The first in an open-ended series of "Star Wars Stories", i.e. "random one-off genre exercises set in the Star Wars universe that allow Disney to exploit the brand name annually rather than wait two whole years, I mean, for God's sake, we're capitalists over here", Rogue One is a thing that has customarily not gone well for Star Wars in the past: a prequel. But for the first time in in four tries (six if you count the made-for-TV Ewok movies from the 1980s, seven if you count the 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and a great many if you count the Clone Wars and Rebels TV cartoon series, but I don't know that you'd necessarily want to count any of those things), it is a prequel that actually does what a prequel is in theory supposed to do, which is to make the original thing seem even better by adding depth to the backstory. The film ends about a half an hour or so before the original Star Wars begins, having spent two hours and fourteen minutes packing meat onto the skeleton of two lines from the title crawl first presented in 1977: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star".
So, Rogue One does indeed involve Rebel spaceships winning their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. It's not, for the most part, a film that traffics in surprise, except in the smallest sort of ways (like, the Death Star can also target individual cities, it turns out), and the easiest complaint about every prequel ever made in any narrative medium applies: since we know where this is going before it ever starts, it doesn't "matter". Add to that how very transparently this is a cash grab (a characteristic it shares with every single Star Wars movie or television production made since 1978, so let's not get too shirty about it; but still, a Star Wars theatrical released less than 365 days after the last one definitely has the tang of grotesque corporate greed about it), and it's easy to suppose that this is crass and horrible and utterly unworthy of anyone's time.
Here's the thing about "not mattering" - that's kind of the point. We know that the Rebels will succeed in getting the Death Star plans, and in broad terms, we know that it's not very likely that any of the particular Rebels who do so will survive, or we'd have likely heard something about them. We know who ends up with those plans, and we might assume that we'd probably see her, if only the actress who played that character wasn't 39 years older, and there's certainly nothing we can do these days to make soulless CGI zombies who look like actors from 1977 (I tease CGI Leia - she is by far the less-objectionable of the two eldritch CGI abominations in the cast). We know lots of stuff that the characters don't, assuming we've seen Star Wars, and oh my Lord, Rogue One assumes that we've seen Star Wars enough to have it pretty close to memorised (it also assumes, rather more dubiously, that we not only have seen Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, we've seen it recently enough and had strong enough positive feelings towards it that we'll remember that Jimmy Smits played Leia's adopted dad in it for like thirty seconds). That doesn't make us smarter than the film, per se; it makes us exactly as smart as the film, which is the most fatalistic thing Star Wars has ever done. It is a film that feels less "predictable" than "inevitable"; there is a sense of glowering doom, of some horrible fate hovering right over the characters (literally, in the sequences where the Death Star goes on its city-destroying rampages). They say "it's the first Star Wars film that's about war, in the stars", and that's so not true at all - every last one of the films has had a showstopping combat scene, though they're among the least-interesting parts of both The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: The Force Awakens - but it is the first Star Wars film where war feels like it has pervaded everything and made it horrible and beastly. And that's true even when the script is collapsing all around, meaning that no matter how terrible it gets as a piece of storytelling - quite bad, at different points in the first 40 minutes - it remains a hell of a good atmosphere piece.
Good atmosphere, after all, is probably the thing director Gareth Edwards does best, and while we'll never know what was changed during the infamous reshoots in the early part of 2016, the fingerprints of the man who made the 2014 Godzilla are all over Rogue One. Both are marked by a profound gloominess, and both evoke a staggering sense of enormous grandeur: in a way that never happened in Star Wars or Return of the Jedi, the Death Star feels huge beyond the possibility of the human being to comprehend it, whether it's a shot of its concave laser array being slowly pressed into place while giant starships flutter around like starlings, or the image of it rising in the daytime sky. Ruined statues of unknown ancientness dwarf unspeakably vast deserts. A tower rises above a bucolic water planet. It is maybe the vastest Star Wars; nor has any film since the first one made the galaxy feel so much frightfully larger than the people inhabiting it (even Empire, for all that it's my favorite, is guilty of making it feel like the whole universe could be traversed in a few hours, max).
