The Rogue One Thread

Guess there isn't one because of the reply I got to mentioning I tookk the family in the Christmas thread. So here one is.

I've got it tied for the best Stars Wars movie ever.



Some of the previous were entertaining. T h i s one had me wanting to get into the fight. That's good! Been too lethargic. Good to feel the old juices flowing again.

 

I haven't seen it, but I've heard is not very Star Wars like(whatever that means). To me that's a good thing, since I'm not a huge Star wars fan. Any opinions about that?

I remember I really liked Man of steel for example because it didn't feel like a Superman film.

 

Saw it a couple days ago. A good but not great addition to the Star Wars lineup. But...

Spoiler :

...the last third of it was pretty depressing. They ALL die!!! Every single person that you don't recognize from A New Hope, whether rebel or imperial, actually dies by the end of the film, WTF?

 

I think you answered my question there(I don't like suprises so I don't mind knowing).

 

I was really surprised to see Jar Jar Binks with a light saber but when they hit him so many times with heavy rocks, then the flame thrower and finally the death star fried the left overs I was glad it all ended well. I mean that right there was worth the price. Or maybe that was when I nodded off during the previews and had an erotic dream.

 

It was super.

 

Saw it two days ago, it was great!

Lots of details to like. For instance how they stuck to 1970s hair and facial hair fashions to make it match the original trilogy. I expect they had a lot of detail-obsessed nerds keeping really close watch on everything for the production.

 

Yeah I really liked that.

 

It has transcended every other Star Wars movie for me. Such a wonderful film. My new rankings are:

1. Rogue One
2. Revenge of the Sith
3. The Force Awakens
4. The Phantom Menace
5. Empire Strikes Back
6. The Clone Wars
7. A New Hope
8. Return of the Jedi

I love that they included a character from the Clone Wars TV show, as well as characters and assets from the Star Wars Rebels TV show. They perfected facial CGI for calm scenes, to the point that in IMAX 3D the characters with CGI faces may as well have been real faces. Not even uncanny valley. Just... wonderful. I have not seen it on a standard screen, however, so maybe it's noticeable in the normal version.

@Lillefix, it's still very Star Wars but it's a much darker approach to it. The good-bad morality system is muddied. Rebels are doing bad things, Imperials are acting like ordinary people. There's terrorism, witnessing acts of atrocity on the ground instead of seeing it from afar in space (i.e. the destruction of Alderaan in Episode 4). Character development is good, by the end of it you like most if not all the primary characters.

Spoiler :

And yes, everyone dies. That was the point, of course. I was very worried they weren't going to do that but I was pleasantly surprised.

Darth Vader is not in it much but his presence is certainly memorable. Excellent performances by everyone in the film except for Forest Whitaker. However, I'm 75% certain that's my personal bias against him as an actor and not about his actual performance.

Nobody gets their "hero death". It's gritty. Death is just a thing that happens. There's no song or dance about it. People die and the story moves on because there's no time, they have to hurry.

Wonderful film. I'm pleased, very pleased.

 

The Phantom Menace.. ranked higher than the Empire Strikes Back? Am I reading that right??

They had to do this.

Spoiler :

Otherwise how do you explain these major players not being a part of the rebellion in episodes 4-6? I salute Disney for not chickening out here and doing it right.

IMO it was very Star Wars like.

Spoiler :

The first 45-60 mins is very slow but once the movie gets going you start thinking "Oh yeah this is def. a Star Wars movie"

Overall I really liked the movie and it's added new context behind A New Hope's beginning and plot. This movie made ANH better and as a result the original trilogy better.

 

My opinion...

The original Star Wars does not sit well with the modern audience because it is way too pollyanna feel good. But in its day the audience was not as tuned to darkness as it is now, so in its day it was a great movie. Unfortunately that greatness spawned however many sequels, which went downhill until they hit rock bottom and then they kept on making them anyway.

Rogue One has every bit of greatness the original had, appropriately darkened for the current audience. In that regard it has to be viewed through the lens of current times as the best of the franchise.

 

I'm not a big fan of the OT, to be honest. I like the universe they create but the films themselves are pretty meh for me. ESB had too much Alice in Wonderland Yoda and superfluous content for me. If they removed the wampa scene, the Yoda scenes, and the Cloud City scenes, then it'd be great. My problem with the superfluous content is that it's not entertaining. The pointless stuff in the prequels was good for a laugh and took up less time than the pointless stuff in the OT. In the OT my thought process throughout all three films often goes: "Can I skip this?" Some flashes of brilliance but they don't connect well to each other and they're muted by the bad stuff.

I'm fairly young but I did see the OT first before ever watching the prequels.

 

The way my parents tell it, the 70s was full of dark grim gritty unhappy movies and Star Wars was the return to uncomplicated good vs evil with happy endings.

 

The Force Awakens was a god awful movie. Thankfully JJ Abrams had nothing to do with this movie and the results showed, amazing, easily see it being the best of the disney movies for quite some time

 

Indeed, the late '60s and early '70s were awash in moral ambiguity, antiheroes, and shades of grubby. The French Connection was '71. Taxi Driver was '76. There was a whole "paranoia" subgenre: All the President's Men; Klute; 3 Days of the Condor.

To my memory, when Star Wars came out, people figured it was a kids movie until they saw it.

 

Drama and suspense was big then, and Egon gave some good examples. Your parents were probably thinking of those. But action movies in the '70s were all about heroes that always made it through no matter how improbable. Whether you were in a capsized cruise ship, a burning skyscraper, a catastrophic earthquake or a garbage compacter on a space station as long as you were the designated hero you were going to be fine and everyone knew it.

 

The 2nd-highest-grossing movie in 1977, after Star Wars? Smokey and the Bandit (which, I have to admit, I loved when I was a tot - I've never watched it as an adult, lest I spoil the memory).

 

LOL...speaking of "if you were the hero you were gonna be fine"...

 

Back to Rogue One, I've noticed a trend: Those who saw the movie in 2-D (myself included) seemed to find Tarkin much more tolerable than those who saw it in 3-D. (Leia was bizarre, regardless.) In 2-D, Tarkin's face was still obviously animated - the mouth didn't perfectly match the dialogue - but it wasn't quite so far into the Uncanny Valley. The tech isn't quite there yet, but boy have they made some progress. Tron: Legacy was 6 years ago, now. I haven't gone back to watch it, but to my memory, Jeff Bridges' "de-aging" was pretty weird. Cool, 'cause I hadn't seen it before, but weird.

Right, I was citing it as an example.

 

Odd. I saw it in IMAX 3D and the facial sculpting for both Tarkin and Leia were perfect. I really want to see it on a normal screen now so that I can understand what people are talking about when they say it was weird or out of sync.