Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Short version: I liked it, without being in love. Likeable original main characters, lots of callouts to earlier SW movies (and tv shows!) without depending on them, improved on one of The Force Awakens mistakes (imo), made a minor mistake of its own (again imo), did something no SW film has done before but which complete sense in terms of already established continuity, and should be enjoyed by the fandom at large, though what the hypothetical kids who aren't familiar with the rest of the saga will make of the ending, only the Force knows.
By which I mean that this is the first SW movie to kill off its entire main cast. (And before Christmas, too. How Blake's 7 of it! And who'd have thought SW and B7 would ever have something major in common, she says with an evil grin.) And yet manages to do so without making it feel a tragedy, or depressing, but I wonder how much that's reliant on the audience's awareness those Death Star plans were really worth it and saved the galaxy, so to speak, and that Leia's last line truly is a validation of everyone's sacrifice?
This being said, I'm not complaining. Not least because "many brave rebels died to bring us these plans", or however that line went, and for once, it wasn't just the supporting cast with two lines. In fact, the entire movie was about the red shirts, so to speak, the canon fodder, in a way, and it managed to endear its entire ensemble to this viewer, giving everyone their moments to shine, personalities and stories. The sole death which I found gratitious and an obvious Doylist thing so Jyn, our heroine, would have only a father and not a mother to worry about happened right at the start, when Jyn's mother, Lirra (spelling?) after already having hidden with her daughter from approaching storm troopers left the kid to go back to her captured husband with no better plan to help him than a single blaster and walking up undisguised to confront the villain and his various heavily armed minions. Lady, this was just stupid. And selfish. Your kid needed you alive, not committing suicide by storm trooper. Your husband, otoh, would have found a later actually organized rescue effort with more people than just you far more helpful. Boo, hiss.
Other than that, though, I thought Rogue One managed to sell me on everyone's demise being the result of their sense-making choices. I also appreciated that after The Force Awakens let its villains blow a few planet with zero emotional impact on anyone, including the audience, just to up the ante in terms of weapons of mass destruction, Rogue One manages to get said emotional impact, on audience and characters alike, by dialing back. The fact that Alderaan had to remain the canonical first planet to be blown up (and thus there could be no planet destruction in this movie) actually helped there, I suppose. So instead of planets exploding, the Death Star takes out two cities at different points in the movie, and this far more familiar image (with a few sci fi addings) really hits home, not least because of the connections several of the characters have to the first instance and the connection we have to the charactersi n the second. It makes it clear within the movie itself why this thing really has to be taken out and why the characters consider it worth giving their lives to accomplish this.
This is also the movie where the Rebellion gets somewhat shades of grey in that Cassian, the latest take on the SW archetype of the antihero with the heart of gold, kills a fellow rebel whose panicking and inability to flee would get him captured, and later is ordered by his superiors to kill Jyn's father, scientist/engineer Galen, to prevent him from doing what Galen has already done (with a twist), instead of extracting him (as Jyn believes the mission to be). As we're still in SW, Cassian reconsiders re: Jyn's father at the last moment, and later says that the reason why he's signing on for Jyn's suicidal Death Star plans retrieving mission is that he's done so many terrible things for the Rebellion that if it fails, they would have all been for nothing. Jyn's point, that following orders that are morally wrong is wrong, no matter who gives them, is a very contemporary turn on this principle - in the original black and white SW world, the idea that leaders of the Rebellion would give wrong orders would have been unthinkable, since the Rebels were coded as "us" versus the Empire being Space Nazis.
If I've been making the movie sound like BSG, the movie, I must clarify: the goofiness and humor that's part of Star Wars is there as well. As well as the insanely impractical designs, but then since Galen Ersa (Jyn's father) has been secretly sabotaging the Imperial weapons projects by planting design flaws, that makes total sense. :) A lot of the comic relief comes from new droid K2, a reprogrammed Imperial Droid who is voiced by Alan "Wash" Tudyk, and managed to become my favourite SW droid in the space of a movie (sorry, R2 D2 and C3PO!). K2 is one sarcastic droid, and the humor is not at his expense, but comes from his comments on the humans around him. His demise hit me as hard as any of the human deaths. (Alas, the rather final events at the end of the film make it unlikely that he could be repaired again.) And Bodi (spelling?) the deserted pilot who I had thought would be abused as comic relief after a certain point actually wasn't, and turned into an incredibly touching and brave character.
