Hold my beer while I try (and probably fail) to articulate this.
This movie is somewhat unique in my experience because the death of all the main characters seems like the good and necessary end to the plot, and I think part of the reason this is true is because, basically, they don’t die for shock value or because Anyone Can Die, they die because this is a war and they are people who exist solely in the context of the war. I love AU’s where Bodhi meets Finn and Chirrut explains the Force to Luke as much as the next person, but within the context of the characters that we are given, in order to complete their personal arcs to satisfaction, they all have to die in this war.
You have Chirrut, who is the last relic of a religion whose lifeblood has been stolen to power a weapon of the enemy–his only peace as a character is to die bringing that weapon and that enemy to its knees. There is no Temple for him to guard, there are only a handful of kyber crystals left in the galaxy, and there’s no way for him to change that. Characters need closure, it’s what makes an ending satisfactory, and Chirrut’s only closure is to do what he can to right this impossible wrong, there’s nothing else for him, and that means he has to die bringing the weapon down.
You have Baze, who doesn’t even have his faith anymore, all he has is Chirrut and his gun. Well, we just established that Chirrut has to die to close his personal arc. Baze has nothing to tie him to the world without Chirrut, because the war has taken everything from him–his people, his home, his faith, and now his partner. Baze is, I think, very much a story of loss, so his closure comes from knowing that he has reclaimed some part of that, and there is no way–given his character and what we see of him–for him to reclaim any of that except in the face of death, when he is able to lay claim to his faith again. And that’s only possible because, at the last moment, Baze has nothing except the faith that Chirrut held for him all this time. And of course he can only take that back in the face of certain death.
You have Bodhi, who is the one with the message. That’s what his whole arc is about, getting the message to where it’s supposed to go. I think I’ve talked about this before, but Bodhi…he’s pretty much burned all his bridges, his home in Jedha is gone and he’s a traitor and a rogue, all he has left is the message and the hope that someone is listening. For his narrative to end the moment he gets confirmation that “Yes, Rogue One, we hear you” is a very clean, natural close, because it offers him the assurance of a task completed.
And then you have Jyn and Cassian, who are very much creations of the war in their own ways. They exist because of the war. They would not tolerate being out of the war, because they’ve never known anything but. There is no future for them, the way they’re portrayed in the movie, except to win the war at the price of their own lives. They’re not villains to be redeemed or heroes to be lauded, they are people who have been carved so much into the form and function of a weapon that they wouldn’t know how to be anything else anymore. And we get that impression very much over the course of the movie, with the way that absolutely everything is second to Cassian’s mission and the way that even at her most removed Jyn is still a soldier at heart. They are Achilles, not Odysseus–there is not a safe haven and a home waiting for them. They are destined to challenge the unbreakable city and die bringing it down.
And K-2…K-2 is Cassian’s imaginary friend, in a lot of ways. He created K-2, he taught K-2, he fed love and humor and duty, always duty, into K-2′s circuits until there was no empty space left. Of course K-2 dies for Cassian. Of course he does.
So Rogue One works because these are all people whose personal narratives are crafted and supported by the war, and because these are all people whose closure is a grave. They’re not Luke, who closes his arc with saving Vader, or Han, who closes his arc with finding something to fight for and someone who loves him, or even Leia, who closes her arc by avenging her planet through the saving of another. They’re not the heroes of a grand and sweeping epic. They are the martyrs whose stories could only end in peace when they died doing their duty.
Bodhi, sweet angel Bodhi, paid all of the attention in the empire induction safety talk; he presses the three red buttons at 12, 6 and 3 o'clock, twists anticlockwise 45° and the grenade is disarmed.
Unbenkownst to Chirrut, Jyn placed her crystal within his staff, a tiny morsel of hope; the blaster shot headed straight for his heart, strikes it instead, and is deflected into his shoulder.
Baze, seeing his love in pain and in danger, but not without hope for survival, flies into a rage and fights his way back to the ship, dragging chirrut behind him; he kills 32 men, and saves one.
Cassian and Jyn are just about to step into the lift when Bodhi hisses from the radio telling them to get where he can see them FAST; they don’t look down when they step over Krennic, even when he grips Jyn’s ankle and begs
Two days later Cassian is well enough to argue his way out of medbay, down to droid storage, where he loads K2-SO’s last backup into another imperial droid; K3-SO sighs and says, “Did you let me die again? You know as soon as I work out how, I’m deleting the self-sacrifice algorithm you wrote into me.”
