Rogue One: Hope & Resignation

Warning: total spoilers for Rogue One.

Here’s the thing about Rogue One: its core emotional scenes all cite the importance of hope in rebellions, but it’s not a hopeful film. Hope is a buck it passes to Episode III in its final moments (via an Uncanny Valley recreation of a young Princess Leia, no less) but everything unique to the prequel itself sits squarely in the Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies category of storytelling. And this annoys me, because it didn’t have to: would rather, I’d contend, have been a stronger film all over if even one core cast member (Bodhi, for my preference) had survived the big finale.

While part of me appreciates the logic of a grittier – ugh. Actually, no: I can’t even bear to type that fucking sentence, a gritter take on the Star Wars universe, without wanting to gouge my own eyes out with a spoon. LBR, I’m fucking sick of grit. But I can, begrudgingly, see the intent behind it in this case.The messy, ugly aspects of the Alliance – Galen Erso dead by friendly fire, the desperate, last-ditch attempt at building bridges with militant extremists like Saul, the things that Cassian has done in service to the Rebellion – is something the Star Wars films haven’t really acknowledged before. As my husband said when we exited the cinema, given that entire planets are destroyed in both The Force Awakens and A New Hope without any real examination of the enormity of those losses, there’s something powerful in showing the more intimate, human tragedy of regular, non-Jedi, non-exceptional people dying in battle, for a cause, without the benefit of an authorial Get Out Of Jail Free Because Protagonist card. And yet it still annoyed me, because as moved as I was by the deaths of K-2 and Bodhi, Baze and Chirrut, Cassian and Jyn, I left the film feeling as though the writers had been so invested in the inevitability of their deaths that they never really focused on their lives.

Rogue One is a fast-paced, action-oriented film, and while that makes it watchable – and while there are some wonderfully choreographed space battles – emotionally, it’s not a good thing. The characters read as distinct by virtue of the skill with which they’re (mostly) portrayed, but there are precious few beats in the narrative that help us flesh out their characterisation, motivation and history beyond the immediate: no quiet moments of introspection, no extra morsels of dialogue. The most thoughtful scene in the whole film is the opening sequence explaining Jyn’s backstory, and while it was beautifully shot, it ultimately feels redundant, partly because the subsequent series of encapsulating flashbacks to her childhood does a much better, tighter job of explaining her history, but mostly because it has no bearing on her adult motivation. When the story then cuts to her present day incarceration, we don’t know what she was doing that lead her to be arrested: we’re read her rap sheet by the Rebellion, but it’s just the cold charges, not the emotional facts of why they mattered. How many aliases has she lived under? Why did she resist arrest? What does she really think about Saul? We’re given just enough information to know these are relevant questions, but never enough to answer them – and that is profoundly frustrating.

Nor does it help that Jyn embodies one of my least favourite narrative archetypes: the ambivalent but apparently special outsider who goes from “this isn’t my fight” to “I will deliver Crucial Motivational Speeches and LEAD THIS ARMY” at the drop of a hat while other, more qualified persons drift quietly into the background. It’s a common expression of Trinity Syndrome, and the fact that it’s a white woman sidelining men of colour in this instance constitutes neither subversion nor improvement. When Cassian points out to Jyn that he’s been in the fight longer than her; that she’s not the only person to lose everything to the Empire, and that her sudden conversion after her father’s death doesn’t mean she understands the stakes better than him, he’s right. (The fact that Galen is killed by Rebellion fire – and that Jyn knows this – is another crucial dropped thread in her characterisation: especially given her prior ambivalence, she should be pissed at this development, not gung-ho to accept the Rebellion as is without any demands for accountability.) The emotional tension that then develops between them feels out of place for lack of such a vital exchange, and while their final scenes together are still moving, the obligatory gesturing at nascent hetero romance is rather ruined by the fact that Jyn has better chemistry – and better narrative callbacks – with K-2 the snarky droid. Their exchanges are punchier, their banter simultaneously more revealing of both characters and more biting for it. Yet when we come to an emotional point, it’s Cassian who comes around to accepting Jyn, and Jyn who’s put in the figurative position of forgiving Cassian’s sins.

And what sins are those, exactly? Apart from his early murder of an informant, we don’t know; nor are we told about his crucial losses. Cassian’s inner struggle as he tries to decide whether to assassinate Galen is evident thanks to the strength of Diego Luna’s acting, but as to the history that actually informs it – nothing. The same goes for Bodhi, whose defection from the Empire is the lynchpin of the plot: without knowing what suddenly tipped him to change sides – without knowing about him – it’s difficult to understand why Galen’s suggestion that he make amends would carry any weight, or why (again) the brutality he experiences at Saul’s hands doesn’t make him doubt the Alliance as allies. It rankles that the consequences of his mental torture are never properly addressed, either: Saul claims it will destroy his mind, but though Bodhi is rattled afterwards, he was equally rattled beforehand. On screen, it reads as though Cassian reminding him of his identity is all it takes to undo Saul’s damage, which neatly handwaves the need for any more in-depth exploration of his character. By the same token, while it’s implied that Chirrut is a former Jedi, or at least force-sensitive, this aspect of his identity is never really evident beyond its applicability on the battlefield. His relationship with Baze is ripe with potential history, but while Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang both do a fantastic job in layering their interactions with warmth and the sense of old depth, this can’t quite compensate for everything the actual narrative fails to invest in them – or in Bodhi, Jyn and Cassian, for that matter.

