This review is inspired by the Daisy and the Trouble With Life books, which I have been reading with my six year old daughter lately, perhaps a little too much.
This week I went with my 15 year old daughter to see Rogue One, which is a Star Wars film not part of the main Star Wars series. Beforehand we ate at the Arndale Market. For those who like to know about these things, she had a very plain, flat pizza and I had a curry in a squeaky plastic box which I ate with a plastic fork. Artisan this was not.
The 15 year old had seen all the Star Wars films, but I’d only seen Star Wars, and I was, what, six or seven years old at the time. The trouble with seeing a Star Wars film when you’ve only seen one of the others is that you spend the first 20 minutes not having a clue what’s going on. Who is that person? What planet are they on now? Can’t it just slow down for a bit, or better still stop altogether to let me do a bit of Googling?
Still, after a while you start to get the gist. Jyn (Felicity Jones) is basically a good sort but the rebel alliance, who are battling the Empire (Darth Vader’s lot) don’t trust her because her dad - a scientific genius - was coerced by the forces of darkness into designing their flagship killing machine. How am I doing?
Unfortunately I often get very sleepy after eating. The trouble with watching a very long film in a warm cinema just after grabbing a curry in the Arndale Food Market is that you’re liable to nod off for a bit and have even less idea about which side that one who looks a bit like that other one is on.
I jolt awake to find Jyn proving her worth by setting off with a motley collection of renegades and misfits to take on the might of the Empire. Many long action scenes ensue. The trouble with long action scenes is that you that start daydreaming and miss very important parts of the story. Lucky, then, to have a 15 year old on hand to later explain that those characters you fondly believed had lived happily ever after had in fact been obliterated while you were thinking about fixing a puncture on your bike.
The story moves on to a planet called Scarif, where Ben Mendelsohn turns up as a pleasingly unpleasant Empire officer called Krennic. The trouble with seeing Ben Mendelsohn playing a horrible old baddie is that you can’t help but remember watching him play a lovelorn teenager in The Year My Voice Broke when YOU were a lovelorn teenager, and despair at where the years have gone.
Back with the film though. In the carnage that is Jyn’s mission hundreds upon hundreds of stormtoopers are being wasted by Jyn and her plucky crew. The trouble with watching Rogue One when you’re 46 is that you can’t help but worry about the stormtroopers - do they have storm partners, storm lovers and storm children who will sit up and wonder why they haven’t come home that night? And you can’t help but think to yourself, does it all have to be quite this violent?
As things start to look bad for the Empire it’s a relief when the one character I definitely recognise turns up. The trouble with Darth Vader when you’re 46, though, is that he’s just not that scary. In Rogue One he comes over as like a moderately successful middle manager. He adeptly arbitrates over a workforce dispute, he never expects his team to do anything he isn’t willing to do himself and he demonstrates strong risk awareness and decisive decision making skills. You half expect him to get his team to brainstorm the Empire’s key values.
The story culminates with Jyn battling to steal her dad’s plans from the Empire and transmit them back up to the rebels - as it happens to the late Carrie Fisher’s superimposed face. According to the 15 year old Rogue One is set just before the first - or fourth or whatever - Star Wars film. Let’s say 1976 then. The trouble with trying to upload the plans to the Death Star into space in 1976 is that the wi-fi wasn’t very good back then. Without giving anything away, a Telex machine might have been a better bet.
Did I enjoy Rogue One? I did. Most of all I enjoyed talking about it with the 15 year old on the way home. But the trouble with seeing a film about a young woman who hero worships her dad who is a brilliant scientist, when you are with your daughter and you are not a brilliant scientist, is that it can make your own accomplishments, like more or less following the plot of Rogue One, seem rather modest.
