Rogue One - Star Wars Fan Service

[immortalfrieza]

Spoiler

The biggest problem I have with this movie is the rather risky use of CGI to try and recreate Tarkin and young Leia, which was noticeable.

What was insane about it was that was entirely unnecessary to use really terrible CGI to recreate these characters. With how incredibly popular Star Wars is, all the actors and actresses that grew up watching the movies not to mention all the cosplayers it's hard to believe that they couldn't just walk into the nearest Star Wars convention and find at least one person who looks and sounds so much like these characters that nobody would be able to tell the difference between them and the original actors. Hell, they'd probably jump at the chance and even do it for free too just so they could be in an actual Star Wars movie.

Spoiler

displaying the Rebellion and its allies more as guerilla warriors and even terrorists that occasionally kill people for complicated reasons.

That would probably be the main thing I didn't like about this movie is it's portrayal of the Rebels (that, and the jarring lack of a title crawl.) Rogue One's writers try to inject grey into the Rebel Alliance, an organization whose entire selling point both in and out of universe is that they are very very unambiguously the good guys despite how resource strapped they are. The Rebellion aren't filled with politicians trying to gain power and influence, terrorists trying to bring down the Empire through morally dubious methods, or even mostly good with a few bad apples here and there, they are trying to free the galaxy from the oppressive grip of the Empire only through morally justifiable means. What separates the Alliance to Restore the Republic from say the Confederacy of Independent Systems is both that their motives are pure and their actions as well, which is the reason people both in and out of universe flock to their cause.

OT: The movie was... meh, good enough for a watch, nothing extraordinary. Prequels are inherently limited in so many ways that it's all but impossible to have them work to begin with, but the characters weren't good or detailed enough to make the journey interesting and since we all knew they weren't going to amount to anything it was already really difficult to get attached to them anyway even if they were good. Prequels only work when they have absolutely nothing to do with the events of anything that is chronologically supposed to come after it and have no characters that appear afterward in it, and this movie failed on both counts. Vader in particular was just a senseless cameo that doesn't really do anything thrown in to get people to watch.

 

[chimeracreator]

Vader in particular was just a senseless cameo that doesn't really do anything thrown in to get people to watch.

I couldn't disagree with you more about this.

Spoiler

I thought that outside of Empire no other movie gave a better sense of just how powerful Vader was compared to everyone around him. When he boarded the Rebel ship he simply walked down the corridor. He never slowed his pace and the best efforts of the Rebels didn't cause him to miss a step. They all died and it didn't even buy any time. They slammed the door on him and it didn't buy any time. Since he never slowed his pace. They all died before him, and there was nothing they could do but run.

How is that not glorious?

 

[immortalfrieza]

Vader in particular was just a senseless cameo that doesn't really do anything thrown in to get people to watch.

I couldn't disagree with you more about this.

Spoiler

I thought that outside of Empire no other movie gave a better sense of just how powerful Vader was compared to everyone around him. When he boarded the Rebel ship he simply walked down the corridor. He never slowed his pace and the best efforts of the Rebels didn't cause him to miss a step. They all died and it didn't even buy any time. They slammed the door on him and it didn't buy any time. Since he never slowed his pace. They all died before him, and there was nothing they could do but run.

How is that not glorious?

It's not glorious because Vader doesn't do anything a squad of nameless Stormtroopers couldn't have done, and then fails to get the Death Star plans back solely because he's too busy screwing around during the ONE brief scene in the movie he actually does something, the fact that the Rebels are slaughtered by him pointless, they could have just had the Rebels escape and had everything go the exact same way as it does anyway. He stands around for most of his scenes in the movie, makes a couple quips, then slaughters a bunch of Rebels that never stood a chance against anything the Empire could have thrown at them, that's it, that's the extent of his appearance. Compare that to every other movie Vader has ever appeared in, he's an actual counter to the efforts of the heroes and a driving influence to the plot in general in those movies, while here Vader doesn't have any actual role in Rogue One except to just be there so they can put him in the trailers. They could have replaced the Director Big Bad with Vader and had him do most if not everything the Director did in the movie pretty seamlessly and thus his presence in the movie would have been far more justified, but as it is Vader could have been removed from the movie entirely and it wouldn't have altered anything that happened whatsoever.