Emotionally, then, Rogue One has the feel of a film whose gracenotes were removed in post-production by someone who viewed them as superfluous to the many big explosions, and whose protagonist (Jyn) was given a motivation that changed halfway through filming to the point of making her soggy (and whose actress in any case is visibly weaker than her costars). Presumably there are already other Star Wars materials – guidebooks, tie-ins and so on – where interested fans can find the kind of gribbly details that didn’t make it into the script, but that seems to me a poor excuse for leaving out everything entirely.  I also found it striking that all the rebels who volunteer to stand with Jyn and Cassian are men, just as all Galen’s scientists are men, with almost no female faces besides Mon Mothma and a lone female member of the Alliance to balance things out. A couple of female pilots show up late in the game, but they’re barely present, and when you consider that multiple female pilots were cut from A New Hope because the Powers That Be didn’t want to show women dying on screen, the absence felt doubly conspicuous.

(The more I think on it, the more it bothers me that we’re given a greater sense of Krennic’s drives and relationships – and more particulars about Galen’s history and regrets – than we are any of the far more interesting POC characters. Jyn was no Rey, and while I’m on board with more female SFF heroes as a general rule of thumb, we’re not so bereft of young white women in those roles – and especially not in Star Wars – that I feel any need to stan for her despite my criticisms. I don’t know if Felicity Jones could’ve turned in a stronger performance if she was given a more coherent character to work with or if the two things are unrelated, but even if she had done, I don’t think it still would’ve been enough to make me love the film – not on its own, at least, and especially not when the white characters were consistently given more emotional time to far less narrative purpose than everyone else.)

Though I ultimately enjoyed watching Rogue One, it didn’t move or satisfy me the way The Force Awakens did. There were a lot of neat callbacks to the original trilogy and some truly gorgeous landscapes, but overall, it just felt lacking in some fundamental way. I want to be able to point to a specific concrete failing, but I can’t: the real culprit is a rather a more nebulous sort of narrative resignation. Both emotionally and narratively, Rogue One is a closed system: a story that exists more as an interlude between the two acts than as a bridge uniting them. Though the actions of the characters are undeniably congruent with the facts of the original trilogy, nothing of the characters themselves suggests a new interpretation of or appreciation of its content – and that’s something I feel a good prequel ought to do. Rogue One doesn’t shed any new light on the existing narrative, and though it tries to open a few new doors in the form of original characters, their deaths slam each one shut.

Which is a goddamn shame, if only because it would’ve been nice to speculate about who from Rogue One might show up again in the forthcoming Episode VIII. But now we know they won’t, which makes the prequel oddly devoid of a legacy of its own – and as half the point of the story was to reinvigorate the franchise, I’m going to have to count that as a failure of both heart and imagination.

Immortal Children

My husband and I saw Eclipse at the movies today. (Let the record state that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was his idea, not mine – I went along with it on the grounds of being hungover.) I’ve only read the first Twilight novel; he’s read none, though we’ve watched all the films together. Beyond this, my knowledge of the series has been fleshed out via numerous and detailed internet plot summaries. Walking back from the cinema, we started talking about what we’d seen, and one way or another, this lead to my mentioning the existence of Renesmee, Bella and Edward’s daughter as of Breaking Dawn, and the circumstances surrounding her birth.

Here is what I know about Renesmee: being a special hybrid child, Bella is only pregnant with her for a month or so, and by the end of the book, the continuation of her rapid physical and intellectual development means that, after little more than a year of life, she resembles a bright, precocious six-year-old. Off the top of my head, I can think of six other instances of Magical Pregnancy and/or Fast-Growing Children in fantasy narratives, but even where the device is used with skill and integrity, I’ve come to realise that it bothers me on a number of levels. At the most basic level, it’s simply too…convenient. Nine months is a long time, and small children are complicated, narratively as well as in real life: someone always has to be with them, and though they can’t contribute much in terms of dialogue for the first few years, they nonetheless exert a significant pressure on the actions of those around them. In that sense, using magic to speed things up is an understandable reaction. But what are the costs?

