Rogue One How Will/Has "Rogue One" affect/affected your viewing of "A New Hope" when watched chronologically?

Love this thread. It has greatly enhanced ANH for me, it gives the story so much more emotional depth.

 

They are both one big story but yet Rogue One is such a dark and serious movie while ANH is fun and way more lighthearted.

I watched them both back to back today and the stark contrast in tone is quite jarring between the two movies!

 

Perhaps the difference in tone is kind of jarring. I like it though. It's sort of amusing that you can have these movies that share parts of the same basic story about the death star plans and that feel like they belong in the same universe and yet have them be so tonally different as movies. But then, life can be like that sometimes, can't it? So much of how we interpret events comes from our perspective. I sort of love the fact that when watched chronologically the story goes from a gritty life-or-death war tale to seeing a couple of unimportant hapless droids quietly bickering with each other in an empty desert.

 

I don't see a huge tonal shift, outside of the main cast of R1 dying. The rest of R1 may be a bit darker than ANH, sure, but not jarringly so. Jyn and Cassian's battle with the stormtroopers in the streets of Jedha City, for example, feel almost exactly like something you'd expect in ANH. So the end of R1 might be a big tonal shift from ANH, but the rest of the film really isn't, IMO.

 

Well said.

 

ANH is not so light, remember, we see Owen and Beru burned, we see a pile of Jawa corpses being burnt, we see a lot of pilots die, there is a torture scene, Vader chokes a guy with his hands (not the Force), one of the main characters dies, there is blood (cut arm in the cantina).... ANH is a little dark too.

And technically it is the Star Wars movie with the highest death count (Alderaan and DS 1)

 

I've always felt that Rogue One is the sort of thing that's happening just off the edge of the frame in the OT. To me, it gives ANH even more gravitas.

 

Also, taking the SW films as a whole, they all feel different, tonally, to one another to some extent. Some more so than others. Watching TESB right after ANH has a very similar effect, as they feel like very different films.

I guess that’s one of the things that’s always stood out to me about the SW series. Each film is quite a different beast to the one that came before. The OT is more obvious in this, as they are directed by different people, although even Lucas manages to make each of the PT films feel quite different to each other.

 

Edwards once said that Rogue One is like the shots in the trenches in ESB extended to an entire film, and I think it really does share its DNA most closely with ESB. I think the way both films now bookend ANH kind of makes ANH's breezier tone seem more sinister, because you know exactly what's at stake.

But yes, ESB has a similar tonal shift--you can see it immediately. Maybe this is more apparent to those of us who saw it when there were only two Star Wars films.

 

Precisely.

 

My favorite thing about that tonal shift that really hits me is when Han steps into the command center and Leia looks at him, along with the sounds of the instruments. It just announces "yes, this is a different movie."

 

A big issue with ANH is I would say the "Hidden Fortress" effect, a lot of the lighter elements of the tone of the film come from R2 and 3PO's involvement as kind of disconnected observers of events. They do drive the plot somewhat of course but there naturally that bit removed from it.

Han does also kind of fall into a similar kind of role as well providing more of an outsiders ironic commentary of events and I think K2 actually fills more of that kind of role than he does the droids in ANH albeit with less screen time.

When you look at the wider world of ANH I think it matches very well with Rogue One, the Empire is cast in a very serious fashion, Cushing maybe goes slightly larger than life but he isn't tearing up the scenery like a typical brit villain.

 

I don't think the tone is that different. The end of Rogue One and the beginning of A New Hope flow very well together as if they were meant to be seen back to back.

And as Ricardo Funes stated, there are some dark moments in ANH as well, from the burning of the homestead to the destruction of Alderaan, which is given even more weight since we saw the Death Star's power in the previous film.

 

I agree that while ANH is definitely somewhat lighter than Rogue One and TESB it's still serious enough and the campy stuff that is included is well integrated and doesn't take you out of the film. ANH is pretty tonally consistent. IMO, the tonal consistency issues don't really start until ROTJ where there's just some stupid stuff (tarzan yell, various ewok crap, etc) that just takes you right out of the film.