Really, everything about the tone and style are superb. It is a movie full of places that feel like places, not the themed lands in a Mario game. The industrial space where we first meet Diego Luna's morally grey Rebel soldier Cassian Andor (morally grey! in Star Wars! and I might also add that "Cassian Andor" is a strong competitor for Best Star Wars Name Ever), however briefly spotted, is a thrillingly tangible space, and it's probably the first wholly persuasive new Star Wars location since Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace first left Naboo. The de rigueur desert city manages to suggest Star Wars's Mos Eisley only insofar as they feel like they come out of the same pan-galactic culture, while feeling like a different place built by different people for a different purpose. In fact, the movie is particularly excellent at evoking that feeling: perhaps the best thing about it is that it feels like a movie made by people who'd seen Star Wars and none of the other movies, and set about the task of building out the world in the direction of other, more dour '70s sci fi.
What I have described so far isn't just the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back - it's the best Star Wars movie, period. And I'll stand by the claim that the strongest elements of Rogue One, including its enormous sense of scale, its filthy, lived-in production design (this is far and away the dirtiest Star Wars film since 1977), its sense of gravity in the face of war, and the like, are the equal to anything in this franchise, if not superior. Oh, and the action! The action! The film is stuffed with action setpieces, and none them are "bad", while the very best - such as the one that introduces Donnie Yen's Force-sensitive fighter Chirrut Îmwe, or the fucking breathtaking closing 30-minute sequence involving one of the best space battles in the history of sci-fi movies, an excellently well-paced ground battle, and the thriller-style attempt to grab the Death Star plans from a giant tube pointing at the abyss - are the absolute pinnacle of 2016 popcorn cinema. If Rogue One was only its concluding hour, it would be the second-best blockbuster-type movie of the decade, behind only the unbeatable Mad Max: Fury Road.
But it is not only its concluding hour, and it's not only its strongest elements. And two of the elements that aren't so strong are fairly prominent: the script and the characters. As far as the script goes, the problem is almost entirely in the exposition. Rogue One is deeply ambivalent about what audience it wants: people who know Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, and Revenge of the Sith by heart, or people who just wandered into the theater for no reason. The result is a movie that, after its beautifully-shot and tense opening (the great Greig Fraser served as cinematographer, but he gets only a handful of moments to show off; after the grey-and-green opening, it's only the rainy night scene on whichever the hell planet it is, where they went for whatever hell reason that really stands out as particularly well-shot), goes to hell for a solid 30 minutes or more, as it shuffles around locations, characters, plot points, and exposition in a slurry that makes no particular sense, and feels like it either needed to be streamlined, or significantly expanded. It is "this happened and this happened and this happened" storytelling of the worst set. There are great moments individually studded into this: the whole sequence on the desert world Jedha is everything I want space opera to be. But the whole of it is a mess.
The characters, meanwhile, they just suck. Maybe the one exception is the sarcastic droid K-2SO, voiced and motion-captured by Alan Tudyk, who's only the sharp-tongued comic relief, anyway. Some of the characters are redeemed by strong performances: the bland Imperial functionary Krennic would be an awfully dreary villain if it wasn't for Ben Mendelsohn coming along to play him as a mildewy careerist bureaucrat, terrified of getting people in power mad at him and taking out his frustrations on the people below him. Twitchy ex-Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook wouldn't even register as an onscreen figure if it wasn't for Riz Ahmed's best-in-show performance as a bundle of nerves and moral panic. But the leads are both terrible: Cassian deserves a more robust, darker performance than Luna gives him, and the film's actual protagonist, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), is such a misfire that it took me 1800 words just to acknowledge that she exists. The character as conceived is satisfactory enough: a prickly misanthrope who resigns herself to doing right because somebody damn well has to, though the reshoots (allegedly) sanded off some of her edges. The character as written is a bundle of clichés, but so have been a great many Star Wars characters. The character as played is a wet twig: I'm still waiting for the Felicity Jones performance where she does fucking anything, and it looks like I shall have to continue to wait: this is all sullen-faced pouts and flat line readings and no sense that the character feels a solitary goddamn thing. By the time it ends, Rogue One has become mostly an ensemble piece, and people like Yen, Ahmed, and Jiang Wen are good enough to make it work. Even Tudyk, who's just playing the embodiment of sarcasm. But when it's mostly just the Jyn Show, it's some pretty rough going.