Back in the days of Xena: Warrior Princess, there were a series of episodes given over to the story of Gabrielle’s daughter, Hope, the evil child of the dark god Dahak. After gestating for only two weeks, Hope attained the physical age of a nine-year-old in just a few months, going on to reach full adulthood not long after. Given her intended role as a villain, this sped up her confrontations with Xena and Gabrielle, not to mention the fact that, in a TV setting, you will never see a child grow from infancy to school-age unless the show is specifically about that sort of development (Full House) or there’s a reasonable way to keep them off-screen most of the time (Friends). If a baby is introduced elsewhere, however, the writers have a problem: what happens next?

If the whole point of introducing the child is the person they’re going to grow into, then leaping right ahead to that point certainly makes sense – but it’s also something of a cheap trick. The actions of TV characters are already constrained, certain choices forbidden them in order to maintain the static premise of their shows across multiple episodes and seasons. Confront this normalcy with the prospect of week-in, week-out pregnancy and/or childrearing, and even the least analytic of audience members knows that the threat is hollow: magical or otherwise, something is bound to avert it. Through all the formula and familiarity, the tension in television comes from our knowledge that, even if only once a season, one of the threatened changes will be carried out, forcing the characters to react. Someone will die, a relationship will end – but raising a child is too great a threat. We know the writers are bluffing.

Another example: in Season 4 of Angel the vampire Darla gives birth to baby Connor and dies, leaving Angel to raise his son alone. But, sure enough, the passage of a few episodes sees Connor stolen away by one of Angel’s old enemies, who takes the boy to a demon dimension where – conveniently – time passes at a different rate. Scarcely has his infant son been stolen than a portal opens at Angel’s feet and spits out an angry, vengeful teenager in his place. Fastwind through a series of increasingly melodramatic events, and we watch as the now-grown Connor saddles Cordelia with a speeded-up pregnancy of her own, bringing the trope full circle.

Beyond the realms of television, there are novelised instances, too. In Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire series, the main character, Alisa, carries and gives birth to a powerful, demonic and fast-growing daughter, Kalika, in the space of a few months. Though not evil, the same is otherwise true of Blessing, the daughter of Liath and Sanglant in Kate Elliott’s excellent Crown of Stars series, though this is the only instance of the trope I find palatable: nothing is circumvented because of it – in fact, it makes things more complicated – while Liath’s absence forces Sanglant to raise and protect their wilful daughter alone. In this iteration, it also helps that Blessing herself is a more realistic mix of childishness and maturity: her body might have developed quickly, but unlike Meyer’s Renesmee, she is still as naive, demanding and impatient as any toddler, and not just an angelic miniature adult. By contrast, the seven children of Snow White and Bigby Wolf in Bill Willingham’s Fables graphic novels progress from infancy to middle childhood in the blink of an eye for seemingly no better reason than that they can, a shortcut that allows their mother to continue her normal working life almost unimpeded. Rounding out the examples is the Icarii race in Sara Douglass’s Axis trilogy, all of whose offspring are sentient even before birth, able to communicate cogently via magic with both parents, thereby rendering the usual childhood troubles moot. This is possibly the weakest example, but even so, it is an instance of wherein normal human difficulties – such as parent/child communication – are erased with magic.

In each of the above instances, some explanation is given as to why these children grow so quickly. But even where that reason feels plausible, it also, with the notable exception of Elliott’s contribution, makes me sad. Because ultimately, what it seems to say is that motherhood – the process of carrying, birthing and rearing a child to an age where they are capable of walking, talking and learning on their own – is incompatible with a mother having separate adventures at the same time. That these parts of childhood must be removed from or circumvented in narrative, not because they might make for dull reading, but because they will inevitably curtail the actions of both parents (and particularly mothers) to such an extent that the story can no longer take place. That a fantasy heroine cannot be both a heroine and a mother at the same time; or at least, not a mother to small children. That it must always be one or the other.

Whenever it is that I have children, I hope that I’ll do my best by them. I don’t want to be selfish, neglecting their wellbeing and happiness for the sake of carrying on my own life as if I’d never had them, or as if they were no more than conversation pieces who’d changed me not in the slightest. But I refuse to believe that my own life, such as it is, will entirely cease to be. It will change, yes, in order to accommodate a different set of priorities, and I will change, too, because how could I not? It certainly won’t be easy. But in real life, parenting has no “skip to the school years” option. And every time I see a fantasy story take that route, a part of me worries that what I’m seeing isn’t just an easy television trope or narrative shortcut, but a warning about the perils of my future life.

Right now, it seems to me that children are an adventure in and of themselves, and maybe we in the fantasy business are doing a disservice to that fact by too often taking the easy, magically-aided route as regards the formative years of their upbringing. Alternatively, I’m being ridiculous and oversensitive. But even if I were given the choice, I think I’d prefer to slog out those early years and know my future children better than to press a button and have them be ready for school. Which, ultimately, seems to be the biggest cost of this trope – a loss, not of time, but family.