Nobody knows quite what to expect with the first Star Wars movie that will tell an entirely separate story from the rest of the franchise. Director Gareth Edwards seems to want to prepare us for a different sort of Star Wars movie. While we can expect many aspects of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to feel like the familiar Star Wars universe we know, Gareth Edwards says that Jyn Erso will be a very different sort of Star Wars hero.
Events take place that just shatter [Jyn's] life and send her off to basically be raised as a soldier in the midst of a war. She ends up not the person she was supposed to be. Even though we're not telling the story of Luke Skywalker, it was important to me that we capture the same themes and emotion. But the film doesn't unfold how you think. It's not the same path as Star Wars.
This is exactly the tightrope that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has to walk. Gareth Edwards is telling USA Today that he's simultaneously trying to make a Star Wars movie, while also making something that's a different kind of Star Wars movie. While the "themes and emotion" of Rogue One may be like the rest of the Star Wars franchise, it would appear that the story is not, as Edwards promises that the plot is not necessarily going to go where we might think.
One then wonders, of course, exactly where it might go. One could argue that both Jyn Erso and Luke Skywalker grew up as somebody other than the person they were supposed to be. Luke is hidden from his father so that he's not raised in the Dark Side of the Force, but then is raised without any knowledge of the Force at all. Jyn has her father taken from her, forcing her to grow up fighting. When presented with the opportunity to fight in order to get him back, how does one respond to that? If and when she is successful, what happens next? Do you continue fighting, as it is the life that you've known, or do you finally stop? The fact that Gareth Edwards says that Rogue One will not follow the same path as Star Wars would seem to imply that Jyn Erso will not go on to become some sort of hero of the rebellion as Luke did. But if not that, then what?
Will Jyn Erso give up on the rebellion once she has her father back? Will she even survive Rogue One : A Star Wars Story? At this point, we have no idea and we still have a couple of months to wait before we figure it out.
