Thanks to the fact that there are two Death Stars in the classic Star Wars trilogy, it turns out there are, in fact, two spy missions to obtain secret information about Death Stars.
For as long as most fans can remember, the Star Wars franchise has been obsessed with various backstories, turning single lines of dialogue from the original trilogy into spinoff books and movies.
In retrospect, Rogue One was released at the perfect time.
In 2016, mainstream adoration for Star Wars was in full swing, and though there were grumblings about The Force Awakens, that film was almost universally beloved at the time.
The reason Rogue One didn’t get smacked with “too much fan service” criticism ahead of time is only because of the year it was released.
Rogue One’s show-stopping final sequence in which Darth Vader goes hog wild with his lightsaber was a reshoot, that wasn’t even in the original script.
People who love the movie would say, that it’s because of the characters that Rogue One is good, which is true enough, but only to a point.
This is the story of big sci-fi and Star Wars in general: either you get lucky with an actor or you don’t.
The actors themselves are all talented, but it’s a mixed bag in terms of how much you buy it.
In short, Rogue One shows us Jyn’s entire life — from childhood to premature death — which means we’re paradoxically less curious about her after the film ends.
Because Rogue One is a backstory, we kind of know going in that these people aren’t going to be okay, otherwise Luke would have met them in A New Hope.
A truly powerful version of this movie would have just ended with Cassian and Jyn dying, but the conventions of Star Wars simply don’t allow for this kind of thing.
The final shots we’re left with are Darth Vader and a CGI Princess Leia, undercutting the uniqueness of the film with fan service and dot-connecting that masquerades as nostalgia.
She’s just a random person who was hiding in a spaceship that was hidden inside another spaceship, waiting to be handed a disc from a guy who ran down a hallway.
That’s the real problem with Rogue One, in an attempt to make a cool movie out of a backstory, the adventure was made more explicable.
Five years after Rogue One, the future of Star Wars movies is more uncertain than ever.