There are other flaws along the way: it's besotted with fannish cameos and in-jokes, some of which work (the stormtroopers who are shooting the shit about some piece of tech, a call-back to a brief scene in Star Wars, are particularly appreciated & add much texture to the film's world for such a small gesture), some of which are all-time great (Darth Vader's climactic scene, right out of a horror movie, is hands-down the most visually exciting presentation of the character ever). But more of them are bad and annoying (the walrus man and "I have the death sentence on twelve systems" guy didn't belong her and it's irritating that they show up), or completely repulsive (Darth Vader's first scene, also right out of a horror movie - specifically one of the latter Nightmare on Elm Street - "don't choke on your ambitions" my ass). Michael Giacchino's music mostly works as a John Williams pastiche, but it's thoroughly unmemorable, blowing past The Force Awakens (which at least had Rey's theme) to set up shop as the weakest Star Wars score ever. And I'm maybe not even excluding the Ewok movies from that calculation.
And there is, of course, a special place in hell for all the people who thought they could put over that act of digital grave-robbing and bring Peter Cushing back to a shockingly unpersuasive simulation of life. As a character in the story, Tarkin is used to exquisite effect - he's the ice-cold Nazi monster to Mendelsohn's banally evil German functionary - but the waxen stiffness of the animation (I think he's probably tolerable in stills, when you can't see how his face just. Won't. Move) ruins it completely.
The point being, when Rogue One is good, it is VERY good. When it is bad, it is... well not prequel trilogy-bad, at least. And it has the common decency to end on its best stuff, so it leaves you walking out with a jazzed-up feeling of enthusiasm, and a heightened appreciation for the stakes of the original Star Wars (this film dignifies the Rebellion by letting it feel like a genuinely desperate rag-tag band, and not just some folks we see one time in a conference room). It's pretty great, and pretty rare, for a prequel to retroactively add depth to the film it precedes, but damn me if that's not what happened here. The film's sins exist, and they are bad sins, but frankly they're so effortlessly wiped out by all the things that it does well, and all the new things it adds to the Star Wars universe, that I barely even cared about them when they were in the act of bothering me.
8/10
Reviews in this series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
The Star Wars Holiday Special (Binder, 1978)
The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
The Ewok Adventure (Korty, 1984)
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (Wheat & Wheat, 1985)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Filoni, 2008)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
I wholeheartedly agree on almost all counts. When it's good, it's overwhelmingly great. And it has flaws that are nearly movie-destroying in wrongheadedness. But somehow, when the smoke clears, I end up loving it more than not.
ReplyDeleteI have a couple of nagging beefs that expand a little bit on what you already said:
1.) The fan-service in this movie is ATROCIOUS. Just mind-bogglingly awful. Prime example: Had they just included Jimmy Smits as Bail Organa, without even naming him or remarking upon his presence or drawing any attention to him at all, it would've been kind of brilliant. But the use of a dramatic musical stinger as he steps out of the shadows is unfathomably stupid: the kind of people who are really thrilled by the appearance of characters they recognize will feel cooler about it if they don't have a bright neon sign pointing them, the kind of people who will recognize Bail Organa don't NEED the neon sign, and the kind of people who neither know nor care will just be confused as all get out, since they recognize that the movie is somehow broadcasting that the character is important, but nothing that actually HAPPENS in the movie supports it.
2.) Christ, CGI zombie Peter Cushing is awful. He might have worked great in the narrative, but I literally failed to pay attention to anything that was being said anytime he was onscreen. I was so distracted that I stopped registering what was happening on a narrative level.