Jyn actually didn't say the line from the trailer- "this is a rebellion, I rebell" - at any point of the movie. As SW heroes go, she followed more the Luke (initial refusal of call, then signing on to mission all the more fervently, and of course the desire to save her father) than the Leia pattern, and like Rey she had a traumatizing loss as a child, then a rough childhood before she enters the story proper. And no, she isn't related to any Skywalker, or Force sensitive. (There's no (unfallen) Jedi in this movie, though Imwe fulfills the warrior monk believing in the Force archetype in a non-Force using way.) I wish Jyn wasn't the sole woman on her (final) team, but at least there were some female pilots about in the Rebellio this time around, and the Jyn-Mon Mothma conversations probably count as far as the Bechdel test is concerned. Felicity Jones does earnest stoic with barely buried trauma well throughout.
Callouts, cameos, and more than cameos: the biggest GCI role is Tarkin, who has some actual scenes, not brief appearances, and GCI Peter Cushing is okay except a few moments when the artificiality comes across. Otoh GCI faced Leia at the very end looks extremely artificial (I don't know what they did, superimposed Carrie Fisher's younger face on another actress?), but really had to be there to sell the emotion of the final moment. Meanwhile, Darth Vader didn't really have to be in the film plot wise (as opposed to Tarkin), he was there because the fans expected it, but the two short appearances both fitted with what was going on. Mind you, the framing of his first appearance was where I thought the film had made a mistake of its own. Look, I know Vader in the first draft of Leigh Brackett's Empire Strikes Back script had a Goth castle of Evil on a Goth planet of evil which made it into some versions of the EU, but I always thought Lucas (or whoever else was responsible) made the right call to get rid of said castle and place Vader instead in that sterile meditation capsule on board the Star Destroyer where we catch our first glimpse of the fact there's a human being inside the armor and that the breathing is because he can't do it without machinery. So Rogue One reintroducing the Goth Castle - and on a lava planet, no less, because it's not like Vader would have ISSUES about lava planets - may have been meant as fan service and nod to that early ESB script, but this fan did not feel served but annoyed. This said, the Vader-Krennic scene that ensued was entirely ic.
Clone Wars shoutout: Jyn's foster father Saw Gerrera. When I heard that name, I thought, hang on, hang on - THAT Saw Gerrera? Steela's brother? From the Onderon arc? Oh, the irony. (Saw Gerrera gets taught rebellion tactics by Ahsoka and early on by Anakin as well.) Also, good thematic choice, since Anakin and Obi-Wan have the classic "freedom fighters" (Anakin) or terrorists (Obi-Wan) argument about Saw's group in the Onderon arc. In Rogue One, an embittered and paranoid Saw is played by Forrest Withaker and has definitely become an extremist, including the use of torture for interrogation, though it's dressed up in an SW shape by him using a GCI tentacled mind reader with unpleasant side effects on poor Bodi whom he suspects of being a plant - Bodi isn't, which is a welcome refutation of something all too common in today's action movies (and tv shows), i.e when heroes or even their extreme helpers use these methods, they always pick guilty people who actually have the correct information, and provide them. That Saw at this point also lacks a few limbs, replaced by droid machinery, and has to use some artificial breathing (though not non stop) is the typical SW subtlety of indicating parallels to another character; Saw seeing the error of his ways before the end and giving his life so Jyn can escape is therefore not an entire surprise.
Prequel shout out: Bail Organa and Mon Mothma both played by their prequel actors. Poor Jimmy Smits still has only a minimum of lines, though; if not for the Clone Wars series, where he actually gets stuff to do, we'd still have no real characterisation for Leia's emotional and thus real father.
Hang on, isn't that...: The film's main villain, Krennic, is played by Ben Mendelsohn whom I had recently seen in the first season of Bloodlines as Danny, and while I recognized the voice at once, it took me a while to realize where I knew him from, because the 70s style Imperial get up is quite a different look from today's Florida drug smuggling beach person. Mads Mikkelsen as Galen wears a beard at first which is a good disguise because I didn't recognize him until Jyn had a flashback to her earlier childhood when he was clean shaven, and I thought, hang on! Dead Peter Cushing aside, this must be the first SW movie where the Imperials, weren't played by Brits.
