Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

[JamesC]

I enjoyed it - a fun romp in general.
Best bits were Darth Vader and the Star Destroyer shunting.
Worst bits were the (incredibly bad) CGI faces and the rubbish CGI octopus that didn't do anything.

[SIP]

I enjoyed it - a fun romp in general.
Best bits were Darth Vader and the Star Destroyer shunting.
Worst bits were the (incredibly bad) CGI faces and the rubbish CGI octopus that didn't do anything.

What on earth was the point of that cgi octopus scene....can only imagine it had a point in a previous draft.

[Steve Green]

OK, I guess -

[spoiler]Yeah, those were recycled shots from ANH for Red and Gold leader apparently - that I thought was quite cool, Tarkin was distracting, think it would have worked better on the few shots where he's in the background or reflected in a window, Leia also pretty fucking cheery considering the massive battle and loss of life, made her look like a psychopath.

Vader's corridor moment was great, Donnie Yen, Jen Wiang, Alan Tudyk were fun.

Thought it seemed to get a lot more out of the budget than TFA, with the bustling Jeddah, the first location (with a remarkably shouty rebel considering he was paranoid about spies)

I guess not having Harrison Ford helped in that respect, the rebellion certainly felt a lot bigger.

Would be more interested in seeing a film about the behind the scenes reshoots/changes

[/spoiler]

[Frank]

the only Star Wars film that feels like a blatant retread is TFA

Return Of The Jedi starts off with the droids and Luke meeting up with Han on Tatooine. They go on a sneaking mission to deactivate energy shields, an old Jedi dies in a lightsaber fight, then an X-wing blows up the Death Star*.

It's all been rhyming and poetry for the last quarter of a century, lads!


* Return Of The Jedi plays with Empire's beats too: Luke rescues Han at the start, Luke goes to Dagoba to set up revelation about his family, Vader tries to capture/turn him. In my old Making Of ROTJ book, a crew member describes the film as ILM's graduate thesis, which is a nice way of saying they regurgitated everything they'd learned in the last six years

[TordelBack]

I enjoyed it - a fun romp in general.
Best bits were Darth Vader and the Star Destroyer shunting.
Worst bits were the (incredibly bad) CGI faces and the rubbish CGI octopus that didn't do anything.

What on earth was the point of that cgi octopus scene....can only imagine it had a point in a previous draft.

I liked him! Using the sucktopus was supposed to set Saw up[spoiler] as a twisted paranoid nutter after decades of hopeless resistance and endless murder,  which would have worked better with his cautionary dialogue from the first trailer, as would his decision to abandon Jyn to spare her his own fate (absent almost in its entirety - the footage from that trailer, I mean). Also to set Bodhi up as a bit unhinged after his exposure. Both sort-of-worked, but given Whitaker's ever-changing hair in the production material [/spoiler]it seems likely that this whole bit was substantially rejigged, leaving it all a bit odd and inconsequential.

I did love that t[spoiler]he partisan ambush on the tank used exactly the tactics Anakin and Ahsoka teach Saw on Onderon[/spoiler]: it was almost a replay of the original scene.


While I enjoyed the film a lot more than I expected to, I am however quite happy about my decision not to get the kids R1 toys for Christmas -[spoiler] the Boy was quite upset by the whole ending, as he remarked "why did they create 6 great new characters and then kill them all?". And while I can see the point, I can't see that (for example) the Jyn Erso dress-up costumes Disney have been flogging for months are going to be well received[/spoiler].  Despite the lack of gore, there's still that shift in tone that I wasn't keen on as soon as R1 was mooted: SW should always be for kids first. And I'm not sure [spoiler]that kids are that into martyrs.[/spoiler]

[HdE]

Just going to address the last part of Tordelback's post - and not wanting to spoil anything for anybody even though this won't contain spoilers for Rogue One, I'm going to black it all out with tags. So - read at your own peril, folks!

[spoiler] With regard to the comment about deaths - yeah. Look, Hollywood - I'm getting sick and tired of this idea that setting up engaging characters and then killing them off is somehow edgy or daring. It's not. It's hacky. It's overdone. And coming off the back of episode 8 killing off Han Solo - which I will never pass up an opportunity to decry as a really, truly, shit-awful decision that should never have been made - it actually seems a bit much.

