Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

[The Doctor]

The lead character in the film is female. It's the first SW film to be headlined by a female actor (TFA still had Harrison Ford as top billed actor). The leader of the Rebellion is female. I'm struggling to see your point. Sorry, chum! The original trilogy had very few female characters so if your criticism is that then it must be levelled at those films too.

An entirely seperate issue is whether the film overall is anyone's cup of tea (or lack thereof). I can see why it could be poo for some folk.

Do not talk of the Mind-Gap! I had purged that from my, er, mind.

-Ralph

[Bogatan]

If Rogue One was only loosely tied to previous films then I'd probably agree that the film lacked women, but this is tied to A new Hope tighter than any 2 other films in the series. In order to make that work they had to cast it like ANH.

I suppose they could have had an almost entirely female team of volunteers and Blue Squadron at the end of the film thus answering the question of where all the rebel woman are in ANH, but I can't help feeling that would have only made things worse.

[Fortmax2020]

Regarding the lack of women in the film (and adequate representation of non-white males outside the 25-40 age bracket in general) I think we will have to disagree. I don't think a film today should at all be bound by any 'consistency' with a film made a generation ago in terms of its casting make up nor is it is adequate to point out the one or two women who feature more prominently in it. Even people who I know have enjoyed the film immensely but fall out of that casting bracket (unlike most of us here) have raised concerns.

As to the rest of the film we can each have our own opinions on it but I have been totally amazed at the lack of any reasonable criticism of the film here and elsewhere. If it wasn't a SW film it would have been pulled to pieces frankly. I shall say no more here though as there is no point being continually negative here just for the sake of it.

[The Doctor]

I think you're conflating your own (valid) opinion as to whether you enjoyed the film with wanting everyone else to have the same opinion and looking for validation. I know the feeling! We all do it when we experience something we think is utterly awful yet everyone else seems to love! I recall walking out of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' thinking it was one of the most boring films I had ever seen and the most blatant rip-off of 1977 Star Wars outside of a Roger Corman film but minus the charm. I liked the typeface for the titles and the soundtrack and nothing else. Imagine my surprise to find it getting universal acclaim. I haven't met anyone yet who has seen it who didn't love it. Is this a problem? Not really. I tried to rewatch it later on but still couldn't see what folk were raving about in it at all.

As for not having 'reasonable criticism' because it is a Star Wars film, I can only speak for myself in that I have been very critical on here of episodes 1-III and VII and expressed ambivalence towards Rogue One before release so I can hardly be said to have lapsed my critical faculties just because of the logo on the film. Heck, my interest in Star Wars is nowhere near as high as Star Trek and films 11 and 12 in that series by no means get a critical pass from me!

It doesn't matter that Rogue One appears to be well liked but you found it to be rubbish. That's fine. If anything, we're having more interesting chat about it than when when TFA was out. But remember, chum, if you want a terrible looking film... 'Monster Trucks' is out next week...

RE: Diversity and gender casting in films. Worthy of debate in its own topic I would say.

-Ralph

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Watched it a second time on Wednesday with my 8-year-old god-daughter, her 10-year-old sister, their older male cousins and their dad. We all agreed it was the tops, and the two girls (big Star Wars fans) gave it 10/10. General agreement it was better than last year's remake and the other prequels. I was in a minority of one in my dislike of the CG rendition of a certain character.

I don't see any issue with the gender make-up. You might as well say we shouldn't make any new historic war movies where the armies are just made up of men. Mostly male armies happen to be a fact of life at the point in time we are interested in in the Star Wars universe, just as they have been for most of real history. No-one ever said Star Wars should be taken to be an idealistic future space society, in the way Star Trek is supposed to be.

I have more of a problem with the dominance of human characters amongst the Rebels than with the dominance of male characters, but with that too I suppose I wouldn't want them to be noticeably inconsistent with the original movie.

Martin

[legios]

Dec 23, 2016 0:37:29 GMT Fortmax2020 said:

I appear to have seen a completely different film to you all or you are all suffering a Unicron-induced Star Wars mindgap/blindspot.

Yes, there were a couple of very token female rebel pilots. Very much token I feel and more of a nod to cutting room antics in earlier films than to any actual drive to show women in key roles.

In fairness, I'm not advancing a claim that either of the female pilots where any more than token roles - but I'd argue that any female extras amongst the ground forces would have been equally token roles, given that very few of the ground troops got actual lines.

Karl

[Andy Turnbull]

Great film.

Much better than The Force Awakens.

[The Doctor]

'Ewoks: Battle for Endor' remains the grittiest Star Wars adventure so far though.

-Ralph

[Andy Turnbull]

Nam with teddies.

[The Doctor]

Rogue One novelisation was decent enough though your mileage may vary depending on how you get on with cave metaphors.