3.) Diego Luna's generic-ish hero performance would, I think, be much more interesting if the script committed to the darker shades of the "moral gray" the character is so clearly meant to represent. The clash between the two would become a wonderful piece of audience cognitive dissonance rather than just a bland, airy nothing-ness. For example, I am convinced that Cassian NOT following through on the assassination of Galen is the direct result of studio-mandated rewrites/reshoots. Nothing in his character arc justifies or explains why he would suddenly hesitate now, and the fight he has with Jyn afterwards has too many conspicuous qualifiers ("They were orders! ...that I didn't follow!"), and watching him straight up murder someone who we've been asked to empathize with from the very first frames of the movie would've really driven home the "moral grey" and "war is hell" undertones of the movie. Instead, it felt like they pulled their punches, and as a result, both the character and the performance are rendered toothless.
I don't want to sound like a fanboy here (probably to late for that) but when Cassian killed his compatriot at the beginning of the movie the look on his face conveyed his inner turmoil at having become so ruthless. Later, after he learns that Gaylan is in fact a rebel hero who created the means for the alliance to destroy the death star, he can't go through with killing another ally simply because a superior who had no understanding of the situation ordered him to.
DeleteThis became a little clearer on my second viewing (p.s rogue one holds up tremendously on a second viewing).
I mostly agree with this review, but no singling out of Mads being his regular incredible self?
ReplyDeleteGreat review, although you will find plenty of defenders of the Clone Wars TV series on the internet. I've heard from a great number of peps it's a vast improvement over both the pilot/preview film and even the prequels, although I haven't watched much of it myself. The reception to Rebels seems to be a bit cooler by comparison, but Wedge is in it so that earns it a few points.
ReplyDeleteCGI Tarkin is proof that this technology is at least a decade off if not more. There are some parts where it looks passable, but like you said, then he starts moving (or not moving as it may be). I wonder if they had an actor stand in that they simply pasted a head over.
In fact there are four eldritch zombie cameos - the two pilots that led the final attack on the Death Star show up for a line each on the battle. They each look fine, mostly because in each case their faces are half-covered by orange goggles and headset microphones. I also thought Leia looked alright in her very brief cameo, mostly because she barely moves. But Tarkin, man. What a nightmare. They had no trouble at all casting a living human being as Mon Mothma, and I can think of at least three skeletal British actors right now that could have taken that role and chewed it to pieces.
ReplyDeleteThe worst of the cameos had to be R2-D2 and C-3P0, who showed up at a time and a place that pretty much guarantees there was NO WAY they could have been aboard Tantive IV at the beginning of Star Wars.
@Brian,
ReplyDeleteThe X-Wing pilots look convincing because Edwards recycled actual alternate takes from A New Hope in the final battle.
This movie may be flawed, but it's triumphant on many counts and reinvigorated my love for Star Wars in a way The Force Awakens never did. I have to disagree with Tim that the characters aren't compelling. As far as Star Wars movies go their characterization was practically Shakespearean. I actually wish we could swap casts for Episode VII and just follow this crew on a new adventure.
And I love, love, love that they turned a huge plot hole in A New Hope (the Death Star being built with such a glaring weakness that one blast to it would cause the entire space station to explode) and turned it into one of a New Hope's coolest details.
ReplyDeleteSo why did a specially designed flaw in Death Star I that led to it's destruction get repeated in Death Star II, and why did it get repeated yet again in Starkiller Base decades later? It'd be nice if the new movies could at least agree on their retcons.
ReplyDeleteAnd I do think this movie was more satisfying than The Force Awakens, but I also don't think it hit the heights of that film's first 30 minutes. The first 30-40 minutes here were *terrible*, and there were so many little plot holes and weird character choices that it distracted me all the way down to the climax. And when are we gonna stop having Tatooine stand-ins every movie?? Figure out a new planet on your own why don't you! Plus, I really didn't feel the galaxy got bigger--since when can the Rebel Alliance order airstrikes anywhere in the galaxy on a moment's notice?
I dunno, I really want to like it, but I'm not sure how much I can.
