[SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]
All right? Good. Let’s go:
The single thing that impressed me most about Rogue One was how Disney did the one thing that I’d have never, ever guessed they would: not force a family-friendly ending. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that Disney would have stood in the way of a sufficiently determined director. But, amazingly… they didn’t even try. From Forbes:
[Director Gareth] Edwards simply assumed that Disney would not let him kill the entire cast, particular the main characters of Jyn and Cassian. But when he pressed them on whether he actually had to do that, Disney got out of his way… “I [Edwards] kept waiting for someone to go, ‘You know what? Could we just film an extra scene where we see Jyn and Cassian, they’re okay and they’re on another planet?’” Edwards said. “And it never came. No one ever gave us that note, so we got to do it.”
It may be time to accept a grim truth: possibly, just possibly, the Mouse is not going to be the Main Enemy of the Star Wars franchise. It has, so far, given us things like Rogue One and The Force Awakens and Phineas & Ferb: Star Wars (do not mock it until you watch it) and these things Do Not Suck (I also hear the same about Rebels, but it’s on the to-watch pile). Either the people running the place are actually prepared on general principles to let what can be a very cranky, self-referential, and over-complicated franchise operate under its own quirky yet highly profitable ground rules – or everybody at Disney is a stone-cold Star Wars fanatic who is deathly afraid of being ostracized by their personal network of friends and loved ones because they mucked up the series even worse than the prequels did. Either one works for me.
Moe Lane
PS: Have at it, folks. Talk about the movie. If you put spoilers in comments, type [Spoilers] at the beginning of your comment so that people will be warned on the front page sidebar.
[Spoilers], maybe.
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I have not seen this movie, so I cannot comment too much on it, but I wanted to speak in broader terms of Star Wars under the Mouse.
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The thing that was the most optimistic for me when I saw Force Awakens was the light-saber duel in the snow. A buddy and I have discussed Star Wars to death and one of the things we always noted was how detached it usually felt. It had a tendency towards the sterile. This makes the fights seem disconnected and not real feeling. My solution: have a visceral conflict in a rain storm. Let the combatants get muddy. Let them get bloody. Convince me that there were real stakes and they were fighting for their lives. Star Wars too often forgets that.
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The fight in the snow, while not bloody felt more real than any lightsaber battle in the prequels. It felt like there were actual stakes.
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I have some quibbles about the characters, but it is early days yet and this could just be first impressions. I AM worried about the reuse of essentially the first movie’s story line. This could be due to them needing to reestablish the world and reconnect with the fanbase- we will see.
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Still, it did not feel like a movie designed solely to appeal to the kids, so that is greatly appreciated. That Rogue one is even more so an adult story is also heartening.
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Another question I have: can the magic of Star Wars survive a movie a year? I think it can if they keep trying to keep story quality up. If they get in a rush and NEED to get a movie out a year, then no.
As to the last point: they’re not so much doing a movie a year as they’re doing a movie every two years on two separate, staggered tracks. Which is a bit more manageable, assuming that you’ve got the infrastructure to pull that off. Which Disney does.
I didn’t mind that The Force Awakens felt a lot like A New Hope, because it wasn’t insulting like The Phantom Menence was.
Overall, I liked it. The assault on the base at the end was worth the price of admission alone. SarcBot 2000 was great too (Honestly, they should have named him 0R-1Y). The ending was fine, if kind of obvious from a meta perspective (How are we going to handle this new set of heroes we’ve retconned into the plot, yet never are never mentioned in the original trilogy? We’re not. They are all dead)
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But, I don’t think this one will ware well over time. The characters are too threadbare, the references to TOT too forced. And the CG versions of older/dead actors are borderline acceptable now, but will just be laughed at as time goes on.
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The writing really felt like a sincere fanfic. A decent fanfic, but still a fanfic. Written to support a action sequence someone had stewing in their head for 20+ years. It’s fine, but more than a little disposable.
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But this is where we are now since Lucas made those crappy prequels. OK to Alright movies in the SW universe are hailed as glorious returns to form.
Alan Tudyk will end up with a Sean Bean-typecast if he’s not careful. At least we knew where this particular leaf was soaring off to early on.
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Even the Original Trilogy was hardly airtight when it came to writing. When the characters weren’t trying to monologue, the movie worked quite well for me. But then, that goes for most SciFi, and was one of the many hangups the….other movies.
My only complaint was Grand Moff Tarkin. He should have been left out. However, that didn’t stop my overall enjoyment of the film.
Here’s the thing: The guy they had as the Cdr. Krennic could have passed for a Younger Tarkin, and at first glance I thought they had done that.
GMT and Darth Vader are maybe the two characters it would be really hard to leave out of a movie about stealing the Death Star plans.
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I thought the CGI worked okay for him. I think it helped a lot he was never in close up, and never brightly lit. Unlike the ending with ghola Princess Leia, which didn’t work at all for me.
