Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

***Valandil*** · 12-27-2016, 11:07 AM

Wow - just realized we hadn't yet started a Rogue One thread. So... here it is!

Saw it about five days ago with my sons. We waited until my oldest was home from college and the younger two were off school for their Christmas Break.

Do we want a couple threads on this? One for spoilers, and one for no spoilers? Or just start using spoiler text for now? For those not familiar, it works like this... type

to start the spoiler text, and

to end it. Someone reading it can click on the gray part to see it. If you do a "quote" of mine, you'll see what I did. Or - below it's shown backwards, because that way it won't gray out.

Without the gray - the end is [/spoiler] typed out, and the beginning is [spoiler], then everything in between shows up gray until clicked on.

Snowdog · 12-30-2016, 06:40 AM

I went to the matinee the day after it opened here. The theatre offered a nice cool afternoon on a hot summer day. I went in not expecting too much after seeing Star Wars VII last year, but the trailers looked promising. I'm a bit tired and lazy to use the 'spoiler' coding, so I'll just say that Rogue One is a well written, well acted, well made Star Wars movie that totally explains the scrolling lead-in of Star Wars IV (the original movie release for you non-Star Wars geeks). This IS the 'prequel'! Go see it. It's worth the $ to see on the big screen, and in 3D if you are so inclined.

mithrand1r · 12-31-2016, 06:11 PM

Valandil,

On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best), I give this about a 3 (maybe 2).
At over 2 hours long, I found this movie slow and uninteresting until the action moves to Scarif. (about 90 minutes into the film)

For most people, save your money and see this film when it comes out to video. (Actually this is one film that could be skipped without any impact on the rest of the SW universe. The opening scroll from SW:ANH(1977) tells all that one needs from this film.)

I would only recommend big SW fans seeing this film at the theatre.

Positives:

Effects, costumes, scenery
Vader's presence at the end was visually impressive though very brief
End of film tied in well to start of SW:ANH (1977) but had some minor issues
Robot (Potassium Sulfate K2SO4) was better than I expected
Nice attempt at telling a story about

non-force attuned people

-- it was not done well.
Cameos ok, but seemed somewhat forced.

Negatives:

Grand Moff Tarkin

-- CGI made him stand out too much in his scenes (Think Legolas in Bakshi's LOTR) and he was in several scenes. If the technology was better it would have been better and more polished -- the same

for Leia, but she

was in one short scene at the end so I did not mind as much.
Tale too long for what was presented. The movie could have been trimmed down about 30-45 minutes without diminishing the essence of the tale.
Except for Jyn no background info given for any characters.
I would have preferred more info about Jyn's father. It would help if movie explained why he and his family were at the farm when found by the empire.
I never really felt any emotional pull with any of the Rogue One party. Did not give me a reason to care about what happens to the characters

so I did not care much when they died on Scarif,
Would have like Vader to have larger role in film.

Perhaps have him take down most of Rogue one .
AT-ATs seemed way too flimsy compared to SW:ESB(1980)
Some of the deaths at the end were pointless. If I cared more it might have had more impact on me, but movie did not provide me reason to care.

Jyn's mother dying really made no sense. Way to be a good parent and leave your child orphaned. She really listened to her husband to run away with their daughter. Did she really think one blaster would win the day against a small group of armed soldiers?.

ST armor is useless against a stick and hand blows
There must have been better stories than this to make a film about. Since SW:AHN(1977) exists we (the audience) know the mission (getting the DS files) will succeed and that those that stole the files paid a heavy price.
Tarkin and Vader really were not needed in this story.
Vader joke seemed out of character for him. but a minor quibble.

My biggest complaint is that I was not entertained. Regardless of my problems with SW:TFA(2015), it was an entertaining story. I was not bored for ¾ of the film as I was in Rogue One. If the makers of the film did a better job setting up the film, then the film would have been more entertaining and better for me.

Butterbeer · 01-02-2017, 08:21 AM

Agree with most of what Mithrandir above says... although i cant really remember any of the names so some of it went over my head a little.

