A butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world and causes a storm on the other. Most people don’t think about that. Most people don’t realize that the moment they are living in right now is the direct result of a thousand small decisions made by people whose names they will never know.
That is what Rogue One is about. And that is why it is my favorite Star Wars movie. I know that’s a hot take. I know people will say The Empire Strikes Back, I know people will say A New Hope. But hear me out. Let him cook.
Without Rogue One, there is no Luke Skywalker. I mean that literally. The entire story of Star Wars, the rebellion, the fall of the Empire, Darth Vader’s redemption, all of it, rests on one thing. A group of ordinary people, nobodies, people the galaxy would never remember, going on a mission that was essentially a suicide run to steal the Death Star plans. That’s it. That’s the butterfly. And everything else, Luke becoming a Jedi, the destruction of the Death Star, the liberation of the galaxy, that is the storm that followed. Without Cassian, without Bodhi, without Chirrut, without Baze, without K-2SO, without all of them giving everything they had on that beach in Scarif, there is no hope. There is no rebellion. There is just the Empire, forever. The people we celebrate in Star Wars only got to be heroes because a group of forgotten soldiers made it possible. And nobody built them a statue for that. There was no victory parade for this small group of heroes that risked everything to save everybody.
What makes this film so different from every other Star Wars movie is that it is not about chosen ones. It is not about prophecy or destiny or the Force flowing through someone’s bloodline. It is about regular people deciding that something has to be done and that they are the ones who are going to do it, they are done waiting for powerful to take a stand or do something, they took matters into their own hands, even if it kills them. And it does kill them. Every single one of them. They don’t get a victory parade. They don’t get to see what their sacrifice built. They transmit that disk and they die on that beach and the galaxy moves on without ever fully understanding what it owes them. The galaxy doesn’t even know their names, and the sad truth is that they probably never will.
And then there is Jyn Erso. I relate to Jyn so much personally, she is one of my favorite characters of all time. She didn’t ask to be part of nothing. She was abandoned, an orphan girl, she was alone, she learned early that the world was not going to protect her so she had to protect herself. She built walls. She stopped believing in causes because causes had let her down. She wasn’t cynical because she was weak, she was cynical because she had been paying attention. And then something shifted. Not because someone saved her. Not because the world suddenly became fair. But because she decided, in spite of everything she had been through, that it mattered. That hope was worth fighting for even when the odds made hope look ridiculous and foolish.
I think of what Jyn was thinking. That there are moments where the mission feels impossible, where the people around you are few and the obstacles in front of you are enormous and nobody in power seems to be paying attention. And it would be so easy to decide that it doesn’t matter, that one person can’t change anything, that the Empire is just too big. That is how systems of power survive, not by defeating every rebel, but by convincing them not to show up in the first place.
Jyn showed up. That small group showed up. And because they did, everything changed. They never got to see it. But it changed. And that just breaks my heart, they never got to see the change they made, but they died knowing their actions changed the entire world.
I think about butterflies a lot, and the butterfly effects we all have on people. I think about that a lot lately. Rogue One taught me that. A movie about people who died before the victory ever came, and who made the victory possible anyway.
That’s not just a Star Wars story. That’s one of the most human story I’ve ever seen put on a screen.
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