 

[chimeracreator]

Fair enough, different people are entitled to their own opinions. That said, please use spoiler tags since not everyone has seen the movie.

 

[09philj]

Spoiler

The biggest problem I have with this movie is the rather risky use of CGI to try and recreate Tarkin and young Leia, which was noticeable.

What was insane about it was that was entirely unnecessary to use really terrible CGI to recreate these characters. With how incredibly popular Star Wars is, all the actors and actresses that grew up watching the movies not to mention all the cosplayers it's hard to believe that they couldn't just walk into the nearest Star Wars convention and find at least one person who looks and sounds so much like these characters that nobody would be able to tell the difference between them and the original actors. Hell, they'd probably jump at the chance and even do it for free too just so they could be in an actual Star Wars movie.

They could have gotten Wayne Pygram back to be Tarkin because he actually looks like Peter Cushing.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Rogue One is a terrible movie, vastly inferior to The Force Awakens.

The main cast is as thinly written as it gets: the reluctant hero, the guy whose done some shit he's not proud of but continues to fight anyway (see also Joel from The Last of Us, Miranda/Jack from Mass Effect 2, some incarnations of Batman etc), the snarker, and the kung fu monk. The LMG guy gets less characterisation than T-Dog from The Walking Dead, so whilst he doesn't fall into an archetype, it's by sheer virtue of not actually having a character. The pilot's the best of the lot, though that's mainly due to him being the anti-Han Solo; a random cargo Ferrier shitting himself in terror rather than an cool space-rogue.

The action scenes are all incredibly boring. If you saw the attack on the Death Star in A New Hope and the firefight on the bar planet in The Force Awakens, then you've already seen what this film has to offer. It's all too safe and done before; some blasters go pew, and spaceship blows up, and a weird fish dude stolen from the set of the next TMNT movie says a few lines. Sound familiar?

Perhaps the biggest problem of all, though? The tone. This was a movie that wanted to be about the darker side of the rebellion. What needed to be done to even have a chance to stand against the Empire. But the film never goes far enough. Nothing the rebels have to do shocks me. They are still all too clearly the good guys in a film that wanted to blur the lines, if even so slightly. It needed to be a a darker movie, but since Disney was never going to allow that, why try to go in this direction anyway?

Overall, a boring, bland movie. Avoid at all costs.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

It's not glorious because Vader doesn't do anything a squad of nameless Stormtroopers couldn't have done, and then fails to get the Death Star plans back solely because he's too busy screwing around during the ONE brief scene in the movie he actually does something, the fact that the Rebels are slaughtered by him pointless, they could have just had the Rebels escape and had everything go the exact same way as it does anyway. He stands around for most of his scenes in the movie, makes a couple quips, then slaughters a bunch of Rebels that never stood a chance against anything the Empire could have thrown at them, that's it, that's the extent of his appearance.

I think one aspect of the Vader-walking-slowly-towards-you thing is that he's...a quadruple amputee cyborg with a breathing problem. He probably can't actually walk that fast.

He's still super deadly, but more in a Deadpool-on-a-Zamboni [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc0Lmt7bSik] kind of way.

Spoiler

Halo Reach did it better, even with a military aproach in storytelling with a more distant view on the characters they had more charisma then the ones on this movie.

I actually can't disagree with you on that point.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

I watched the film with two friends an hour ago and... I can't disagree with this review. My main gripe with it was this: it wasn't as offensively bad as some of the prequels, but it was basically nothing. A big ball of grey and apathy. Flat characters, story is all over the place, line delivery wasn't bad enough to be funny either. It's just a load of callbacks to better moments and an attempt at an ending it was never going to be able to pull of well.

