ROGUE ONE: Spoilerific WTF thread!

[Atekimogus]

So I managed to watch it yesterday and there will be spoilers ahead. Stop reading NOW if you don't want any spoilers!


Now I am not a religious Star Wars fan...I love the original triology but find the rest pretty much forgetable so I was excited about this one mostly because of the trailer, which looked great.

And here is the first failure....the movie is nothing like the first trailer AT ALL. No dialuoge from the trailer was actually IN the movie, heck...most of the SCENES from the trailer are not even in the movie. It feels like a completely different cut, either they filmed scences specifically for the movie...or they made the trailer and then reshoot must of the stuff....

But first things first......I won't go into all that emancipation, political correctness etc. BS surrounding it but just view it from an entertainment point of view. The movie starts with the first 30 - 45 minutes being....UTTERLY boring. They introduce the "main characters" but most of the time is spent watching Shuttle X flying towards destination Y before the beautiful background of planetary vistas. There is hardly any diaoluge and such as it is is UTTERLY generic, uninteresing and....booooring. It is so painfully OBVIOUS that they have no idea what they are doing but just need to connect points of rough story outlines. Hence ever character behaves absolutely stupid, the unnecessary and stupid death of the mother being the first cringe-worthy moment. Yes...I think I let myself getting killed in a completely unnecessary and stupid way just so my daughter can develop a proper hatred of a galactic government...which doesn't seem to do much evil anyhow.

(Seriously..just as a side note...why is the Empire considered evil in the first place? Ah yes..dark side of the force and all that...but come on...we never see anything reallly evil from them...civilzations and bases run by the empire all seem clean, well ordered, peaceful....WTF is the beef the Rebellion has with them? They seem to get shit done. Now sure...in the expanded universe they eleborate more on the "evilness" of them...but going by the movies,..well I found myself rooting for the Empire in this one).

The lead is not a "strong female lead"...it's just generic angry at the world girl and completely unlikable. Not a fault of the actress though..I think she did great considering what she had to work with. Still I never felt any danger for her character nor did I much care and I hated that again..this is a character who completely makes a 180° turn of their world view for no good reason at all.

Her male sidekick, completely forgetable generic PC minority guy....is also just basically an asshole and only there to be a completely out of nowhere 3 minute romance interest for the sake of.....I really don't know. There is zero chemistry there and all attempts of it feel forced.
The rest of the Rogue One crew you never even get to know..they are just there so that Angry Girl can deliver a "Private Ryan" storming the beach speech before they go on their suicide mission...which is completely unnecessry because...there really is no point for them anyhow. Well...a distraction..maybe...but basically they were infiltrating.....so..I would argue that putting the whole base on alert because of this "distraction" was probably more detrimental to their success than just infiltrating the thing undetected....

Doesn't really matter though because all of the "good" characters only succeed because of the sheer incompetence of the Empire. I mean if Stormtroopers where bad against Ewoks...this is a whole other level of incompetence..they get mowed down here more easily than Zombie Nazis in Horror comedy movies. There never is any sense of REAL danger for the protagonists you don't care about anyhow. I swear the Empire cannot shoot a laser straight.....


Other points I found disappointing:

The main villain who looked really cool, menacing and competent (like I would imagine Thrawn) in the trailer, turned out to be an utterly forgetable and incompetent bureaucrat with a lisp who completely shits himself when his base is under attack. He is so generic and forgetable I will need a second viewing to confirm if all the guys we see in the white uniform are actually the same guy or not. The rank insignia seems to change randomly and I am not sure if the guy talking with the main characters father (Galen Erso) is the same we see on the death star with Tarkin. (Uniform also quickly changes between cuts...sometimes with a long cape, sometimes with a short one. Painfully obvious that the re-shoot a great many of scenes if this is indeed the same character. Production of this movie most have been a mess).

Tarkin....while a find it commendable that they made the effort....it is painfully obvious that this is a CGI character even through the damn 3D glasses. (Same goes doubly for young Lea...why exactly was she in the final battle?)

Vader....had one of the view cool scenes at the end....but was it really Vader? His voice sounded off and I am not sure if they hired Jones with the flu or just a voice impersonater.

The final space battle...looked great but come on.....the amount of stupid in it is just too grating. Sure..let's disable a Star Destroyer with Ion torpedos, why not. But the small corvette than ramming the thing (and surviving for some reason) and then overcome the Inertia of a ship probalby 40x its own mass faster than the second Star Destroyer is able to evade under his own power? WTF.
And then the disabled Star Destroyers cuts the second Star Destroyer in half because........what? Those are identical ships..why is one made of paper mache and the other one of adamantium? You know...I do NOT care about realism in a space sci fi opera....but COME ON, you need to be consistent within the rules of the universe you create. Everything that happens in the movie is not the result of the actions of the protagonists..it happens because "the plot" needs it to happen. That is why Vaders Star destroyer is suddenly not built out reinforced cardboard like the other ones.....pure power of the plot.

