PULP & POPCORN

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