Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

[Mattofthespurs]

Went to see this again today but this time in 3-D.
To be honest the 3-D is fairly unobtrusive until the final 35 minutes but then it really comes into it's own and definitely worth seeing in that format.
Must say, despite the naysayers, I loved the musical soundtrack and thought the tiny, recognised, cues of the original Star Wars films were woven into this soundtrack beautifully. A good example is a tiny cue from Leia's theme, probably no more than a bar or two, at the end but followed by a great piece of original music.

The film stood up very well on a second viewing and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around, if not more so.

[Mattofthespurs]

Also, some  may find this interesting https://filmschoolrejects.com/rogue-ones-missing-pieces-46-shots-that-didn-t-make-the-final-cut-e1a0737f3abf#.aajw86lbq

[blackmocco]

Courtesy of a buddy who works up in ILM, I can gently allude to the original ending not having much of a [spoiler]space battle, no colliding star-destroyers (one of the storyboard peeps suggested it), and no Vader badassery (he was always in it, but really as more of a glorified cameo, nothing else). Jyn and co were going to have to deliver the plans by hand instead of via transmission. Probably 40% of the movie was reshoots, as rumours suggest, but my bud maintains the movie is infinitely superior because of them. The "making it feel more like Star Wars" quotes are all centered around adding the final space battle.[/spoiler] I'm not in a place to argue. I loved Rogue One. For me, infinitely superior to TFA in every way.

[TordelBack]

That's a cool video that MattOTS links to, and together with Blackmocco's pal's scuttlebutt, it very much strengthens my impression that the movie we got was a lot better than the 'original' one: hokey dialogue and cheeky pouting are no match for a good[spoiler] Sith boarding action,[/spoiler] kid.

Still, the Blu-ray extras are gonna need a bigger disc!

[blackmocco]

That's a cool video that MattOTS links to, and together with Blackmocco's pal's scuttlebutt, it very much strengthens my impression that the movie we got was a lot better than the 'original' one: hokey dialogue and cheeky pouting are no match for a good[spoiler] Sith boarding action,[/spoiler] kid.

Still, the Blu-ray extras are gonna need a bigger disc!

If there was one thing I felt the movie was missing, [spoiler]it was spending some time with young Jyn and Whitaker's character, to build their history a little. I'm perfectly capable of filling in that gap for myself, but would have had a bit more emotional heft had the movie shown us a bit more. Other than that, I was just thrilled to see what the original movies have alluded to without actually showing us: What life is like under the heel of the Empire. Good to see Stormtroopers doing day-to-day activities besides getting shot or blown-up.[/spoiler]

[JOE SOAP]

These changes are pretty much as expected. This was never going to pass as just a small, intense, militant focused off-shoot - especially since the central story concerns the first third of the original opening-crawl of Ep. IV., which in itself suggests a lot happened.

Like the average Judge Dredd story, a mixture of all the usual Star Wars elements are needed to make these stories work. The spin-offs are going to fuck around with differing amounts of various SW tropes but they'll still, in essence, be Star Wars films.

[Tjm86]

Well, eldest daughter and I went to see it this morning. She loved it, more so than TFA.  Wants to go see it again so that must be a decent line.

TBH I wasn't expecting to be blown away.  As Ive said previously, I'm a little concerned that Disney are now going to dilute SW with profligate releasing.  All I'm going to say is, if this is the standard then that is a misplaced fear.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't perfect by any means.  Some of the early half of the film seemed to be grasping a bit for direction.  The defecting shuttle pilot didn't work as a character for me.  Even a fairly junior ranking pilot would have looked more like they belonged in the military.  He looked more like a reject from Air America.

The closing scenes brought it home nicely though.  Little surprised at part of the outcome, that said it did give it more of an emotional punch.  One can only imagine what the original prequel trilogy would have been like if they had taken the same approach.

[TordelBack]

Hmm, I've seen a lot of people saying Bodhi seemed out of place in the movie, but I thought that was the point of the character. [spoiler]He's a cargo pilot doing runs to a processing facility, moved by conversations with a scientist to act on his conscience and throw in with a bunch of gung-ho freaks, and in that respect he's as close to an everyman as the film gets, with its former teenage terrorists, covert intelligence officers, temple guardians and sassy robots.  In fact he's not unlike Finn (a sanitation technician) in his reactions to his new situation, and Finn was raised from birth to be a stormtrooper.[/spoiler] I actually really liked the guy.

