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malarkiness · 7 years

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Saw Rogue One. Spoilers galore.

And I thought it was.... okay.

Well, alright, here’s the stuff that I thought was great:

The CGI characters were amazing. I didn’t pay attention to most of the press surrounding this movie, so I totally missed any news about them animating characters, but I was pretty impressed with the final product. I actually missed 99% of Tarkin’s dialogue because I spent all of his scenes going back and forth with myself over whether or not he was CGI; there was something sort of unnatural about his facial movements, like I don’t think his eyes ever really focused on anything, and something about his expressions seemed too... fluid? I can’t put my finger on it, but even if I could tell it was CGI, it was still well done CGI. Leia looked perfect, though, like they absolutely could’ve fooled me with that one.

Seeing walkers stomping around on a beach was pretty cool, ngl.

“Are you kidding me? I’m blind!” made me laugh.

The score is nice. There were a few tracks that were a bit jarring at times (because they evidently just took music from the original trilogy and changed a note here and there), but the score itself is good.

I liked seeing the Star Wars universe’s equivalent of an archive. That was neat.

The ending. Jyn and Cassian holding each other and waiting for the end, Vader laying waste to all those troops like it’s nothing, Leia’s line about hope– all good choices, A+, very nice.

Since Diego Luna plays Cassian, and Zoe Saldana plays Uhura in the Star Trek reboot, I always see their characters singing whenever I listen to that last song in The Book of Life.

And the not-so-great:

I could almost swear this movie shared a writer with Jupiter Ascending what with how much PLOT PLOT PLOT it tries to spit at you as quickly as possible. There is 0 time allotted to just give the characters (and the audience) time to process the weight of new story developments. It just blazes ahead no matter what. Like there’s this one scene when they get back on the ship and Jyn’s all pissed at Cassian for trying to kill her dad, and he gives this one line that I can’t remember exactly, but it’s essentially, “you only started caring about the rebellion five minutes ago, you don’t know what all I’ve sacrificed to bring us this far, so get off your fucking high horse,” and it’s a GREAT line that should really make Jyn shut up and think for a second, but lol guess what, it doesn’t. She just says he’s dodging the real issue and the argument just... drops. Cool. Cool cool cool. And do we ever find out just what kind of darksided shit Cassian had to do for the greater good? Or anything about why he joined the rebellion in the first place? Nope! There’s no time for any of that because PLOT.

Chirrut’s use of the Force was such an interesting idea, but it wasn’t really explored at all. His first scene has him talking to Jyn about her necklace, showing that he can ~sense it’s there even if he can’t see it, so like... What else could he’ve sensed? Could he’ve maybe been able to find the Death Star plans in the archive so they wouldn’t have had to search for it? Could he’ve sensed where they should go once they’d infiltrated the base? I feel like they could’ve done SO much more with his character rather than just giving him a couple of good fight scenes and killing him off.

The only character who gets any kind of development at all is Jyn, and it’s just... not good. Like she suddenly starts caring about the rebellion just because she found out that her dead father cared about it, and that’s literally it. Rather than, I dunno, having her become attached to the other characters and wanting to help them with their cause, the writers just stake all her investment in the rebellion in her relationship with a character we barely see. Awesome.

Honestly, why was Jyn even in this movie? They could’ve given Cassian her backstory, and that’d explain his devotion to the rebellion: the Empire killed his mother and took his father, and he wants justice. Boom. Done. Or they could’ve had Jyn grow up to be the rebel with a droid sidekick rather than just making her some randomass criminal. Or Cassian could’ve also been the ex-imperial pilot. Seriously, there was just NO NEED for this movie to have all the characters it did. They could’ve easily collapsed a couple of them into each other and developed them as they were; instead, we waste all this time being introduced to one unnecessary character after the other. Like I get that the writers probably wanted a Ragtag Bunch of Missfits to go on this adventure, but if you want that kind of ensemble, you need the characters to have actual chemistry with each other, and these characters just don’t. Beyond Chirrut and Baze’s relationship (which is already established by the time we meet them), none of these people ever form any sense of camaraderie with each other; they’re literally only together because the plot needs them together.

And while I’m harping on about characters, Krennic is one of the most forgettable villains I’ve ever seen in any movie. The only interesting things about him were his cape and that one scene where he got choked (and tbf, Vader could’ve choked anyone in this movie and I’d’ve been equally impressed, so whatever). I’m sure the writers didn’t want to distract from Darth Vader with another villain, but... It’s fucking Darth Vader. No bad guy’s going to undermine him, alright, you can afford to write a more interesting beta villain.

idk, I was just really looking forward to this one after loving TFA so much, but Rogue One just didn’t grip me the way the other movie did. I think most of that is just because TFA introduced us to, what, four new characters? And we got to know all of them pretty well (okay, maybe not Poe so much, but he was still very likable and engaging enough with the little screen time as he got). Like we know all of Finn’s motivations from the get-go, we see him go through a HUGE change within like the first ten minutes of the movie, and then watch him continue grow until his final battle. And we got to know Rey really well, too; they kept her past a mystery, but we still sympathized with her longing to belong somewhere. As for Kylo, his motivations weren’t really... understandable or sympathetic lol, but they’re at least interesting (in the parallel that they set up between him and Anakin if nothing else).

I suppose TFA appealed to me a lot more because it had FAR fewer new characters to introduce and therefore more time to make me care about them. I didn’t care that the story was just a recycled Episode IV; the characters carried it so well that it just felt natural for the storyline to play out the way it did. With RO, the storyline steered everything, and the characters seemed to just exist to carry it out.

I definitely think this story would’ve done better as an EU novel or a miniseries on Netflix, but eh. I didn’t hate it, and I am glad that it’s doing as well as it is box office-wise. And I do like a lot of the fanart/headcanons coming out the fandom rn, so I can at least get into that.

#sometimes i watch things #star wars

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