The data archive and storage system......ok. That is not how anyone would do it att all. This is worse than the obstacle course in Galaxy Quest....


I liked the droid.....it says something about a movie with real life actors if the most likeable character and the one with the only semi-emotional death scene is a complete CGI fabrication. I swear this mission would have been much more easier if they blasted the shuttle out of the sky and the droid being the sole survivor. He could have done alone probably much better without all the characters being stupid.


A real shame, the trailer was fantastic and the movie had huge potential imho. Sadly it is painfully obvious that they played mostly on nostalgia ('member the Star Destroyer crashing into something? 'member the Death Star? 'member Tarking?) Why they so utterly fail to create interesting, likable characters is beyond me....I do think this is because they are not casting by necessity of the story, but by comittee of what minority needs to be represented. Why there is no talented writer/director for Star Wars movies I really don't know. Seems they are all busy actually doing television nowadays, because interesting characters with great dialogue are more likely to be found in Game of Thrones or Westworld than in movies.

[Graham Kennedy]

When the thread title is marked as spoiler you don't need the spoiler tags in posts.

[IanKennedy]

Agreed

[Graham Kennedy]

Just saw it.

Not bad, overall. I like that it had the guts to show most of the good guys dying. The story was clear and made sense, acting was okay all around. I mostly liked the characters, except Forest Whittaker seemed a bit too weird for the story he was in. Decent idea to have multiple rebel factions who don't like one another, I thought.

The action was generally good, effects were spectacular as usual.

I thought the idea of "hit the reactor and it will blow up" being a deliberately introduced flaw was a little unnecessary. It's a pretty universal sci-fi trope that if you blow up a reactor there's a great big boom. Why not just make him putting in the exhaust shaft with a clear line to the reactor (and no grating!) the flaw? But that's a minor quibble.

I gotta say, the CGI people did not work too well. They looked like animated rubber-faced dolls. Tarkin only looked vaguely like Peter Cushing's Tarkin, and didn't really sound like him. I foresee a special edition some years down the line with these replaced with realistic versions.

But overall, decent movie. I'd give it four stars out of five.

[Atekimogus]

When the thread title is marked as spoiler you don't need the spoiler tags in posts.

Ok, I thought better save than sorry:)

[DarkMoineau]

It looks like we didn't saw the same movie ^^

For your remark about Princess Leia... She has the plan at the beginning of A New Hope (Star Wars 4 maide in 1977) so it was necessary to show why she has them and why Darth Vader is following her.

The end make sense and the CGI faces clearly improved since Tron Legacy.

It's still the beginning of that technology (Second time it is used I think, at least by a movie financed by Disney) but I clearly liked the effort made to have characters having the same face in 1977 and 2016. I prefer it to recast as the end of one movie is the beginning of another.

For the characters... After having criticised the VII because of a lack of World Building I was pretty happy to see Gareth Edwards took time to do world building.

The movie has flaw that will probably become more obvious with time just like any movie, but in the end I didn't leave a theatre with such a good feeling for a Sci-Fi Movie since 2005.

[IanKennedy]

As a Star Wars prequel it was far better than the three abominations that Lucas provided. That said it wasn't that great. In terms of movies since 2005 I would rate any of the recent Star Trek films way above this one. Also Iron Man, WALL-E, Avatar, District 9, Monsters vs. Aliens, Watchmen, Hot Tub Time Machine, Paul, The Avengers Assemble, The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, 10 Cloverfield Lane all come to mind as better than this.

[DarkMoineau]

It's true Guardians of the Galaxy was great.

I have not seen Ender's game.

But I disliked Avatar and I do not consider Super Hero Movies as Science Fiction but as it's own genre so I don't compare them together (and even in that case, I prefer Roge One).

Paul is a Sci-Fi Comedy, I would more easily compare it to Fanboy than any Star Wars.

I am not going to do a comparison movie for movie but for me Rogue One was a good Star Wars, clearly better than two of the prequels and the only sequel we know yet.

And I am not a big fan of the remake of Star Trek and always considered Star Trek was better on TV as it gave more time to world building than movies.

[Graham Kennedy]

It looks like we didn't saw the same movie ^^

For your remark about Princess Leia... She has the plan at the beginning of A New Hope (Star Wars 4 maide in 1977) so it was necessary to show why she has them and why Darth Vader is following her.

You didn't need to literally see her for that, though. They could easily have just had that guy hand them round the door and go "Get this to the Princess!" and leave it at that. Or you could have had that scene where they go onto the bridge and you see her from behind, and leave it at that.

