Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company Review (Spoiler Free)

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Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company is a story of grit & determination.

Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company
by Alexander Freed

The bravest soldiers. The toughest warriors. The ultimate survivors.

Among the stars and across the vast expanses of space, the Galactic Civil War rages. On the battlefields of multiple worlds in the Mid Rim, legions of ruthless stormtroopers—bent on crushing resistance to the Empire wherever it arises—are waging close and brutal combat against an armada of freedom fighters. In the streets and alleys of ravaged cities, the front-line forces of the Rebel Alliance are taking the fight to the enemy, pushing deeper into Imperial territory and grappling with the savage flesh-and-blood realities of war on the ground.

Leading the charge are the soldiers—men and women, human and nonhuman—of the sixty-first mobile infantry, better known as Twilight Company. Hard-bitten, war-weary, and ferociously loyal to one another, the members of this renegade outfit doggedly survive where others perish, and defiance is their most powerful weapon against the deadliest odds. When orders come down for the Rebels to fall back in the face of superior opposition numbers and firepower, Twilight reluctantly complies. Then an unlikely ally radically changes the strategic equation—and gives the Alliance’s hardest-fighting warriors a crucial chance to turn retreat into resurgence.

Orders or not, alone and outgunned but unbowed, Twilight Company locks, loads, and prepares to make its boldest maneuver—trading down-and-dirty battle in the trenches for a game-changing strike at the ultimate target: the very heart of the Empire’s military machine.

Over the course of nearly four decades, Star Wars has always toyed with the idea of war from the perspective of the front-line soldier. Right from the get-go, the first human faces you see in the film are Rebel Alliance soldiers preparing to defend the besieged Tantive IV. I can see the faces of these unnamed ranks clearly in my minds’ eye, even though they said nothing and died almost immediately. But Lucas let the camera linger on these soldiers, and we are with them while they hear the invading force approaching. We see their eyes wander, we see them steel their nerves for battle. We marvel at their amazing sideburns.

Decades later, Lucas would take these ideas further, exploring a ground battle of epic proportions in Attack of the Clones that made the battle of Hoth a minor skirmish on screen. However, it was only a few minutes of battle, really. Aside from realistic battlefield chatter between troopers, there was no characters developed here. During this decade, the war docu-drama was also being revolutionized through film efforts such as Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, and We Were Soldiers, to name just a few. To say the climax of AotC was not inspired by this film movement would be an understatement.

A few years after that, The Clone Wars was promised, prior to its debut, as a series that mixed Band of Brothers with Star Wars, following embattled clone troopers through the course of the war. And while there were certainly a few through-lines with familiar clone squadrons, The Clone Wars strayed far from its mission, choosing instead to follow Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka more closely than originally conceived.

Now comes Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company, and if there were ever a story that skewed close to the arc and the spirit of Band of Brothers, this would be it. Instead of Easy Company, we follow Twilight Company, the battle-hardened, front-line group of the Rebel Alliance that are the first to invade and last to leave. Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company as a novel is a patchwork of battles and soldiers that come and go, with conspiring villains that the author cuts to without preamble. Much like in Band of Brothers, readers watch the members of Twilight Company move up through promotions and evolve in leaders of the Rebel Alliance. It feels busy, and bustling, and action envelops the pages fast and furious–so much so that it may be worth a reread, or at least a very close initial read.

I’m not sure that Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company is for every Star Wars fan. Don’t expect much in the way of core characters, who stay at the periphery of the action at best. In fact, with the way the action flows in this story, it’s hard to find a central character in this story to anchor upon. Perhaps this lends itself to Freed’s background as a games and RPG writer; he tends to invest his time into the action, scenario and worlds that he implants his characters into, letting situations play out, almost arbitrarily, to characters in the story. One minute, there’s a battle the next, a character you were just getting to know is dead. That’s Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company, and while it can be jarring, I think it is the book’s greatest strength–it delivers the chaos and unpredictability that soldiers find at the front of war. If you’re looking for Star Wars with a different flavor, this is the book for you.

I look forward to revisiting Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company in a few years to see how it feels a part of a larger continuum of canon, and I think it will be discussed for along time as something rather unique int he story of Star Wars. After all the efforts of Twilight Company would have once climaxed at the end of a book in a deciding victory; now, they are just a unique chapter in a struggle that is, at this time, without end.