Death Star II was still under construction. As for Star Killer base - I'm with you on that one. The Force Awakens is getting worse and worse with age.
DeleteI don't know if they used any physical spaceship models in this or not, but I was debating it:
ReplyDelete"Hmmm... that actually looks like it could be an intricately designed model! Even if it's not, that's pretty cool how old school it looks!"
Just before the moment when it first cuts to zombie Tarkin. My god. Those nightmares should be relegated to reflections only. We know the characters and can fill in the details using our imagination. Let the camera stay on the desperate rebel holding the Death Star plans as he keels at Leia's feet, only showing her in the reflection of his helmet or something...
Maybe the movie holds up on second viewing but in ten years those zombies are going to be even more glaring and, I think, disrespectful.
Other than that and some rushed editing, yes, it was an enjoyable Star Wars movie but The Force Awakens edges it out for me, mostly due to the characters and lack of face zombies.
Even Kylo Ren vs Mendelhson? I think the antagonist alone puts Rogue One in another league than the Force Awakens. Having a petulant incompetent millenials as a main antagonist was definitely novel in theory but the character's menace was constantly undercut by extremely broad jokey humour like his temper tantrums. The fact The Force Awakens played more like a greatest hit compilation than a story has definitely left it feeling like a trifle in the wake of Rogue One. It doesn't speak well to the future of the trilogy when what was supposed to be a one off seems vastly more consequential.
DeleteThe whole thing's better than Force Awakens, which sinks with its pathetic villains, and I'm also on the "Best Since Empire" team, but I guess I'm in the minority for liking the first half better for its intrigues and hints at a rebellion disintegrating into factionalism and paranoia. Whitaker's performance wasn't necessarily good but the role and the character's introduction were pretty alarming. It also sold me with that lightning Alliance attack on Eadu on why the Death Star seemed necessary. After all that it becomes just another Star Wars movie, albeit very good of its kind.
ReplyDeleteThe one dude on the Star Destroyer who Vader tells to prepare a boarding party sure as hell looked exactly like the actor from A New Hope, but I didn't notice if he was scary CGI or just a lookalike.
ReplyDeleteI loved Tarkin in the script so much, just deliciously evil. But going through this mental thing of "wow, that guy looks just like Peter Cushing, wait, does he have so much makeup his face doesn't move? Oh my Christ is CGI and gahhhhh"
(which will, for the record, have its share of spoilers, including the film's very last shot)
ReplyDeleteSo did I miss that bit in the review? Or did your review suffer from re-shoots too?
(sorry, I just couldn't resist the joke. I'll have to re-re-read the review and find the reference).
@javi: I think Tim meant his reference to the somewhat-better job the resurrection artists did on Young Carrie Fisher, since Leia's face is the last shot.
ReplyDeleteI kind of love this movie, despite its flaws--it's superior to TFA--and even though the whole thing, in seeking to fix a plot contrivance, opens up a pretty nasty plot hole. (Mainly, it cannot be explain why Galen does not simply give the lat/long coordinates for the Death Star's weak-kneed exhaust port in his message to Saw Gerrera--because guess what, nerds! It turns out that zero analysis of the Death Star plans was necessary, and therefore the Death Star plans themselves were ALSO UNNECESSARY. That is, unless I totally missed some bit about the anti-Mothmaites not believing the Rogue One gang without solid, incontrovertible proof--but I'm *pretty* sure I was paying attention.)
Also, K-2SO is better than BB-8, C-3PO, and R2D2. I don't even see how it's a competition.
@Hunter - The flaw that Galen installed was that the reactor was unstable, not the exhaust port itself. They still needed the plans to determine the best way to destroy the reactor, which ended up being the exhaust port.
DeleteEven if Galen did install the exhaust port, the message was cut off before he got to that part and destroyed along with Jedha. So, again, they need the plans.
I think the confusion about this plot point comes from people automatically assuming the "flaw" Galen talks about is the exhaust port, and not actually listening to what he's saying.