[radiator]

This article really hit the nail on the head for me, and perfectly articulates a lot of my problems with the plotting, especially the ending, which felt totally dramatically hollow to me:

How do you make a man on a mission movie where the mission is never clear?

How do you turn an obvious heist into something so unplanned and off-the-cuff (as in everyone's just going to wing it) to the point where you neuter your finale?... You absolutely need to create previously established objectives, so you can maximize the dramatic tension of the moment when that moment arrives. To dramatically care, the audience must be able to anticipate one result or the other. If I don't know what should happen, I can't fear what might happen. And it results in a "heist" with all these randomly shouted-out objectives in the middle of an unwieldy, unfocused battle that just wants to echo the last act of Return of the Jedi.

Every action beat is desperate for clarity and works overtime to explain in the moment, but that's why it fails. Like, there's no tension in them getting through the shield because there's established reason it should work. It's just dumb luck, like almost everything that follows. It feels like they're literally fucking their way up through this, stabbing for needles in haystacks and finding them. This is seriously unforgivable for this movie. Because a heist is constructed around quiet build-up and the careful set-up of critical moments. There's a reason every heist film has a careful, visual "going over the plan" sequence and it's all about setting up dramatic expectations. There has to be a plan in order for things to go wrong. It's freaking everything in these kinds of movies.

The thing is it's not going to be "bad," as there's enough cinematic competence to make it feel texturally interesting in some way, but in terms of drama and actually giving a fuck you have just taken everything away from your carefully set-up movie and turned it into limp, wheel-spinning... Instead of a nailbiter, we get noise.

How can I really care about a 'master switch' that was introduced just two seconds prior? It's like trying to learn chemistry on the fly as you take the test.

He also makes some great points about the Vader/corridor scene, which I felt was totally gratuitous in the moment.

What this article doesn't really hit on is another one of my beefs with the ending - the absurd number of times they repeat the plot beat of a character having to press a switch and/or open or close a door. Did anyone else think that got super repetitive and weird towards the end? There are so many apparently important switches and doors in play that at a certain point it all just starts to blur together and wash over you.

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/12/21/rogue-one-film-crit-hulk-the-slippery-sloping-story-of-rogue-one

[Jim_Campbell]

"This film wasn't the kind of film I thought it should be."

That's sort of your fault, rather than the film's, surely?

[Hawkmumbler]

Am I alone in really, really rather liking [spoiler]the CGI Tarkin scenes?[/spoiler]

[TordelBack]

While I agree about the Eadu sequence ([spoiler]the core of the some act) feeling unfocused, and even to some extent the muddy eddies of the ground battle that was (like the Gungan Grand Army's sacrifice before it) merely a distraction, I just can't agree about the climax of the movie: this wasn't a movie that was solely about these characters, it was a movie about the Alliance's first victory against the Empire, and the fact that the story kept going into the sacrifices of nameless ordinary soldiers and pilots while our heroes died on the planet below is what made the whole thing work for me. [/spoiler]This is not a self-contained action movie: it is specifically and intentionally a direct prologue to Star Wars.

[Frank]

I agree about the Eadu sequence

It was never a penalty. I'd like to have spent more time on Jyn Erso's homeworld of Pogba, maybe explore the spaceport at Marouane Fellaini a bit.

[sheridan]

I actually really liked the guy.

I thought Finn had some memory of being taken from his family at a young age?

[von Boom]

Am I alone in really, really rather liking [spoiler]the CGI Tarkin scenes?[/spoiler]

No, you are not. [spoiler]I was extremely impressed at the first reveal of Tarkin, but the CGI became more apparent longer he was on screen. That aside I thought he was brilliant! Actors need to beware of becoming too diva-like or they'll find themselves replaced with CGI soon. The Princess Leia was less impressive, simply because she was so young in Star Wars so CGI just looked too smooth. [/spoiler]