In conclusion: enjoyed watching it, don't feel the need to rewatch it in the cinema, though. I'll wait till it's on tv.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1208706.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
By which I mean that this is the first SW movie to kill off its entire main cast. (And before Christmas, too. How Blake's 7 of it! And who'd have thought SW and B7 would ever have something major in common, she says with an evil grin.) And yet manages to do so without making it feel a tragedy, or depressing, but I wonder how much that's reliant on the audience's awareness those Death Star plans were really worth it and saved the galaxy, so to speak, and that Leia's last line truly is a validation of everyone's sacrifice?
This being said, I'm not complaining. Not least because "many brave rebels died to bring us these plans", or however that line went, and for once, it wasn't just the supporting cast with two lines. In fact, the entire movie was about the red shirts, so to speak, the canon fodder, in a way, and it managed to endear its entire ensemble to this viewer, giving everyone their moments to shine, personalities and stories. The sole death which I found gratitious and an obvious Doylist thing so Jyn, our heroine, would have only a father and not a mother to worry about happened right at the start, when Jyn's mother, Lirra (spelling?) after already having hidden with her daughter from approaching storm troopers left the kid to go back to her captured husband with no better plan to help him than a single blaster and walking up undisguised to confront the villain and his various heavily armed minions. Lady, this was just stupid. And selfish. Your kid needed you alive, not committing suicide by storm trooper. Your husband, otoh, would have found a later actually organized rescue effort with more people than just you far more helpful. Boo, hiss.
Other than that, though, I thought Rogue One managed to sell me on everyone's demise being the result of their sense-making choices. I also appreciated that after The Force Awakens let its villains blow a few planet with zero emotional impact on anyone, including the audience, just to up the ante in terms of weapons of mass destruction, Rogue One manages to get said emotional impact, on audience and characters alike, by dialing back. The fact that Alderaan had to remain the canonical first planet to be blown up (and thus there could be no planet destruction in this movie) actually helped there, I suppose. So instead of planets exploding, the Death Star takes out two cities at different points in the movie, and this far more familiar image (with a few sci fi addings) really hits home, not least because of the connections several of the characters have to the first instance and the connection we have to the charactersi n the second. It makes it clear within the movie itself why this thing really has to be taken out and why the characters consider it worth giving their lives to accomplish this.
This is also the movie where the Rebellion gets somewhat shades of grey in that Cassian, the latest take on the SW archetype of the antihero with the heart of gold, kills a fellow rebel whose panicking and inability to flee would get him captured, and later is ordered by his superiors to kill Jyn's father, scientist/engineer Galen, to prevent him from doing what Galen has already done (with a twist), instead of extracting him (as Jyn believes the mission to be). As we're still in SW, Cassian reconsiders re: Jyn's father at the last moment, and later says that the reason why he's signing on for Jyn's suicidal Death Star plans retrieving mission is that he's done so many terrible things for the Rebellion that if it fails, they would have all been for nothing. Jyn's point, that following orders that are morally wrong is wrong, no matter who gives them, is a very contemporary turn on this principle - in the original black and white SW world, the idea that leaders of the Rebellion would give wrong orders would have been unthinkable, since the Rebels were coded as "us" versus the Empire being Space Nazis.
If I've been making the movie sound like BSG, the movie, I must clarify: the goofiness and humor that's part of Star Wars is there as well. As well as the insanely impractical designs, but then since Galen Ersa (Jyn's father) has been secretly sabotaging the Imperial weapons projects by planting design flaws, that makes total sense. :) A lot of the comic relief comes from new droid K2, a reprogrammed Imperial Droid who is voiced by Alan "Wash" Tudyk, and managed to become my favourite SW droid in the space of a movie (sorry, R2 D2 and C3PO!). K2 is one sarcastic droid, and the humor is not at his expense, but comes from his comments on the humans around him. His demise hit me as hard as any of the human deaths. (Alas, the rather final events at the end of the film make it unlikely that he could be repaired again.) And Bodi (spelling?) the deserted pilot who I had thought would be abused as comic relief after a certain point actually wasn't, and turned into an incredibly touching and brave character.
