ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY – What’s Your Structural Focus?

This week we’ll be looking at Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Which is about as far as we can go from last installment’s Oscar Winner Manchester By The Sea.

Rogue One is a silly joyride of a script, built with half-drawn characters, nonsensical plot twists, and a hundred other flaws. And yet, while clearly feeling a bit trifling in scope compared to the other Star Wars films, it nevertheless delivers in a big way what its audience is seeking.

What’s also particularly interesting about Rogue One for screenwriters is the way it dives into a moment that is literally just a blip on the radar in Star Wars: Episode 4, and discovers there an entire backstory, worthy of a film itself.

The ability to dive deep into any moment and find drama is one of the most exciting things about screenwriting (and one of the most important skills you can develop as a screenwriter). It means that truly anything-- even just a little question like “how did they find those Death Star plans anyway?” can become a movie, if you’re willing to look closely enough.

But it’s also a reminder of how easy it is to get waylaid by backstory and exposition as we write and rewrite our scripts. Because as successful as Rogue One might be as a stand alone film, just imagine the effect it would have had if George Lucas had tried to squeeze all that exciting backstory into Star Wars: Episode 4, rather than just allowing the rebels to already have the plans.

He would have been 100 pages into the script, and Darth Vader wouldn’t even have boarded that first starship. We wouldn’t have met Luke Skywalker. We wouldn’t know the real story we were following.

So, we’re going to talk about what makes Rogue One work, and more importantly, we’re going to explore a concept called Structural Focus and how you can use it, both in writing and rewriting a script, to keep you focused on what really matters, whether that’s diving deep to find the drama in a specific moment, or keeping yourself above at a bird’s eye view, to keep your focus on the big picture of the story you’re telling.

So what makes Rogue One work?

If you’ve listened to my podcast on Star Wars: The Force Awakens then you know that these movies are being built more like a TV Series than like traditional Feature Films-- replicating the same Structural Engine over and over again to create a genre experience for the audience that feels the same as the one they got from previous episodes, but just different enough to make them feel like they got value for their money.

The elements that compose this Engine are always the same.

For the Star Wars franchise, it’s always some version of a Death Star, a McGuffin (usually plans) that everyone is trying to get their hands on, gorgeous space chase and fight sequences with super bad-ass technology, a juxtaposition of jaded “Hans Solo” and innocent “Luke Skywalker” characters working on the same team, a neurotic Droid, a complicated father/child relationship, and most importantly, a spiritual journey in relation to the Force.

As Episodes 1, 2 & 3 proved, Star Wars movies abandon these elements at their peril. Successful episodes can shake up these elements and approach them in different ways, but if they ignore them, the films stop feeling like Star Wars and start feeling like something else.

And of course if you’ve studied TV Drama, TV Comedy, or Web Series writing with us you know this is the exact same thing that happens in TV Series Writing.

Rogue One is just another reconstitution of these same elements-- some, in a vague way, and some in a very specific way.

At the core of the film are the characters we care about most. We don’t care about them because we haven’t seen them before. We care about them because we haven’t seen them this way before.

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