Actually, Darth Vader and Princess Leia worked for me. Darth Vader worked for me because he was a real guy and Princess Leia worked because it was more or less a cameo (although, I was a ball of tears when I saw her).
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Grand Moff Tarkin broke my suspension of disbelief every time he was on, mainly because the CGI was jarring (for me) and Peter Cushing’s nuance performance just wasn’t there. GMT’s appearance didn’t take away my enjoyment of the movie, just took me out of the movie every time I saw him.
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Again, this is just my opinion. You found Leia jarring and I found GMT jarring.
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
It was a fun movie, but it could have been great. It had to many main characters. I wish they had taken machine gun guy, force monk guy and random imperial pilot guy out and focused on the relationship between Jyn and Cassian.
That movie screams for a scene where Jyn asks why the hell should she risk her life for Cassian’s cause, and in horrifying detail he tells her what the Empire did to him when he was six.
We didn’t get that kind of character development in A New Hope and we had 8 main characters.
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Trust me, Cassian explaining his backstory would have bogged down the film consideraly. I knew enough about each character to follow each of them.
Not sure why you were surprised at Disney allowing the gritty ending…after all, they’ve already started movies with a crow plucking out a guy’s eye (Pirates of the Caribbean 2) and the judicial murder of a kid (Pirates of the Caribbean 3).
Could have done without Saw Gerrera, in retrospect. Nothing wrong with Forrest Whitaker, just that the middle of the film was burdened with material to establish Saw & co, which all becomes sort of unnecessary about ten minutes later when Jedha gets nuked. Could’ve moved all that along a bit by leaving him out and making that a regular Rebel cell or something.
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The characters are fine for what is, after all, a plot-driven film. They do feel a bit perfunctory, but I don’t know that I want a deep, character-driven drama about the horrors of war from Star Wars. Not, you know, after the prequels.
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“Rogue One” seemed to be trying to pull from some of the classic war movies, and I don’t think it’s going to measure up, favorably, but as a Star Wars flick, I’d say I’m pretty happy with it. Pretty solid 3.5 or 4 out of 5.
Did they do that just so they could tie him back to Rebels? He just made his appearance on there.
[Spoilers]
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I assume cross-marketing was part of the idea, though he also appeared (briefly) in The Clone Wars. (The biggest thing keeping me away from Rebels is that I don’t get the channel, and I’ve been too cheap to pay Amazon to watch it, there. What I’ve seen looks pretty respectable, though.)
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From what I remember of the marketing chatter, the film wanted to show the darker side of the Rebellion, which is personified in Saw, Draven and Cassian (and Jyn). Saw has Bodhi, so tying Jyn to Saw gives the Rebellion a reason to need Jyn, and Saw’s presence lets them put a bow on Saw’s character arc. So, that’s some narrative value.
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OTOH, Cassian, Jyn, and Draven do a decent job of showcasing the unpleasant side of the Rebellion, and using Jyn as a handle on Galen would probably have been enough to get the rebels interested in her.
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It all works well enough, and I don’t recall feeling bored or confused, aside from Chekov’s telepathic squid.
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… I need to take some time to see this one, again. Maybe I feel differently on a second viewing.
No particular spoilers.
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The *really big question* Rogue One asks is .. what is The Mouse going to do to *fix* the pile of steaming vomit George Lucas called Episodes I, II, and III?
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I mean .. without spoilering it .. Rogue One adds a *whole lot* of weight and meaning to Episode IV without *changing* a single frame of film ..
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There *has to be a way* to .. fix .. I, II, and III .. right?
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Mew
Live version of Clone Wars?
I do not think so. Let’s just leave them were they are and never speak of them again.
I agree with that. The prequels got all the validation they deserve when they brought back Senator Organa from his Episode III cameo. The only way to ‘fix’ those movies is do a completely new timeline. But I don’t think there’s anything to gain from it.
My biggest take is the last couple of minutes with Darth Vader are worth the price of admission.
Agreed! When that red lightsaber turned on, I about jumped out of my seat.
Liked it, without reservation. Not one scene I found cringe-worthy or overly bogged down with ‘meaningful’ monologue. I agree that the CGI characters might not age well, (though I still watch Babylon 5, and people harp about its CGI). But the scheming manipulation of Krennic by Tarkin, and cold-blooded solution to the ‘incursion,’ definitely fit.
When I heard the tagline, “Imagine Dirty Dozen in the Star Wars universe,” I knew where this was going. But that didn’t bother me. And as a comparison with that classic, people saying there were too many characters should go back and watch that movie. How much time do we spend with anyone, outside of Marvin’s character, and perhaps Bronson, who was scene-stealing for the screen time? Saving Private Ryan is the same thing. It’s pretty much part and parcel of war movies in general.
So yeah, I’ll give it a 4 star and would have no problem watching it again.