Much better than the perfunctory 'he said, she said' TFA novel.

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

Saw the film again. Still enjoyed it though the book is better in some respects.

-Ralph

[Andy Turnbull]

Watched it again yesterday with some friends.

Still enjoyed it, I have seen it twice in the cinema and the Force Awakens only once. So I stand by my assessment that it is the better of the two films.

Andy

[Pinwig]

First viewing tonight. Tickets bought.

[Andy Turnbull]

What a way to end the year!

[Bogatan]

Saw it for a second time yesterday. I think I saw TFA 2 or 3 times.

Second time around was a bit weird. I wasnt really expecting everyone to die, not because it didnt make sense, I just hadnt given the film that much attention. On second viewing, knowing how it ends made the rest of the film darker.

This time I did pick up an oddness in the plot that may be tied to the reshoots. When the shield gates closes they say they can no longer escape so the only way to get the data out is via the dish. But the file size is too large to transmit while the shields up so the shield has to come down.

At which point the original plan is again viable, but no one seems to consider this.

On the same point theres no reason Jyn and Cassian? couldnt have gone looking for a ship to escape rather than go and sit on the beach.

Still great.

[The Doctor]

It's been out for over two weeks. Do we still need spoiler tags?

-Ralph

[The Doctor]

RE: Your second spoiler point. There just wasn't time for cough and cough to do anything like do the cough due to the cough having happened just a few seconds before. It's made a bit clearer in the novel but I think it's still clear enough in the finished film.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

I'd been avoiding the thread anyway, but I only saw it tonight.

Acid test is whether Blueshift has seen it.

I thought it was magic. Great film. Last shot was a choker.

[blueshift]

Dec 31, 2016 23:29:25 GMT Pinwig said:

I'd been avoiding the thread anyway, but I only saw it tonight.

Acid test is whether Blueshift has seen it.

I thought it was magic. Great film. Last shot was a choker.

I have not seen it but I have had the chance and found I'm not caring that much about spoilers, so go wild!

[The Doctor]

SPOILER TAGS HAVE BEEN LIFTED.

-Ralph

[jameso]

Ralph does the novelization match up with the final cut or are there references to scenes from before the reshoots?

[The Doctor]

Scene wise it matches up very closely to the finished film, however tonally it is much more doom laden with the main Rebel characters more clearly on their own descent spirals. Galen's hologram speech is different, making Jyn's motivations much more interesting (in more opinion).

It's the same story on the surface but much darker internally as we are privvy to the internal thoughts. Jyn comes across less heroically and more bordering on sociopathic.

The book is for adults, the film is for everyone. Same story though. I found the film more exciting, but the book more affecting.

-Ralph

[Stomski]

I took in a second viewing too just before Christmas.

Another criticism that I forgot to list the first time is the background shouts of things like "Let her speak" in the Rebel Alliance meeting seem really unnatural.

However - in the same meeting there's a good reference to the Emperor's plan in RotJ.

Best Easter Egg was the Stormstrooper saying 'What The?' like the Forest Trooper on Endor, even better than the mention of the BT-15 being obsolete.

[jameso]

Sounds like the novelization will be worth checking out. The Revenge of the Sith novel is probably more adult than the movie too.

[The Doctor]

Third viewing. Spotted an imperial probe droid this time!

I still haven't spotted Chopper or The Ghost.

-Ralph

[blueshift]

Oh my god, it was Guy Henry playing Tarkin!!!!

[inflatabledalek]

Finally saw it!


Hmmm.

It's one of those films where I think it will take a second viewing to nudge it into me either really liking it or finding it unmitigated crap.

I certainly like the way it unashamedly does something that's different for the franchise but very much in keeping with its original ethos: In the same way Lucas originally did the perfect distillation of every pulp serial of his youth this does the same with every Mission war film ever made.

The cast were fine despite the characters they were playing being a dour bunch (more on that in a minute), the set pieces were impressive (though my mother started laughing loudly at the--IHHO--stupidity of the ramming sequence at the end) and there was little you could point at and call outright bad.

But at the same time it felt unsatisfying. Largely because I don't think this type of movie is a good fit for Star Wars. At least without toughing up the opposition a lot more, you can't really do a dark gritty war film when the Empire still can't shoot anything right in front of them and a guy with a stick can twat them at ease. The actual war part of Star Wars has always been a bit silly and this doesn't quite bridge the gap between that and the film it wants to be.

The seriousness also makes for quite a dull bunch of characters, as noted the performances were fine (though how someone raised first by Mads Mikkelsen and then Forest Whittaker wound up with a cut glass English accent I'll never know), but they're incredibly serious and have very little humour or warmth to them. Again, probably realistic but many of the great war films this is aping had fun larger than life characters as well.