In many ways, I would've preferred if it was just Uwe Boll levels of bad. I could've laughed at it, or cringed, or felt anything at all.

EDIT: Oh, wait, there was one thing that got a reaction out of me: the fucking Lava Fortress on Cliff Doom.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I watched the film with two friends an hour ago and... I can't disagree with this review. My main gripe with it was this: it wasn't as offensively bad as some of the prequels, but it was basically nothing. A big ball of grey and apathy. Flat characters, story is all over the place, line delivery wasn't bad enough to be funny either. It's just a load of callbacks to better moments and an attempt at an ending it was never going to be able to pull of well.

In many ways, I would've preferred if it was just Uwe Boll levels of bad. I could've laughed at it, or cringed, or felt anything at all.

EDIT: Oh, wait, there was one thing that got a reaction out of me: the fucking Lava Fortress on Cliff Doom.

You "like" to cringe at bad movies?

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Spoiler

Halo Reach did it better, even with a military aproach in storytelling with a more distant view on the characters they had more charisma then the ones on this movie.

Spoiler

Halo Reach could have been so much better if the campaign had the gameplay of Star Wars Republic Commando and the Noble Team was more developed on the level of Saving Private Ryan squad

 

[Alleged_Alec]

I watched the film with two friends an hour ago and... I can't disagree with this review. My main gripe with it was this: it wasn't as offensively bad as some of the prequels, but it was basically nothing. A big ball of grey and apathy. Flat characters, story is all over the place, line delivery wasn't bad enough to be funny either. It's just a load of callbacks to better moments and an attempt at an ending it was never going to be able to pull of well.

In many ways, I would've preferred if it was just Uwe Boll levels of bad. I could've laughed at it, or cringed, or felt anything at all.

EDIT: Oh, wait, there was one thing that got a reaction out of me: the fucking Lava Fortress on Cliff Doom.

You "like" to cringe at bad movies?

With that I meant the "so bad it's good" kind of territory, like the Underworld movies.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I watched the film with two friends an hour ago and... I can't disagree with this review. My main gripe with it was this: it wasn't as offensively bad as some of the prequels, but it was basically nothing. A big ball of grey and apathy. Flat characters, story is all over the place, line delivery wasn't bad enough to be funny either. It's just a load of callbacks to better moments and an attempt at an ending it was never going to be able to pull of well.

In many ways, I would've preferred if it was just Uwe Boll levels of bad. I could've laughed at it, or cringed, or felt anything at all.

EDIT: Oh, wait, there was one thing that got a reaction out of me: the fucking Lava Fortress on Cliff Doom.

You "like" to cringe at bad movies?

With that I meant the "so bad it's good" kind of territory, like the Underworld movies.

No such thing as so bad its good for me.

For one I genuinenly enjoy the first 2 live action Resident Evil movies. I think they are still good movies now. Helps that they are the more faithful and took inspiration from the Survival Horror Resident Evils.

 

[Redvenge]

I watched the film with two friends an hour ago and... I can't disagree with this review. My main gripe with it was this: it wasn't as offensively bad as some of the prequels, but it was basically nothing. A big ball of grey and apathy. Flat characters, story is all over the place, line delivery wasn't bad enough to be funny either. It's just a load of callbacks to better moments and an attempt at an ending it was never going to be able to pull of well.

I agree.

Anyone who has seen Star Wars: A New Hope knows how Star Wars: Rogue One ends. If they had any interesting characters, I might have felt invested when they "started blowin things up". I get that people cream themselves when they see Darth Vader or Star Destroyers once again on the big screen, but I can't help feeling that once that novelty wears off, Rogue One may not hold up to the "test of time".

Since Disney intends to give us "moar Star Wars, every year, FOREVAH!", then that novelty might wear off sooner, rather than later.

 

[ecoho]

saw the movie and honestly loved it. the Tarkin cgi was acceptable and the leia one was rather hard to notice the first time through. still think this is one of the best star wars movies out there, not as good as empire but definitely better then a new hope, return and force awakens.