Enjoyed the film last year (one before this one)... it just seemed to be quite fun, well made and was an enjoyable Christmas family movie.... this one left me vaguely interested at best, kinda enjoyed the end fight... best bit for me was the ...spoiler below..

deaths at the end- i literally cheered

(just because if some one had swooped down at the end and saved them at the last second..id have been annoyed..was kind of glad they didn't- lol nothing personal to those two characters)

basically i think this is essentially the third time they've used the same basic plot for a SW's universe film and the whole thing is becoming increasingly formulaic. But the previous one i quite enjoyed- this one was at best 3 out of 10...though i still quite enjoyed going to the cinema to watch it- luckily i wasnt expecting too much..so like yeah.

Its fair to say that some of my family party that went to see it fell asleep.

Snowdog · 01-06-2017, 09:22 AM

Wow. Guess I didn't see the same movie you guys saw. Whatevs. To each their own.

mithrand1r · 01-06-2017, 02:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snowdog

Wow. Guess I didn't see the same movie you guys saw. Whatevs. To each their own.

Based on current box office returns ($834,507,837 worldwide as of Jan 4, 2017), I do not think Disney will worry about my opinion.

Perhaps we did see different movies.

If true, I want to see the good movie you saw.

Zu jedem das seinen

Perhaps I expect more from Star Wars than other films.

***Valandil*** · 01-06-2017, 03:31 PM

Really? I don't expect too much from Star Wars films. When I go back and watch episodes 1, 2 & 3 now... they seem so awful. Very much geared toward small children. I even thought much the same about episode 6 - back when it first came out.

Star Wars doesn't really sweat the continuity, or logic.

BTW - a couple other "Positives" about Rogue One:
* No Jar-Jar Binks!
* No Anakin-Padme adolescent romance

***Alcuin*** · 01-07-2017, 11:13 AM

I suppose Carrie Fisher will be all CGI going forward. She completed filming Episode VIII, I understand, and Disney bought an enormous insurance policy on her, likely enough to digitize her image and voice well enough for most fans, at least for a while, and probably for that reason.

Insidious Rex · 01-10-2017, 11:58 AM

Let me just preface this by saying if you DON’T want spoilers then read no further because Im not going to be holding anything back and Im not going to kill myself redacting out every third word I write. Its been almost a month now. Go see it already…

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snowdog

Wow. Guess I didn't see the same movie you guys saw. Whatevs. To each their own.

I couldn’t agree more. Frankly shocked anyone would give this such a terrible rating as a 3 out of 10. What movie were you guys watching? I found this quite entertaining. It was fairly shallow and character development was almost non existent but that’s to be expected when you have a movie that’s acting as the bridge to the point EVERYONE on earth is familiar with. You cant keep these characters around because they weren’t in the next movie. So almost everybody has to be new and everybody has to die.

This movie, unlike Force Awakens, isn’t presented as hollow badly written derivative nostalgia worship meant primarily to tease the audience about the next film. It’s a fully self contained work that still fits pretty much perfectly into the Star Wars continuum. In fact, its bridging is so precise (as we witness in the final scene) that I felt the urge to run home and watch New Hope again while it was all fresh in my mind. And by god, that scene with Vader entering the transport… I have never gotten chills from any of these movies in the 40 years Ive been watching them but THAT scene completely sucked the breath out of me. It was outstanding. Not the Princess Leah portion which was good (and eerie considering I saw it just days after she died) but Vader emerging from the darkness and mowing through terrified troops with such cold determined malice. That 30 second scene gives us a more terrifying glimpse at the inner workings of this Sith Lord/machine then we ever get in any of the three original movies. Just stunning.