The blind guy was the biggest example of this, a possibly insane blind kung fu master who thinks he's a Jedi? Great silly idea. But there was no ooomphhh to his performance and he seemed to be napping at times.

The robot probably did best out of the heroes, I suspect the fact his dialogue could all be altered easily in post meant a lot of reworking during the extensive changes, certainly he seemed to shift between being a bit of a bastard and being C3P02.

The other big flaw is it was too long: You could easily have made the planet with Dad on and the planet with the plans one and the same and ensured both of the film's main plot threads climaxed together (rather than, as happens, finishing off the one that wasn't a foregone conclusion first). It would certainly have made sense for there to be a copy of the designs at the place where the Death Star was designed and the big shield being over a top secret lab makes more sense than the records archive.

A few people on twitter suggested it had to be two separate missions to bond the team and ask the tough questions about the two lead's motives... but the war films this is aping usually just have one central mission and have to bond the team and payoff the plot threads within that, so I can't see why that couldn't have been done here with some better writing and structuring of the plot. Plus tropical planet was a fairly fresh thing for Star Wars whilst we've had storm planets before, skipping that would have been fine.

Darth Vader seemed like he'd been smoking some good weed before his main talky scene didn't he? Again, I suspect a character who's lines are all ADR anyway meant they bore the brunt of the attempts to lighten the tone. Possibly the performance didn't help there, the new actor (I'm guessing they didn't get Hayden Christian back despite otherwise being faithful to the prequel trilogy actors with returning characters) was camping it up far more than Dave Prowse ever did.

Other thoughts:

The names of Mads and wife bugged me for being familiar during the screening, of course they're named after Galan and Llyra from the Headmasters comic! Spelt one letter differently in each case (trademark reasons presumably) and I'd have put one down to a coincidence (or just a Planet of the Apes TV show gag in the former case), but together and in a relationship? Has to be deliberate. Shame the daughter wasn't called Kord.

I wasn't expecting Tarkin to have such a big role (possibly not even that much smaller than in the original), I was expecting to find it awkward but--whilst I never thought for a second "That's a real face"--I actually bought into it. Probably helps there's so much motion capture in Star Wars anyway (including of otherwise normal looking types like Serkis in the last one), I wonder whether it would have stood out for anyone who didn't know Peter Cushing?

Oddly Leia felt less convincing at the end, though of course, that's got a weight to seeing it now. Especially considering that--as ADR is usually one of the last things done on a film--that one word voiceover might have been Carrie Fisher's last work even if we've still got one more film with her in to come.

I guess the last few minutes was part of the reshoots? Up to then it's almost fastidious about not contradicting anything from the original--would anyone have really minded if the Death Star had blown up a planet?--but the last action scene basically throws all that out the window and makes the Vader/Leia conversation that opens the original very strange ("I'm on a diplomatic mission!" "Dude, you literally just fled the battle. I watched. Look, there's the guy I chased aboard with the plans. Hello again there! By the way, I've been working on some quips. Would you like to hear one?"), I guess someone thought just transmitting the plans to the ship wasn't exciting enough?

I'll bet Admiral Fish was Ackbar at one point before changes downed that ship.

Would have been nice if at least one of the team had made it out alive. Once the tone they're aiming for sinks it becomes a bit obvious they're all doomed so at least a minor subversion of that would have been refreshing.

Bail Organa gets a very oddly dramatic "TA DAH!" introductory shot, as if everyone knows who he is. With all respect to Jimmy Smits I'm not sure he's that well remembered. Even from the Prequels he's no Samuel L Jackson or even Jar Jar Binks. The lack of explanation of who he is for people that don't remember his three minutes in a film 11 years ago makes the very clunky exposition heavy conversation about his "Jedi friend" all the odder.

He's certainly aged better than Obi-Wan in the same timeframe though.

I did like the small scale threat of the director, he's entire ambition was just to save face and keep his job and it's only having lots of soldiers that makes him a threat. I thought a flaw of Force Awakens was the supposedly impressive villains all seemed a bit rubbish (Kylo Ren: Handy if you want a wall or a pensioner stabbed, terrible at everything else), here you've got a desperate guy struggling to keep his head above water and no one treats him as anything but that and it works much better.

There's some great black comedy from how everything he does--starting with forcing someone to build his death weapon who doesn't want to do it--makes the situation worse and worse.

Not sure why he needed to go to Plans planet himself at the end though, he could have just phoned them up and asked for a copy of the information to be sent to him surely?

Oh, and visually I really liked how the Death Star had a real imposing presence in this that it's never quite had before. Really think the TF films could pull of Unicron now.

[Philip Ayres]

I was much amused to spot within the group of engineers accused of being the traitor was the Dirty Stinking Traitor himself Richard Franklin!

[Pinwig]

Coo. Missed that!

[The Doctor]

"I urge that traitor to step forward!"

-Ralph