chamerionwrites:jedifinn:On Jenoport, he’d found Cassian staring at his blaster with tears on

chamerionwrites:jedifinn:On Jenoport, he’d found Cassian staring at his blaster with tears on his face. K-2 volunteered for a memory wipe in case Cassian’s “continued dignity and service demanded it”. — Rogue One Novelization by Alexander Freed#rogue one just perfectly illustrates the importance of a good exposition scene #like #i was immediately hooked #because how often is a star wars hero introduced by a scene of war execution? #it’s both clinically realistic and anything but cold-blooded or ruthless #-diego is such a talented actor that you can feel both is moral disgust and fervent determination #in the tiniest details of his expression #and so just in a handful of minutes #you get to the core of the character and of his moral dilemma #and the ethical compass of the whole movie is settled #….i’m still baffled #THIS IS SO GOOD #and also encapsulates the main strength of rogue one’s characterizations #which is to define its main leads through the action and not by the way of some static monologues (via lagren0uille)YES YES YESThis scene is such a sublime establishing character moment. It’s what - two minutes? And you get everything you need to know about the character: how GOOD he is at his job (he effortlessly plays harmless for the troopers and soothing for Tivik and then kills both of them - this man is as skilled in deception as he is with a blaster, not to mention incredibly quick-thinking and cool under pressure), his ruthless determination, the depth of his anything-but-ruthless anguish over his own actions, his buried self-loathing, his burning dedication. All of that and the hook for the main plot. That’s some first-class visual storytelling. And on top of Diego Luna’s flawless wordless acting here? The character’s very first words in the movie are “I came as fast as I could.” That’s it. That’s Cassian Andor in a nutshell. I literally have a tag called “#showing the fuck up is what cassian andor does best,” and it’s true - in the context of Jyn’s story, sure, he keeps coming back for her, but on a metaphorical level that’s who Cassian IS. He makes the hard choices. He does the hard work. He grapples with the moral compromises required by war, rather than washing his hands of it. He hauls himself hand over hand up that data tower while he’s bleeding to death inside (and don’t even get me started about my feelings on THAT as a metaphor for the character) and sees the mission through to the end even when he shouldn’t have anything left to give, when no one could possibly ever say he hadn’t done enough and more than enough, when even the narrative tells us his part in the story is over. He shows up. Against all odds, he shows up, and he saves Jyn, and he saves the galaxy. (Incidentally, this scene and the many others like it are also why I want to scream when people say Rogue One has little in the way of character development. Because look - we have a standalone movie here, with a breathless action plot and a central cast of six; it’d be understandable if the characterization were a little shallow. Except that we get more character development in this one scene than many movies manage in two hours.) -- source link

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