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Page 36<br />
I wrote about showing Toshi Saving Private Ryan when he was first starting to<br />
talk about being a soldier. That sort of talk has ended on his part, but now he’s<br />
fascinated by war movies in general, and the idea of sacrifice in particular. We<br />
watched Hacksaw Ridge together when the screener arrived, and in our conversation<br />
afterwards, Toshi talked about how much more heroic he thought it was to put<br />
yourself in harm’s way when you aren’t going to get something directly as a result of<br />
it. He couldn’t believe that Andrew Garfield’s character would step onto a battlefield<br />
without a weapon and that he would keep putting himself in danger just to help<br />
someone else. It was the first time he considered that heroism during a war might<br />
have a broader definition than just being the person with the gun. Talking to Allen<br />
about Rogue One, it was clear that the same ideas were starting to occur to him, and<br />
he was rattled by the way it made him think about death and the finality of it. He’s<br />
used to good guys winning and bad guys being punished and no one really losing<br />
more than they can afford to, and the idea that you could win while still losing your<br />
life was a powerful disruption of how he thought things worked.<br />
One of the canniest things about Rogue One is the way it forces us to reassess<br />
things from other chapters of the larger Star Wars saga. It has become accepted<br />
wisdom that the Empire had to be fairly stupid to design the Death Star with such an<br />
insane flaw right at the heart of things, and now, thanks to the way this film works,<br />
we see that it’s not a plot hole at all. Instead, it’s an act of conscience performed in<br />
secret by someone who could not live with the moral baggage of having helped to<br />
build a gun the size of a planet. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) doesn’t have much<br />
screen time here, but I think he emerges as a very interesting character in a film that<br />
is loaded up with interesting characters. When he is killed by bombs dropped by the<br />
rebellion, it is an unexpected detail, but it fits in this particular story, which seems to<br />
largely exist to point out that morality can become very grey in a time of war, and<br />
much of what we call heroism is simple self-preservation. Real heroism comes when<br />
self-interest drops away and you act in service of something greater, and we see that<br />
happen with Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) when she first sees the hologram in which her<br />
father explains why he’s done what he’s done. If the Empire simply killed him, it<br />
would be easy to frame Rogue One as a revenge story. Here’s a girl who lost both her<br />
parents, and by the end of the film, she’s going to bring down the jerk (Ben<br />
Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic) who killed them.