Rogue One Spoilers
BTW I saw Rogue One today and while
a) This is not my fandom
b) I was expecting Space Ocean’s Eleven not Space D-Day At Normandy holy fuck
c) I am so ignorant of Star Wars that I once thought an origami Star Wars Spaceship was a poorly-executed origami flowernevertheless
a) Pretty great movie
b) K2-SOF MY HEART
c) Even though I was expecting it I still almost cried when CGI Baby Carrie Fisher showed upAlso, I told my parents before the movie “This is a movie that is so political Disney had to make a statement that it wasn’t political” and after the movie my mum said “I have literally with my own eyes seen live anti-nuke protests in the sixties that were less political than that movie.”
PS WOW Darth Vader’s outfit does not age well huh? I feel like the grainy quality of the original films hid a multitude of costuming sins on that one, holy textured trousers Batman.
wait, how was this political? i’m 27, am i too young to see it? was it like an anti-nuke thing or something???
(legitimate questions, i’m not tryna start shit, i just genuinely didn’t notice anything political about it)
WELL I AM HAPPY TO EXPOUND :D
The Empire has traditionally been a symbol for totalitarian regimes – it’s an insanely repressive and corrupt police state ruled over by an emperor where violence stands in place of reasoned law. The film takes a strong stance against this totalitarianism, casting the film’s heroes as enemies of the regime. Also, notably, it is a cast of predominantly people of color as the heroes, pitted against predominantly white men as the villains.
So this is a movie about the first step in toppling a dictatorship, an empire, which America is uncomfortably close to being in letter as well as in aspect, both against other countries and against marginalized people in our own country.
Exchanges like “You would see the Empire’s flag across the galaxy?” “It doesn’t bother you if you don’t look up” are pretty pointed, especially followed by that same person saying “rebellion starts with hope” later in the film. This entire film is about people who were either active colluders in a totalitarian regime or passive subjects of it, awakening to the evil they live within and coming together with people who have spent their lives fighting it to throw the first punch in bringing it down. One woman trying to carry out her father’s legacy of sabotage becomes six people intent on finishing their mission becomes what, about two dozen soldiers assaulting a stronghold, becomes the entire Rebel Alliance engaging with the Empire, which results in the attainment of the Death Star plans that allow the Rebellion to strike a savage blow against the Empire in A New Hope. The power of one person to start a firestorm if they’re just willing to stand up to power is a pretty political message.
It is, also, I think, extremely anti-nuke, yes. Every time the Death Star fires, you get a cloud that looks very like a mushroom (atomic bomb) or bubble (hydrogen bomb) cloud. The Death Star is the ultimate evil, because once you have it, you don’t argue with someone who disagrees with you, you just obliterate them. It’s rule by fear. And if the other side doesn’t have it, then we don’t even have “nuclear deterrence” (which is kind of an insane concept) – there’s just this one single planet-destroying weapon in the hands of a madman. America has a lot of nukes and we keep wanting to be the ONLY ones who have nukes…sound familiar?
Others who have seen the film more than once and know the background better than me can chime in, but in my view this was a film with an exceptionally political point to make about anti-authoritarianism, the essential corrupt nature of empire, the sacrifices that rebellion requires, and the priceless value of those sacrifices.
I haven’t check through all the reblogs so it’s possible someone’s already mentioned this, but it’s worth remembering the context of the original trilogy, released between 1977 and 1983. In the US, this was the period of the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War–a war large sections of the US population (and eventually a significant portion of the US military) had come to oppose. This was a war where the US dropped more bombs on Laos, a country the size of Utah, than fell on all of Europe during all of WWII. It was also a war in which the most powerful military on Earth was defeated by a small guerrilla army sometimes fighting with literal sticks. (Remember Jyn’s line about one determined fighter with a sharp stick?)
For a guerrilla force the Rebels seem relatively well-armed, but it’s always clear they’re fighting an enemy much bigger and more powerful than them–often literally bigger (think of the recurring imagery of city-sized star destroyers and towering AT-ATs, plus the fact that the Death Star is big enough to be mistaken for a small moon.)
The early 1980s were also a period of increased tension between the US and the USSR, a time when the world seemed as close to nuclear war as it had at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apocalyptic destruction of an entire planet seemed like a very real possibility. (See also, the popularity of the Mad Max franchise during the same era.) There were huge anti-nuclear movements in the US and many other countries. I think the idea that the Death Star is a stand-in for nuclear weapons–and that people who would build such a thing are the bad guys–would have seemed like a fairly unsubtle political metaphor to many people at the time.
The thing about the original trilogy is that while the idea of the Death Star is terrifying, the actual effects of it are…kind of cheesy on screen. In Rogue One we get to see what it’s like to be on a planet when the Death Star strikes, and it’s terrifying. The strike on Jedha City is given a lot of visual attention and dramatic weight, from the giant rock tsunami to the view of the blast from the Death Star, which looks very mushroom-cloudy in nature. As for the strike on the vaguely Polynesian-looking Scarif, convince me that’s not supposed to evoke a South Pacific nuclear test.
Rogue One is interesting because it mixes the Cold War imagery of the original trilogy with a whole bunch of other war imagery, from WWII to the present. So, visually, the Battle of Scarif looks like Space D-Day or Space Okinawa, but a better description of the balance of forces might be Space Tet Offensive. Jedha is
Baghdaddistinctly Middle-Eastern-looking, with occupying stormtroopers on a very tank-like transport vehicle getting attacked by insurgents who blend into the civilian population. In case you haven’t been following the analogy, in both of these case, the US is the Empire and the Rebels are a stand-in for the people of a small nation in the Global South resisting occupation.So, yeah, Star Wars is kinda political.
I mean the prequels are literally about the slow collapse of a republic rotting internally from corruption and the animated series (the CG one) also features an ongoing plotline is the slow destruction of a neutral power because forces outside the war invade and the republic that could help decides not to because the power chooses to be neutral.
so yeah
Star Wars is hugely political – you should’ve seen the shitstorm when Revenge of the Sith came out – and I love it dearly.