It actually troubles me a bit that a high profile movie released at the end of the year, at a time when people evidently still buy into the 'peace on earth and goodwill to all men' bullshit, apparently skews so heavily toward putting death, grimness and dire consequence on screen. For the masses. To 'enjoy', apparently.

I'm not suggesting that the fact Rogue One does this makes it a bad film. But it does make me wonder why, in a world that's increasingly turning to crap all around us, people seem to be lapping up entertainment that doesn't really offer much of anything especially feelgood, positive or uplifting in its conclusion.
[/spoiler]

[dweezil2]

CGI [spoiler]Leia[/spoiler] looked like she was on speed, which is at least accurate, if you've read her biography! 

[TordelBack]

CGI [spoiler]Leia[/spoiler] looked like she was on speed, which is at least accurate, if you've read her biography! 

Brilliant! 

HdE, I do think the end of the movie is uplifting - [spoiler]it's a story of people coming together to sacrifice everything to oppose an apparently unstoppable evil, perhaps best summarised in the shot where the terrified trooper shoves the plans through the gap in the blast door: and they do succeed. Being prepared to pay the price of standing up to evil, and not just squabbling about it, is a powerful and a welcome message.

But. As the missus remarked, given that this was 'a Star Wars story', there was no reason whatsoever why Jyn and Cassian couldn't have been plucked off that beach at the last minute, by oh let's say... Moe.  Still would have been plenty of sacrifice in the Serenity sequence without the Deep Impact moment.  [/spoiler]Star Wars already veered too close to grimdark with the ghastly last half hour of Revenge of the Sith, and I'd like to think that's as close as it will ever come... while I understand that this is a side project, and an attempt to explore other types of Star Wars on the big screen, I still feel SW should remain solely a kids' brand: get your own space fantasy, 'adults'.

(As I've wittered on about extensively in the past, I thought Han's death was appropriate to the character and the drama, even while wishing that the OT characters hadn't been involved at all in the sequels).

[JOE SOAP]

Star Wars has been promoting martyrs and suicide missions since 1977.

If Obi-Wan didn't allow himself to be struck-down Luke wouldn't have his 'one example' of sacrifice - the idea of becoming more powerful after death.

Rogue One showed why the Rebellion had such a reduced fleet of ships at the end of A New Hope - one, even more dire suicide mission, followed another.

[TordelBack]

Sure, and I like very much how the film opens up the possibilities for the pre-ANH world, by providing a sort of immediate clearing house for anything that may have come before or has yet to be introduced. 

SneeryNerdQ: Well why doesn't X or Y appear in Episode IV?
SmugNerdA: Scariff. 

Add to that [spoiler]the Guardians of the Whills, the Temple on Jeddha, the conflicted groups of partisans and terrorists, the Empire as legitimately bloody scary but riddled with traitors, defectors and manoeuvring politicos...[/spoiler] it's a surprisingly fertile addition to the universe (albeit one that plays on long-explored EU elements), in a way the less-constrained TFA wasn't (Maz aside).  OTOH the Alliance was burdened with division and uncertainty, but [spoiler]for all their paranoia apparently devoid of spies: I was half expecting Cassian or even K2S0 to turn out to be undercover baddies in the end.[/spoiler]

I know [spoiler]there's sacrifice and suicide missions galore in the other films, but not with this scale or outcome.  It shifts the tone of the thing in a direction I don't like.[/spoiler]

Still, it did't stop me persoally enjoying and admiring the film, just Won't Somebody Think of the Children etc.  The only serious misstep for me was [spoiler]Tarkin and Leia.  If they weren't prepared to recast, get some some really good impressionists to do the voices (in the case of Tarkin the voice was almost worse than the CGI), shoot them from behind, in holograms, in reflection, whatever tricks I'm too stupid to think of...[/spoiler] don't just throw money at it, trust your audience be clever. 