@Hunter Allen: Thanks. I haven't seen the movie and I'd read that the movie ends with two characters embracing awaiting certain death, or something to that effect (I believe most everyone dies, and like Tim points out early in his review, that was to be expected). Because of that I hadn't checked out Imdb's plot synopsis, where I assume the ending of the movie is described in detail, and so I missed Tim's reference.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely idea to end the movie on Leia. Both cgi "resurrections" sound like great ideas, pity the execution is not up to par, apparently.
The primary sin of Force Awakens was that it was just the original triology recycled. This is The Force Awakens recycled but with lousier character and without the light-saber battle which I, for one, really enjoyed. It was boring because there was nothing fresh there. At least FA had the Irish island at the end. I also can't agree about the fleshed out universe bit - particularly the city but also in general. I was missing more wide shots as well as the presence of characters who you might meet in an actual city. It did not feel alive.
ReplyDeleteWell, Im glad ya'll thought it was good.
ReplyDeleteIts the least bad prequel, I'll give it that.
@Sean: fair enough. It's not like it actually bothers me (the "nerds" I was referring to definitely includes myself), though it is indicative of the fan fiction approach to the Disney-era Star Wars movies (not in itself *necessarily* a bad thing, although it has occasioned some problems, moreso in TFA than here, I'd say).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that does gesture in the general direction of one my real problems with Rogue One--Galen is probably the most interesting character, in the most interesting situation, and we see him in 1)the prologue, 2)a flashback, 3)a hologram, and 4)through binoculars. It helps that Mikkelsen really sells the guy, I suppose, but I'd definitely have enjoyed a movie that spent as much time with him as it did with the pissing contest between Krennic and Tarkin.
@Javi: Yeah, you know, I think I'm practically alone in that I... don't hate them. CGI'd old men are definitely not ready for prime time (strangely, CGI Cushing seems wrinklier and crinklier than I remember Real Cushing being in Star Wars), but I don't like the idea that digitally resurrecting an actor is "sacrilege." If nothing else, it's certainly interesting as a technical exercise, even a failed one. (But tangentially, it's kind of a shame that The Congress isn't *actually* about its premise, huh?)
The trailer didn't do anything for me, but now I'm looking forward to this. It's fun to see what I agree with others on and what others are wrong about. But just so we're clear, I rate Death-Star-plans-stealing by the number of bothan deaths. So I gave Return of the Jedi a "many". I'm hoping Rogue One is at least a "three".
ReplyDeleteThere are people who hate the zombie character, and there are people who don't care, and then there are the angry people who think the ones who noticed the zombie are dumb, and I would be interested in seeing a statistic on the percentage of those people who spend more of their time interacting with digital video game characters than they do with physical humans. There was a review by someone I usually like where he went on and on about not agreeing with the [zombie] hate, and then I remembered he is a professional animator, and the world made sense again.
ReplyDeleteThe zombie bugged me a lot. I would start to get over it (but not enough that I didn't notice), and then it would turn, and then OMG its eyes! Make them go away! And I was ready to let it go, too. The rest of the movie was good enough. But then the end happened. And I sat in my seat silently screaming "please don't turn around!" Because, like you said, the movie has a reliance on a knowledge of Star Wars, and are people really going to wonder who is the woman in the white cloak with Carrie Fisher's voice? A Phantom Edit version of this movie would make me really happy.
I think the zombie stuff is being over exaggerated. It's really only a couple minutes of screen time total and the heights of the movie are so thrilling it really doesn't matter. I'm a huge Peter Cushing fan and I doubt he would have a problem with them using his visage. He was all about fun, entertaining movies. He'd probably take it as a compliment.
ReplyDeleteOh man. I just watched Star Wars '77 again, and while it doesn't affect my enjoyment of either that or Rogue One in the slightest, the opening scene of ANH is now made absolutely hilarious in context with the ending of Rogue: "This is a consular ship! We're on a diplomatic mission!" Oh, *are* you now? Are you *really*?
ReplyDeleteI'll definitely put myself in the best since Empire crowd. This movie was really everything I wish Force Awakens had been. Instead of a weak retread, we got a new story that really felt like a lot of the best of the Extended Universe. We had new places, new ships, and a lot of military SF.