Some people complained that that scene and a number of other scenes in this film were just too dark and chilling for the Star Wars franchise and this is definitely a darker colder film then any of the other 6. But that’s largely because its about war in a way none of the other films were. The other films had battle scenes but they were all dramas involving characters. This is a purely military movie. It reminded me of Guns of Navarone or A Bridge Too Far. And it chooses that path purposefully rather than the path of long careful character development like we get with the original trilogy. We know Luke, and Leah and Han and the rest like the back of our hands and more importantly they all have time to know each other. This movie is the polar opposite in that it throws an ENTIRELY new slate of characters at us almost all at once and doesn’t give us any opportunity to get to know them before action has begun. That did bother me some because I felt like they were trying to have their Star Wars nostalgia feel to the movie where we expect to know all the characters well while not making the effort to get us there. This made the movie less appealing just by its very nature and I found myself more dubious about the characters interactions with each other because they haven’t had an opportunity to connect at all. BUT I guess that’s what happens when you make a disposable film with characters that have to be disposable by definition. These folks cant continue on. We dont see them after this and therefore they must all die. So you are left with a film where you never really get a good feel for anyone and what connection they do develop with each other comes off feeling thin and fake. I mean you have characters (some of the rebels that agreed to go with Jyn) that you get NO INTRODUCTION TO AT ALL yet they play key parts in the battle on Scarif. That was too much for me. If you aren’t going to introduce them AT ALL then don’t feature them as characters at all. The audience has no idea who they are and doesn’t know why they should care.

Theres much less comic relief in this film and I think I liked that. Clearly that’s a departure from all the other films. The only thing that came close to it was the droid but hes funny in a defiant bad attitude kind of way. Not in a fluffy playful way like R2 and C3PO. Reminded me a little of Chopper from Rebels but better actually. I definitely felt a lump in my throat when he finally gets taken down.

As for the CGI controversy, I think they did a pretty good job with Tarkin. Was it obvious he was graphically generated? Sure. But it looked good enough to me to work. Better than any video game Ive ever seen at least (apparently they were able to get their hands on a face mold he had made for a role in another film which they said turned out to be incredibly valuable in properly digitizing him). And I don’t understand people who insist you dindt need Tarkin in this movie (or Vader!) He was the head of the whole operation. How are you going to write around that exactly? So I was good with it and I thought it came off reasonably well enough not to impact my enjoyment of the film. The approach certainly fits right in with the concept of disposable less than developed characters anyway.

Not sure why they felt the need to give Vader a “castle” and put it on Mustafar no less! Why!? I don’t need to know about Vader’s house. And it seems completely out of place and unnecessary. We get that Vader has an old gothic feel to him but you don’t need to actually mock him up like Count Dracula thank you.

I did enjoy the scenes on Jedha. The whole feel of the thing was biblical, with the empire being like the Roman occupiers of an ancient holy city and Forest Whittaker hiding out in the caves with his band of zealots like the Essenes. The metaphor was a little in your face (Roman “Empire” on a planet whose name sounds just like “Judea” with the destruction of the Temple echoed in the destruction of the capital walled city) but I appreciated it.

I guess this movie finally answers the eternal burning question (after 40 years) of “why would they make a super weapon with such a glaring flaw to it”. But it now changes the question to “why would they hire someone to build their superweapon who is fundamentally opposed to the Empire politically and morally”? Or even “why would you NOT try to fix the flaw AFTER you know the rebels have the plans SHOWING the flaw”? I mean they really do nothing at all. Shouldn’t they have put it on ice for a bit till they cleaned things up? At least cover over that hole or alter it so its just bristling with anti aircraft guns? At LEAST post some ships near it at all times?! But no. Its just business as usual and the rebels are allowed to successfully exploit this weakness that the Empire knew they knew.

But plot holes aside, I definitely enjoyed the film. I enjoyed its differences and I enjoyed its small nostalgia moments that they don’t knock us over the head with (we get Leah for 5 seconds, Ponda Baba and Evazan from Mos Eisley for 5 seconds, and the briefest cameo by C3PO and R2, unlike Force Awakens which is one long unnecessary nostalgia explosion). I respected that it was a film about war and that it perfectly handed the baton off to the very moment I remember seeing in the theater as a little kid. In that way it was magical unlike any of the other prequels or sequels have been.

***Valandil*** · 01-10-2017, 04:14 PM

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