Nearly 40 years later, the global situation has shifted. American military might has grown exponentially (thanks, in part, to Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”), the Soviet Union—another latter-day empire—has fallen, and America boasts a force that considers itself the peacekeepers of the world. In 2016, we are the undisputed masters of the universe, with a well-earned reputation for crushing our enemies. To the extent that adversaries dare challenge American power, they do it through asymmetric means—like terrorism or hacking—not outright war.
In 1977, this U.S./Empire parallel was there, but is far less obvious in A New Hope. The country was still nursing its fresh wounds from a protracted and painful conflict in Vietnam, and filmmaker George Lucas was fresh off of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a movie he passed up, worried it was too explicitly political. Instead, he plowed his outrage over the U.S. presence in Vietnam into Star Wars – he even once described the plot as “a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters,” according to a biographer — but as a child I never picked up on it.
Rogue One, by contrast, presents a Rebel Alliance far different than the white-washed, happily-ever-after rebels of the original trilogy.
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