Jyn actually didn't say the line from the trailer- "this is a rebellion, I rebell" - at any point of the movie. As SW heroes go, she followed more the Luke (initial refusal of call, then signing on to mission all the more fervently, and of course the desire to save her father) than the Leia pattern, and like Rey she had a traumatizing loss as a child, then a rough childhood before she enters the story proper. And no, she isn't related to any Skywalker, or Force sensitive. (There's no (unfallen) Jedi in this movie, though Imwe fulfills the warrior monk believing in the Force archetype in a non-Force using way.) I wish Jyn wasn't the sole woman on her (final) team, but at least there were some female pilots about in the Rebellio this time around, and the Jyn-Mon Mothma conversations probably count as far as the Bechdel test is concerned. Felicity Jones does earnest stoic with barely buried trauma well throughout.
Callouts, cameos, and more than cameos: the biggest GCI role is Tarkin, who has some actual scenes, not brief appearances, and GCI Peter Cushing is okay except a few moments when the artificiality comes across. Otoh GCI faced Leia at the very end looks extremely artificial (I don't know what they did, superimposed Carrie Fisher's younger face on another actress?), but really had to be there to sell the emotion of the final moment. Meanwhile, Darth Vader didn't really have to be in the film plot wise (as opposed to Tarkin), he was there because the fans expected it, but the two short appearances both fitted with what was going on. Mind you, the framing of his first appearance was where I thought the film had made a mistake of its own. Look, I know Vader in the first draft of Leigh Brackett's Empire Strikes Back script had a Goth castle of Evil on a Goth planet of evil which made it into some versions of the EU, but I always thought Lucas (or whoever else was responsible) made the right call to get rid of said castle and place Vader instead in that sterile meditation capsule on board the Star Destroyer where we catch our first glimpse of the fact there's a human being inside the armor and that the breathing is because he can't do it without machinery. So Rogue One reintroducing the Goth Castle - and on a lava planet, no less, because it's not like Vader would have ISSUES about lava planets - may have been meant as fan service and nod to that early ESB script, but this fan did not feel served but annoyed. This said, the Vader-Krennic scene that ensued was entirely ic.
Clone Wars shoutout: Jyn's foster father Saw Gerrera. When I heard that name, I thought, hang on, hang on - THAT Saw Gerrera? Steela's brother? From the Onderon arc? Oh, the irony. (Saw Gerrera gets taught rebellion tactics by Ahsoka and early on by Anakin as well.) Also, good thematic choice, since Anakin and Obi-Wan have the classic "freedom fighters" (Anakin) or terrorists (Obi-Wan) argument about Saw's group in the Onderon arc. In Rogue One, an embittered and paranoid Saw is played by Forrest Withaker and has definitely become an extremist, including the use of torture for interrogation, though it's dressed up in an SW shape by him using a GCI tentacled mind reader with unpleasant side effects on poor Bodi whom he suspects of being a plant - Bodi isn't, which is a welcome refutation of something all too common in today's action movies (and tv shows), i.e when heroes or even their extreme helpers use these methods, they always pick guilty people who actually have the correct information, and provide them. That Saw at this point also lacks a few limbs, replaced by droid machinery, and has to use some artificial breathing (though not non stop) is the typical SW subtlety of indicating parallels to another character; Saw seeing the error of his ways before the end and giving his life so Jyn can escape is therefore not an entire surprise.
Prequel shout out: Bail Organa and Mon Mothma both played by their prequel actors. Poor Jimmy Smits still has only a minimum of lines, though; if not for the Clone Wars series, where he actually gets stuff to do, we'd still have no real characterisation for Leia's emotional and thus real father.
Hang on, isn't that...: The film's main villain, Krennic, is played by Ben Mendelsohn whom I had recently seen in the first season of Bloodlines as Danny, and while I recognized the voice at once, it took me a while to realize where I knew him from, because the 70s style Imperial get up is quite a different look from today's Florida drug smuggling beach person. Mads Mikkelsen as Galen wears a beard at first which is a good disguise because I didn't recognize him until Jyn had a flashback to her earlier childhood when he was clean shaven, and I thought, hang on! Dead Peter Cushing aside, this must be the first SW movie where the Imperials, weren't played by Brits.
In conclusion: enjoyed watching it, don't feel the need to rewatch it in the cinema, though. I'll wait till it's on tv.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1208706.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.