You Love to See It: Rogue One

Juggling overlapping and technically oriented action scenes at the climax of a movie is no mean feat, but Tony Gilroy manages to take a final battle revolving around landline access, a broadcast tower, and stellar gate mechanics and spin all that tangled wire into gold. The ending of Rogue One moves like a Swiss watch, precise and flawlessly paced without ever once feeling overly linear. Jyn and Cassian scale the transmitter tower as Rebel ground forces mount a suicidal campaign of distraction on the beach outside and in orbit the Rebel and Imperial fleets rip into each other in one of the series’ best space battles. It’s the closest the series has come to recreating the wire-taut thrill of that original attack run on the first Death Star, spacing out the flow of interdependent events so that at a key moment the entire mechanism snaps immediately, inevitably into place.

The film’s large cast of secondary characters feels surprisingly natural here, too. Even minor players like the Mon Calamari commander Admiral Raddus and handsome fighter ace Merrick have a few prior lines to give us a feel for who they are and what they care about, none of it talky or overwrought. The action has just enough emotional weight to keep it interesting, and moments like the surprisingly gutting death of wisecracking droid K2-SO and the blind monk Chirrut Îmwe’s heroic sacrifice serve to take each subsequent segment of the final act into deeper and more heartfelt territory. By the time the crippled star destroys spiral into Scarif’s planetary gate and the transmission breaks orbit, death is both inevitable and deeply personal, so close to the surviving characters that all possibly of flight is gone and all that remains is to face oblivion in silence, holding onto one last moment of human connection.

The movie’s facility for seamlessly blending scenes of destruction with a quiet, personal tone is hardly revolutionary filmmaking, but good craftsmanship is worthy of respect on its own merits. Where Galen Erso’s heartbroken but defiant message to his daughter Jyn adds a devastating personal element to the test-firing of the newly completed Death Star, Michael Giacchino’s melancholy score kicks in during its climactic destruction of Scarif to wordlessly recreate that same sense of deeply personal suffering tied to violence on a cosmic scale. It’s elegant, so well-done it adds posthumous gravitas to every offhand firing of a planet-killer in the entire silly series. Rogue One’s ending demonstrates the value of doing a simple job well, injecting — if only for a moment — a spark of life into the limp body of the mainstream blockbuster.