[JOE SOAP]

The only serious misstep for me was [spoiler]Tarkin and Leia.  If they weren't prepared to recast, get some some really good impressionists to do the voices (in the case of Tarkin the voice was almost worse than the CGI), shoot them from behind, in holograms, in reflection, whatever tricks I'm too stupid to think of...[/spoiler] don't just throw money at it, trust your audience be clever.

[spoiler]Tarkin[/spoiler] didn't bother me as much and [spoiler]Leia[/spoiler] could've been handled with a profile shot - but - I admire their intention and the balls to try it so boldly while not resorting to the usual tricks* which would've worn a bit thin quickly or lacked the intimacy of the scenes. I didn't think about it after the first appearance because what sold it for me in the end is the voice work - which I thought was fine - and the fact the scenes are well written.

*I did think a hologram of Jabba would've worked better for the added Mos Eisley scene in A New Hope - especially with Han walking through his tail-space etc.

[TordelBack]

I didn't think about it after the first appearance because what sold it for me in the end is the voice work - which I thought was fine - and the fact the scenes are well written.

I found the [spoiler]Cushing[/spoiler] impression weak, for such a distinctive voice - but I can't fault the actual lines or performance.  However, I'm not really clear why there needed to be so much [spoiler]Tarkin that the CGI version [/spoiler] was necessary. Surely some brief hologrammed snapping would have worked fine for the plot, and served to hide the wires?  And if they were committed to role large enough to need a computer double, then why not an even bigger part to play, with the [spoiler]Vader/Tarkin/Palps [/spoiler]hate triangle more in the foreground of Krennic's problems? 

Coulda, woulda, shoulda, to be sure, all very easy from the bench.  But like I say, I found the whole thing pulled me out of the moment constantly.  This may have been partly the fault of the super-detail of the Parnell St IMAX, which dear sweet Force of Others remains the best cinema screen I have ever experienced, by some margin.  I bullied the missus into dropping the extra dough, which she wasn't happy about, until the film started, whereupon quoth she: "Ahhhhh, I see".

Something I did love, and which was kept nicely secret, was [spoiler]Vader setting up home on Mustafar. Boy that must hurt, living in the place you killed your wife and unborn child (on whose account you murdered children), were chopped up and left to burn alive by your father/brother, and lost your humanity into the bargain.  The wheezy cybernetic next step on from the hair shirt. I wonder does he put salt in that Bacta.[/spoiler]

Your hologram solution for ANH:SE Jabba would have been great, can't believe I have never thought of it.  Although at this point I just want that hopeless scene gone.

[Steve Green]

Would love to see the original cut - the odd shot in a trailer not appearing I can understand, but it looked like a major chunk of the Scariff sequence played out differently, as well as something else going on with the Saw sequence in Jeddah.

[TordelBack]

The extent of the Scariff changes must have been massive - no [spoiler]Jyn and Cassian action outside at all (we saw them both shooting at walkers, and presumably afterwards running with the plans), no TIE fighter confrontation at the antenna dish, no running battle at the Canary Wharf tube station, no Krennic and stormtroopers wading in the tropical shallows; but equally almost all of Saw, Draven and Mon Mothma's dialogue from the  trailers was absent, as was Jyn's already-iconic "I rebel" line and Krennic's cringey "pow-ah is immeasurable" one.  Vader is also never on the Death Star, but we saw him in the control room [/spoiler] I'm used to things changing from the trailers, but it seems like hardly any of the trailer material made it in, which is a bit odd.  That said, the actual dialogue and the takes used are generally far better than the ones in the trailers, which I was never happy with: Jyn in particular comes across much better in the film. 

[TordelBack]

Oh, and unless I missed it, there were no [spoiler]captured Rebel pilots on Jeddah - [/spoiler]which makes the still-smouldering crashed X-Wing in the background even stranger!  K2SO[spoiler] telling Jyn that he won't kill her isn't in there either, nor are his 97/8% odds of failure, and nor is Baze Malbus' "I fight the Empire now". [/spoiler]And that's just from one viewing, I'm sure there are many others.  ODD I say.  But not necessarily bad.