Rogue One: A Star Wars Story does a lot of things to make it clear to the viewer that it is, in fact, a Star Wars movie. However, there's one iconic part of the franchise missing from the film and the man responsible for creating it isn't happy. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is missing an opening title and text crawl and the man who spent countless hours trying to create a version that George Lucas liked, really thinks it was the wrong move.
Frankly, it is a huge mistake, because the image is so iconic and it's so important to tens of millions, hundreds of millions of fans. I couldn't imagine it starting without that. It's foolish.
Dan Perri is the man credited with creating the opening of the original Star Wars and when The Hollywood Reporter asked him what he thought of the new film not using it, he didn't hold back. Of all the things that went on behind the scenes of the creation of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story one of the most hotly contested seems to have been whether or not to open the film the same way as all of the others. On the one hand, no Star Wars film has ever happened that didn't start that way, but on the other, there's never been a Star Wars movie like Rogue One. It's a different sort of animal, and as such, Lucasfilm wanted to give the film a different feel and thus decided against opening it the same way. They have said that the title and text crawl are exclusive to the "saga" films, referring to the episodes that make up the Skywalker family history.
I'll admit that even being prepared for it, as the word going in was that the classic opening would not be there, the most jarring thing about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story were those first few seconds where the movie began. I was still half expecting to get the fanfare opening and the words STAR WARS on the screen, even if the text crawl didn't follow it. While the film basically opens exactly as the rest of them do following that, with an image of deep space and a ship coming into view, the opening did feel strange. Even when the title of the movie does appear, the words Star Wars are nowhere to be seen.
At the same time, as much as Rogue One felt like a Star Wars movie, it also achieved its goal of being something different. Perhaps that shift in the opening that set me off actually better prepared me for the different sort of movie that was to come.
What did you think of the opening of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story? Should it have started as all the other films have or did they make the right call by doing something different? Sound off in the comments below.
