Peter Cushing isn’t the only venerable film institution revived this moviegoing season. Cushing, who died in 1994, is digitally recreated as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the “Star Wars” film “Rogue One.”
It’s harder to say just when the movie musical died. Was it the 1960s, when bloated spectacles like “Paint Your Wagon” hit the screen?
When last sighted, movie musicals like “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Mama Mia,” “Hairspray,” were adaptations of stage plays.
If “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was a home run, “Rogue One” is a triple.
(Can you tell I miss baseball?)
It has been said that with the rebirth of the franchise a new Star Wars film will be released every year for the rest of your life.
If so, “Rogue One” is one of them. This latest chapter (fourth in chronological order, eighth total films released) in the saga by “Godzilla” director Gareth Edwards occurs just prior to the first original film.
The empire and Darth Vader, still, again and forever voiced by James Earl Jones, is already testing the planet killing Death Star. “Rogue One” tells the story of how Princess Leia and the Rebel Alliance got the plans that helped them destroy it in “A New Hope.”