Rogue One: A Star Wars Story broke the tradition of the seven previous live-action films in the franchise when it went without an opening crawl and simply thrust viewers into the movie. Director Gareth Edwards made the choice to leave it out even though those floating letters of the original Star Wars essentially led to Rogue One nearly 40 years later. Now, a fan has created and posted their own opening crawl for Rogue One, which seems to capture the pulpy flavor of the earlier movies.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, Andrew Shackley posted his take on a Rogue One opening crawl, and it’s already gone wide on Reddit.
“If any film in the new Star Wars canon needed a crawl just to let people know where we are in time in this universe, it was Rogue One,” Shackley told THR. “At the very least, I feel these words give added weight to the opening prologue of the film.” He added that when he came up with the text, “I needed it to do two things. It was important for it to conform to the pulpy style and language of the series, and it needed to contextualize the action we were about to see.”
One of the reasons that Edwards gave for leaving out the crawl was that it might lead to another Star Wars spinoff movie. Shackley avoided that problem by keeping the crawl from describing too many specifics about the lead up to the story of Rogue One, and it did accomplish his goal of easily explaining why Krennic and his troopers were so eager to reclaim Galen Erso’s services at the beginning of the film.
Shackley did an admirable job with his take, and we agree that the opening crawl is part of what makes each Star Wars movie unique. But its absence in Rogue One wasn’t a deal breaker for us, and we were more than happy with the final picture.
What did you think of the opening crawl written by Shackley? Blow up the Death Star in the comment section below!
Image: Lucasfilm
