somewhere else. There was also an interview feature at with Diego Luna and

“Tony Gilroy where Gilroy really stressed that the show is about real characters making real decisions.”

A lot of noise has been made about the fact that Andor is the first Star Wars TV show to

shun the volume. The LED lighting and background tool that Greg Frazier developed for Rogue One that became a mainstay on the Mandalorian and other Disney+ Star Wars shows. I have a lot of opinions about the way people talk about the volume which we covered a bit in a previous episode and basically boiled down to "It's a tool it can be used well or used poorly and it is value neutral." But I will say that while Andor does have some massive practical sets it's also clearly

using digital backgrounds. They're just using green screen instead of the volume. Announced in early 2018 Andor has been pushed back several times by the pandemic, the second wave of the pandemic and most recently by Disney. The series was meant to start

“on August 31 but it was very recently pushed back by three weeks to September 21st.”

The delay wasn't because the series wasn't ready. The first three episodes will all be uploaded on the same day to catch up with the original release schedule. Andor was delayed so that it wouldn't go up against the rings of power and house of the dragon. Two other big budget prequel series that are being released around Andor's original release date. Despite rushing three years' worth of post-production into nine months to make sure Rogue One made its December

release date, Disney delayed Andor to avoid competition. It's been weird watching Gilroy who's

role on Rogue One was always so hush, hush, slowly being pushed to the front by Lucasfilm.

Gilroy doesn't appear in any of the behind-the-scenes material for Rogue One. And even when Star Wars dot com did some retrospective interviews for Rogue One's fifth anniversary, Gilroy didn't do one. For years, he'd only really given that one interview about the film. And that has since changed. In most of the press for Andor, Gilroy has zeroed in on Cassian's first scene in Rogue One, where he kills his informant, Tivic, saying that it hints at a much darker backstory for the

character as someone who came to the right cause the wrong way. It's also a scene that Gilroy wrote and probably directed. The trailer for Andor has this full frame title card that reads from the creators of Rogue One, which is the boldest use of a plural that I've seen in a long time. By all current reports, the only Rogue One creatives working on Andor are Gilroy and executive producers Kathleen Kennedy and Michelle Rajwan. Chris Whites, Gary Whitter, John Null, Kirihart,

and Garithead Woods all have no involvement with the series. Garithead Woods is currently in post-production on True Love, his first film since Rogue One. It was wrote the script and reunited with Rogue One's cinematographer Greg Frazier and produced the Kirihart for the film. And the cast is pretty stacked, this got John David Washington and Gemma Chan. Edwards is the last star wars director to release a

follow-up film. Ryan Johnson, Lord and Miller, Josh Trank, Colin Trevorow, Ron Howard and JJ Abrams have all released post-star wars films. Although if you do want to nitpick, JJ's was another star wars movie. True Love is due to be released in late 2023 and I hope it goes well. I think Garithead Woods is an interesting and vicious director and he seems like a really nice blog. I hope Rogue One didn't break him. Garithead Woods is not online, a great decision and he hasn't talked much about

Rogue One since the film was released. It's also a bit of a downer to watch any of his interviews from 2016 since he was talking about a film that had effectively been taken out of his hands and sometimes it showed. Often the answer to the questions he was being asked was because of re-shoots, which wasn't something that he could actually say, so he was left to sort of awkwardly tiptoe around the details. But during his director's Guild of America conversation with Chris Miller,

“he did say this. You have to have a high aspiration, I think, when you make films, like,”

because I always think it's so for the compromise that the process of making a movie. If you're not,

that's thing of like, if you reach for the stars, you might get the moon or whatever people say, like, you have to aim too high and then you might make something okay. I think if you're just aimed for good by the time, you know, you hit all the compromises, you have some bad. So, so you have this incredibly high aspiration and the frustration of being a filmmaker as you'll know is like, you're always disappointed because you remember what the aspirational thing, which I mean and then

it just ended up where we're ended up. And so you can never be pleased, it's very hard to be happy.

trilogy, I'm initially, you know, it's like, "Why are you doing this? They're brilliant. They're

“masterpieces. Don't touch them." And then now, I feel like, "Oh, you're I get it." You know,”

like, there are always little things you want to tweak and work out the way you wanted. And that's

sort of the beauty of being an audience versus a filmmaker as you don't bring any of that baggage with you. It just hits you for what it is and you don't know what happened that day and why they didn't

“get what they really wanted and, you know, really just take it for this.”

Going rogue was researched, written, presented and produced by me, Tanti Gata, with editorial assistance from Charles O. Grady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompetek and our theme song is called "Suspended Animation" by Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios.

“You can find a link to the script for this episode and all episodes of the podcast with full”

sources in the episode description or on the show's Twitter account going rogue underscore pod. Over this show, I've relied a lot on the work of other journalists, including Tom Butler, Jamie Benning, Boris Kit and Kim Masters. Joshua Kushens book The Art of Rogue One has been a massive resource and I also want to shout out Dan Goldings book Star Wars after Lucas. It's a fantastic breakdown of post Disney sales Star Wars and he has a lot of really insightful stuff to say about

nostalgia and he also wrote the music for untitled goose game. If you've enjoyed the series, please let me know. I'm on Twitter @TansyClickboard and if you have enjoyed it, please recommend it to your mates or chuck us a good review in whatever podcast app you're using.

It really means a lot. I am currently working on the second season of going rogue which is going to

be quite different to this first one but will still have an analytic forensic approach to modern film history and if you've enjoyed this one, you'll probably enjoy it too. This show was made on the lands of the warundry and bunoring people of the cool in nation.

Sovereignty was never seated and this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.