But I agree, from a story point of view, it's perfectly fine to show them actually handing her the plans. As an aside, I even wondered if when somebody asked what it meant, she would say "It's a new hope." Little too on the nose, I guess.

But regardless of how good it was to have her be there from a story point of view, the actual look of the character was really weird and creepy to my eyes. It didn't look like an actual person at all. I love the idea of being able to do this kind of thing, and recreate young versions of actors or dead actors. But the technology just isn't there yet. Maybe ten years down the line.

The movie has flaw that will probably become more obvious with time just like any movie, but in the end I didn't leave a theatre with such a good feeling for a Sci-Fi Movie since 2005.

I liked it too, and I'm not a great Star Wars fan.

Couple of small things that have occurred since. I noticed some rock formations around Jedha that looked a little weird. Apparently they are huge statues of Jedi Knights which have fallen over and broken up, indicating that it is indeed the origin point of the Jedi. That's a nice little detail, I thought.

I thought it was weird when they blew up the base at the end that they didn't shoot at the actual base. When that happened with Jedha it made sense; the Imperials blew up the city, and the shockwave slowly spread to where the characters were. Seemed like a seriously slow shockwave, but okay, bit of poetic license there.

But at the end they wanted to fire on the base... but they actually hit a spot that's miles and miles away. It's a nice callback to the first shot, visually, but why did the Imperials do that rather than just targeting the base? Seems odd.

What I did appreciate was the clever solution to using the Death Star. IIRC, in the original movie they say they have not yet tested it. So it's never been used before. Yet in this movie, you can't really have a superweapon as the maguffin without showing it working for the audience. A "one reactor" test was a clever way to reconcile the two, I thought. Worked very well, and looked awesome on screen.

[DarkMoineau]

You have to remember peoples on DITL here know Sci-Fi franchise more than most people. Even you with as little knowledge of Star Wars as you think you have are part of a "Fanboy elite" with more knowledge than most peoples. That's why the Princess have to be shown.

And you can't have the first Death Star without Tarkin wich is already a proeminent ennemy of Rebels.

For the critic about the technology not being mature enough... Yes I agree but if we never start, it will never happen. And only Star Wars have both fan supports, story driven (artistic?) motivation and financial power to do it. I am affraid Star Trek lack the financial power.

[Graham Kennedy]

Congratulations!

[DarkMoineau]

Sorry, did I say something wrong?

English is not my native language.

[Graham Kennedy]

No, I somehow posted in the wrong thread. Because I'm an idiot.

[DarkMoineau]

Oh ok

[Atekimogus]

It looks like we didn't saw the same movie ^^

For your remark about Princess Leia... She has the plan at the beginning of A New Hope (Star Wars 4 maide in 1977) so it was necessary to show why she has them and why Darth Vader is following her.

I am sorry..it makes absolutely no sense at all. Yes..it would make sense hiding the plans to the deathstar on a diplomatic vessel with immunity that nobody would suspect. No..it makes no sense bringing that vessel to the very same attack that targets the only installation in the galaxy having those plans in the first place.

Consider this...having narrowly made their escape on the corellian corvette from the attack on the data archive...what is the first thing they would logically do? EXACTLY...ditch the plans and give it to a vessel which ISN'T known to carry them in the first place. Hence....I find this incredibly stupid and just played for the sake of it. ('member Leia? 'member the corellian corvette?)

(and I would like to think that her foster father isn't a complete idiot either who would allow his daughter being present at a major naval space battle for NO reason at all. Yes...her being a diplomatic ambassador makes a believable cover story for using her as a death-star plans mule.

Having her in a space battle......why? What benifit did she bring to the fleet? What was her role supposed to be?)

The end make sense and the CGI faces clearly improved since Tron Legacy.

It's still the beginning of that technology (Second time it is used I think, at least by a movie financed by Disney) but I clearly liked the effort made to have characters having the same face in 1977 and 2016. I prefer it to recast as the end of one movie is the beginning of another.

For the characters... After having criticised the VII because of a lack of World Building I was pretty happy to see Gareth Edwards took time to do world building.

The movie has flaw that will probably become more obvious with time just like any movie, but in the end I didn't leave a theatre with such a good feeling for a Sci-Fi Movie since 2005.

Despite my rather longish rant...the thing I really criticize the most is.....that the film was rather boring. Honestly...it really was. As soon as I get my hands on a digital copy I think I will actually make a count on how much minutes were only spent watching a shuttle-craft making a flyby from point A to point B. All those time could have been spent getting to know the characters a bit better and adding some depth...alas, they were only cliche cutout 08/15 characters.

Editing and cuts were horrendous...I am sorry..but that's true.