Ever since its debut in 1977, Star Wars, has captivated the minds of children and adults the world over. Its tale of underdog rebels fighting an overbearing dictatorship is tried and true. Its story timeless and its ideals pervasive.

Star Wars for all its universal themes and classic storytelling remains very simple in its morality and characters. It’s very black and white. The rebels are good without exception and the Empire is completely bad with very little moral complexity. The closet thing the good guys get to a morally complex character is Han Solo who comes off less as a sympathetic anti-hero than as a charming scoundrel whose hiding a heart of gold. As an entity it has tried to tackle more complex themes, but its previous attempts through the prequel films were stymied by heavy handedness and troubled screenwriting. Things seemed set in this paradigm of morally upright characters and good vs. evil plot.

Until Rouge One arrived.

Now if you haven’t seen Rouge One yet, stop reading this and get off your lazy bum and go see it. If you have, congrats on being a decent human being. Rouge One is different from all previous Star Wars films for a few reasons.

First, its heroes aren’t exactly typical heroes. Unlike the main films where the heroes are either important figures or blessed with tremendous power and a destiny to fulfill, Rouge One’s heroes by contrast are just ordinary people. The cast includes a turncoat pilot, a reprogrammed droid, a hardened intelligence officer, an ex-guerilla and criminal, a homeless monk, and a washed up guard. No one has any special powers (except that monk guy kinda), no one has a special destiny, and no one can be characterized as purely anything. They are simply the grunts in this war, the cogs in a vast machine. It’s a situation much more in step with real life where the vast majority of people in any group, rebellion or not, are just average Joes going about their lives.

Second, the characters exist in shades of gray rather than paragons of virtue or epitomes of evil. The rebellion itself has some of its goody-two-shoes glamour stripped away when it follows the all too real path of radicalization and dissatisfaction. One rebel cell tortures prisoners to discover if their information is truthful. Another cell tries to kill a weapons designer trying to give them information because he had the nerve to work for the Empire threatening him. This extends to the lead characters as well such as the rebel soldier who killed his informant to keep him from revealing too much and is implied to have done worse things in his past. In keeping with the theme of true to life most people are neither wholly good or evil, they simply go about their lives the best they can.

Rouge One attempts to make a Star Wars movie that is more adult in its themes and characters while being more true to reality in its depictions of the way the world works. It manages to do successfully what other Star Wars films have tried to accomplish before it. It’s a film where the heroes aren’t that outwardly heroic, where the ending is bittersweet, and, above all, it gives some more depth to the people living in a galaxy far, far away by telling their stories.