ReplyDeleteIt's not perfect. Like many military movies the characters exist more as roles than as characters.
And the zombies.
To me, the zombies felt like they'd been transported in from a video game as much as anything. They moved stiffly and in slightly the wrong directions in their factial animation, like the boning in the character models had been rushed in favor of other parts of the project. At the same time, they moved a little too much, with meaningless animations that exist solely to keep them moving at all. The end result is far twitchier than anything human actors would have come up with. If it had been used in a game it might even have completely passed without note, but next to real human beings on real sets, the effect is just amplified, bringing out their true eldritch horror.
I don't quite get the love for this film, like people like Travis especially feel. The whole thing felt like it was self-consciously trying to be something so much greater than it was and it missed the mark. I'm not against a chapter in a a hugely commercial franchise trying to attain new artistic heights but this didn't work, it just came off as tedious and bland. The action was cool I suppose but without any emotional connection to the characters or situations (though it is technically tragic they all die) I'm left pretty much cold and not invested much at all in the battle scenes. In another words, the characters suck. Big time.
ReplyDeleteI will say that the tonal change was interesting, as were the atmospherics and expansiveness of its use of space.
Did your eyes stop working during the climatic space battle? It's pretty self-evident why people love it even if you didn't connect with it on a personal level.
DeleteGood review!
ReplyDeleteReally loved it. Low expectations, brought on by all the tales of re-shoots, most likely helped. Agree that the two leads, and the villain in my opinion, weren't nearly as interesting as the droids and Yen and the other team members.CGI actors were shit-- keep those things in the shadows for Crist's sake.
ReplyDeleteTim, what did you think of Whitaker? I got the distinct impression that his role was mostly scrapped when they re-tooled the film.
I'd personally put the blame on Whitaker's whole sequence for why the first half of the movie was such a weird slurry. His word voice, Bin Laden-ish characterisation (cave-dwelling extremist relying on machines to survive), and the weird bit with the telepathic torture octopus that went nowhere at all - it was all something that fit very poorly with the rest of the film as a whole.
ReplyDeleteMan, that mind reading squid wasn't even referred back to, was it? And Bhodi didn't lose his mind. Why the fuck was that left in?
ReplyDeleteTo ad tension to the scene of them escaping from Saw's prison -would the pilot remember his mission and purpose in time for them to escape the Death Star Ray with vital information? I don't know if it matters that the squid comes back into the plot. The giant asteroid worm in empire was even less essential to that film's plot and nobody complained.
Delete... but he didn't have any ill effects and remembered everything perfectly. It reminded me of the memory-erasing drill in Spectre that had Spectre no effect on Bond whatsoever. It was just a goofy scene that went nowhere, like a lot of Saw Guererra scenes.
DeleteYes he did. He had to be prodded to remember and was babbling incoherently afterward. I don't see how it's any more of an egregious example of something going nowhere than say the alien in the trash compactor in New Hope.
DeleteI love your reviews Tim, and almost always agree. Big exceptions are View to a Kill and this one. It completely fails at any attempt at story telling, and it is also so, so obvious. A mis-match of terrible, unnecessary expositions takes up nearly half the film and the characters suck. I think the real characters are worse than the CGI ones everyone complains about. My personal favorite moment to hate among all the misdirections and incomprehensibilities is when they are on that dark wet planet trying to get to whatever base it was and of course the rocks have to fall as they step just to show us how dangerous it is... Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. Bring on the Phantom Menace. At least that one was entertaining.
ReplyDeleteThey knew they needed the pilot. He has already delivered the hologram to Saw. Whether or not he remembered anything was 100% irrelevant. And then he snapped right out of it three minutes later anyway.
ReplyDeleteBaze was going to kill the pilot until the pilot came to his senses and started talking about how he defected to make things right. Baze likely wouldn't have blown open the door and freed him if not for that. Also, the pilot then would not have led them to Jyn's dad and Jim would have not seen him die before her eyes and have been motivated see his plan of revenge come to fruition. The pilot could have been completely fine when Cassian started interrogating him but that would completely uninteresting. The memory squid is justified by the plot. Whether you liked it or not is a different matter but it wasn't an extraneous addition.