If I bring this back on my main will y'all get it to a nice round 500
anyway i love the fact that the rest of rogue one is like “grr murder revenge we are here to kick some empire ass” and then they’re like “hey goggles boy what’s ur deal” and bodhi goes “i’m gonna be brave and listen to my heart” and like. all the Grisly Rebels visibly melt a lil.
how long do you think it’s been since cassian last held someone, or was held? few months? years? over a decade maybe? this man’s family was killed when he was six and his only friend was a droid, i think it’s pretty safe to say it’s been awhile. there is so much bullshit here: like the way his eyes close slowly, savoring the feel of her, the weight and warmth. he breathes out, grips her tighter. the way she pulls him closer in response, the way they just ease together, like holding this person is the most natural thing they’ve ever done. GOD!!! what the fuck!!!!!!! this is bullshit. fuck diego luna and fuck lucasfilm
Okay, I have a lot of emotions about this.
I know all the rebelcaptain shippers like me love to tell our stories of Jyn and Cassian falling in love, making out in corners, etc, and in particular we love all our AUs where they survive Scarif and have a relationship, and make their way towards some kind of happiness together - & clearly we are a bunch of the most hopeless soppy ha’porths imaginable - but in allowing ourselves to wallow in all that we are half-forgetting how immensely subtle the canonical relationship is, how well scripted and how brilliantly acted.
Don’t get me wrong, I want as much as anyone to believe this could/should/would have been a love to sway the sun and the other stars! And I’m one of those who went into the film the first time really hoping that the script was not going to push another slightly-forced “we-only-just-met-but” romance on me. The love story crept up on me unawares, and tore my heart out; because incredibly, and largely by resolutely focussing on not telling it as a love story, they made it a completely believeable one.
Yet what we actually get to see is almost entirely platonic; two people who discover a kindredness of spirit, and who help one another to recover a sense of belonging; who become comrades, and are edging towards being friends, and who may be just beginning to wonder if they could be more; and then in the end they don’t have time. And yet, they manage to say everything that has gone unsaid, including all the might-have-beens, without a single word, in those two last scenes; the elevator, just looking at one another without speaking, and finaly on the beach by this simple act of holding one another in the face of death, being there
for one another
right through to the very last - which is an ultimate act of love.
Words, confessions of love, kisses, would snarl up the clear and unabashed emotion of this moment and burden it with too much thought, too much consciousness. It all stays interior, instead, and is shown only through their body language; through the things the OP here remarks on, they way they hold one another, so close and yet so gently, they way they fit together so tightly and find so much comfort in that closeness. All their awareness of the future they’ve laid down in order to complete their mission, all their awareness that they have come to like one another, that they would have been glad of the time to know one another better; their awareness that their chances have finally run out, but they won, is all carried just in the way they embrace. It’s that simplicity, that acceptance of the fact everything else must be left unsaid, as these two really quite ordinary, and very damaged, people - who in the end have found it in themselves to be consumately brave and honourable - accept their fate and roll with it, and pack all the years of comradeship, friendship, love, hope, that they could have known, into giving one another the last blessing of not dying alone.
And because we have two very good actors here, they don’t need any lines to do it. They just show it.
The result is almost a Sci-Fi equivalent to Hamlet’s “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be
not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all… Let be.”
so, the “pretending we’re married/together” trope is a great one but i think in chirrut and baze’s case, reversing it could end up in some of the funniest shenanigans ever
baze and chirrut, the most married couple to every marry - undercover and pretending they’re NOT married
maybe they’re trying to infiltrate the gang of an imperial stooge arms dealer on jedha, go in together and act as if they’ve never seen each other before, and bring down the operation from the inside. they’re working together because honestly, you need two people to do a job without even needing verbal communication, even when one of them is blind? you go to baze and chirrut
but asking them to act like strangers is impossible. they keep slipping and calling each other pet names. almost forgetting to sleep in separate bunks, and unable to sleep when they do so. freezing halfway through absent-minded displays of affection, before hamming it up and pushing each other away, “uhh what are you DOING” “GET OFF OF ME, YOU’RE NOT THAT IRRESISTIBLE” “SINCE WHEN!?”
having one of their normal arguments at a critical moment during an ambushed weapons drop when one of the marks roars in frustration, “would you two just FUCK and get it over with”
without thinking chirrut says, “that never works when he’s in a mood like this” and there’s a pregnant moment’s silence. then their contractor arrives and baze has never been more glad for a firefight to kick off
they agree never to take another job like it again. too damn difficult
anyways…if u think my ass is gonna be able to watch the next Star Wars movie see krylo ron and like be impressed by his powers when I just saw daddy v waste everyone in like 1 min….you’ve got a whole other thing coming