 

It does seem like it would be a bit of an abrupt change going from the intensity of the Battle of Scarif and the escape of Leia and her crew on the Tantive 4 to the more subdued, drawn out, and slower paced introduction of R2 and 3PO on Tattooine, all within the span of a few minutes. And that's also assuming you were to somehow skip the credits of RO, and then skip the opening of scroll of ANH and just go right into the opening shot of the Tantive 4 being chased by the Star Destroyer. Which in itself would seem like more of a continuation of the ending scene of RO. But to then go from that to the seeing R2 and 3PO wandering around Tattooine, and then Luke's introduction, and then Obi-Wan's introduction, would definitely be an abrupt shift in pacing. That whole sequence takes about 30 minutes. So while watching sequence, how are you not thinking about how this other major epic battle that literally just took place moments ago.

 

Well, so the bolded part points out that this isn't really an issue with how RO fits into ANH or how smooth the transition is between them... the shift from the Tantive's capture to the droids wandering on Tatooine was already there within ANH from the start. And great movies often have shifts in tempo and intensity. Sometimes the story needs to slow down and "breathe" some. Besides, the pace of life on Tatooine would be very far removed from the recent battle on/above Scarif.

 

This is where I had trouble going directly from RO to ANH. The pacing slows so much it was a tough transition to make which almost put me to sleep (probably didn't help that it was a Friday after a long day of work). This is why you typically don't have long drawn out endings after a climax of a story.

Tonally I don't think the transition is all that abrupt. the end of RO and beginning of ANH blend seamlessly, and I really don't think ANH is as lighthearted as many people seem to think. It has always come off as a serious movie to me, and the comedy was never of the laugh out loud type.

 

Good point. In and of itself it's not that big of a transition. And if it had just been the Tantive 4 floating around in space and then suddenly finding itself chased by a Star Destroyer it would flow perfectly. But my point was just in watching this whole huge epic battle take place on Scarif, and then within minutes being on slow paced Tatooine with characters we haven't seen up to that point (I don't consider R2 and 3PO's cameo in RO to be much of introduction to the characters). If it had cut to characters we came to know throughout RO that would be different.

Imagine watching that whole sequence of events play out for the very first time as if it was one movie. Starting from the Battle of Scarif to R2 and 3PO wandering around Tattooine. As I mentioned above, with these two characters we haven't been introduced to up to that point, it does seem a bit abrupt.

Keep in mind I'm not trying to criticize any of this. I'm trying to be objective about it.

And I agree about ANH not being as lighthearted as others think.

 

I actually think the tone of ANH is brought down a little now knowing what we know... And I mean that in a positive way! RO is the best SW film since Empire.

 

That's probably because ANH is a masterpiece that came at precisely the right time and reinvented the way movies were made using a centuries old model of archetypal storytelling . . . while and Rogue One is a soulless corporate product designed to appeal only through its many references to the trilogy.

 

Yes, that must be it.

 

The main thing I find jarring regarding the movies is that (for obvious reasons...1977...) the Rogue One crew are never referenced in ANH, especially the medal ceremony. Dodonna going through the plans as if he found them himself, after dismissing the notion of the DS less than a few days before.

That's really it for me

 

I think that has to be it lol because I really don't see it between those films at all. I think a lot of the "ESB is the greatest" fans like to act like ESB is some super dark, serious movie that's completely different from the others. ESB is loaded with witty banter, funny moments, and isn't a very dark movie honestly. It remains the only Star Wars movie where absolutely nobody important dies.

Rogue One has a more "ominous" tone than ANH, which is more hopeful and seems like an optimistic movie. They are supposed to be different, though, that's what happens when you have different plots. The "tone" of each movie isn't going to be the same when the plots are up and down haha. It doesn't seem "jarring," rather it seems like ANH is the first film on the rebound, after the dark events of the prequels and Rogue One.

 

ESB just feels a bit more restrained and intellectual than ANH. I don't mean that it's "more intelligent" but rather colder and less visceral. It just feels more sophisticated but less involving. If ANH is Wagner, ESB is Philip Glass.