Delete1) I liked it, but it's not as good as The Force Awakens.
ReplyDelete2) Zombie Peter Cushing looked fine to me.
3) The way the Red Letter Media boys are slamming this movie, you'd think it was secretly produced by Adam Sandler.
4) I heard about Carrie Fisher on the radio on the way back home from the theatre. Dammit.
"The characters...they just suck." I wholeheartedly agree with this and it seems like most reviewers I've come across agree with this too. This is a Star Wars movie we are talking about! Star Wars has always been about the characters! I just don't know how a Star Wars movie with characters so obviously underwritten and under-preformed can be considered the best since Empire. Was this really better than Return of the Jedi? Of course Return of the Jedi was the weakest of the original trilogy but I think we can all agree that it had some iconic scenes. I haven't seen that movie in over 5 years and I can still remember scenes from it. I don't think I'm going to remember any scenes from Rogue One five years from now, well, maybe the "Be Careful Not to Choke On Your Aspirations" scene, but I'm going to remember that for the wrong reasons. I appreciate good style and world-building as much as the next guy and I do respect Disney experimenting with different tones; the last thing we want is for them to make the same film over and over. But with this movie's utter disregard for character development and lackluster script, I just don't know how you can derive much pleasure from this other than "oh that looks cool". The only thing giving me hope for future installments is the knowledge that Rian Johnson is writing and directing Episode 8. His heart is in the right place and he has the talent and artistic integrity to pull it off.
ReplyDeleteFinally saw this today. I'm a RotJ fan so will put it as forth on my own list, but definitely ahead of last year's 'half a great film, half a remix' effort. I also feel that one won't age well once the 'new Star Wars: not totally rubbish!!' novelty wears off, but each to their own of course.
ReplyDeleteAgreed on the main characters, and some of the script did make me wince (the 'Are you kidding me?' line in particular jarred IMO). On the other hand I preferred the first half with its atmosphere and world-building to the obligatory space battle, which did have a 'here we go again' feel for me. I also had a terrible moment of feeling they would be a romantic subplot thrown in at the end, but thankfully not.
Two other thoughts are [spoilers]: was there a rule about named characters not dying from storm trooper shots? As far as I remember it's all grenades, death star and thumping a console. Mind you, at least we didn't get 'heart-breaking last words' every other minute (Matrix Revolutions-style)...
And finally I didn't have a big problem with the zombies myself. While I agree they're not quite 'there', when I saw Peter Cushing's CGI ghost I remembered Tim's review of The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires mentioning how PC seemed to be enjoying himself then. Anyone who went through that surely wouldn't mind a bit of haunting! And I did enjoy the character at least :)
Anyway, thanks as always for the review Tim. I don't tend to comment but I enjoy them all!
Quick question: did those who hated the CGI zombies see it in 3D? I saw it in 2D and thought they worked brilliantly, but I know others who saw it in 3D and thought they didn't look right, so I wondered if perhaps it was the conversion to the third dimension that was sending them into the uncanny valley.
ReplyDeleteI was amazed initially, that they had found an actor who resembled Peter Cushing so well, but then I worked out that they must be using this relatively new technology. It blew me away that this technology is now being used for films, I've previously only seen it on adverts (Dior and Galaxy/Dove chocolate for you Americans). I did think Tarkin looked a little creepy, but I just felt it added to the effect of the character; Krennic may be a climbing politician, but here is a man who has risen to his rank simply by virtue of being more ruthless, merciless and evil than you can possibly imagine. The creepiness of the close ups, rather than take me out of the film, just made him seem more tangibly evil. Seeing a young Carrie Fisher (RIP) worked perfectly well for me. If they wanted to have her at the end (and I thought it was a nice choice), having the original actress was essential for visual continuity.
I disagree. My favorite Star Wars movie after Empire is still Serenity.
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