The first 20 - 30 minutes feels uneven, pacing wise, until the order is given to destroy Jedha City. Then things really pick up.
K2SO steals the scene as a real asshole droid. He dies. (Is destroyed?)
Cassian Andor is a jaded Rebel intelligence officer. He dies.
Jyn Erso lives on the fringe of society, but commits to a greater cause in the film; has a great speech. She dies.
Bodhi Rook is an Imperial cargo pilot who is responsible for setting everything in motion when he gets Galen Erso's message out; he dies, too.
Look, everyone dies, okay? Baze Malbus, the blind Force user, the space monkey, Pao, the entire Rebel ground team, Ben Daniel's X-Wing general, the pre-Luke Red Five, they all DIE.
General Syndulla, presumably, survives; we don't see if this is Hera, just hear the call over a loudspeaker.
Tarkin, via CGI, is alive and well, and has a fairly substantial role. I feel like he reminds me a lot of Charles Dance, and I wonder if Dance did the performance, which then had some CGI additives layered over.
Princess Leia also has a short CGI cameo at the very end of the film.
Dr. Everzan and Ponda Baba also both appear, on Jedha. R2 and 3PO appear in a quick scene on Yavin Base. I wonder if they're going to try to get these two into every Star Wars film...
Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, is in the film. I wonder if the rumored Obi Wan standalone film might feature him as well.
Mon Mothma, portrayed by the same actress who played her in ROTS, is back; not a surprise, since she's been in the trailers.
We have a blue Mon Calamari, presumably captured or killed by the Empire.
Vader's in for two sequences. I assume his fortress is located on Mustafar, but why is he being guarded by Royal Guards?
Red and Gold Leader also make quick cameos. That was neat. I didn't see Porkins, though.
posted
Pretty much everyone who wasn't in Episode IV dies. Which isn't very surprising at all. I was half expecting it before I watched it.
Vader' final scene in the corridor with the Rebel troops was terrifying, and easily his most badass scene in the history of the franchise. Sure, he was scary before, but even Luke in ESB was close to a match for him. Here, it's just a pure one sided bloodbath.
The CGI faces were technically impressive, but no matter how hard they tried, they did not manage to bridge that pesky Uncanny Valley. I'm a little puzzled why they CGI'd Tarkin but not Mon Mothma. I wonder if the CGI was really a better choice over just having similar looking actors. (I give CGI-Leia a pass because it was one scene and she was the star of the next film.)
I wasn't expecting very deep characters from this film, but we got some good development for Jyn and Andor. The background on the origin of the flaw in the Death Star was pretty clever, and a very heroic detail in its own way.
Oh, and even though he was a despicable guy, I felt just the tiniest bit sorry for a Director Krennic when Tarkin usurped his success. But no more than that. I knew from the beginning of the scene that those poor nameless engineers were dead no matter what.
Will definitely watch it again!
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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Snay: Your opening post would be much more interesting if you talked about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy about the movie, rather than just thoroughly spoiling who dies, as people coming here are more interested in the quality aspects of the movie rather than being spoiled.
My physical or visual observations: we got a new bi-wing TIE Fighter design, and an extremely pretty larger sibling to the Nebulon-B Frigate (captained by the blue Calamari), nice.
Also, on the visual side, we got a literal presentation of how a planet shield works, and I thought it was shown to great effect.
There are lots of references to "Star Wars Rebels" (General Syndulla, Hera's father, is called over intercom, the actual Ghost is present in the end ship battle (keep an eye out), the cooky brown astromech is seen in a shot at Rebel HQ).
I liked this movie more than anything from the prequels AND TFA. It is not better than TESB, like some people think, but definitely much more "Star Wars" than The Force Awakens, even though I liked TFA and look forward to VIII.
In disagreement with those that like to reference South Park's recent invention of memberberries ('Member Tantive IV? 'Member Mon Mothma?), basically the analogy of post-2010 movie/TV-producers relying too much on nostalgia as a sales pitch, this movie is not doing necrophilia on Star Wars stuff because it literally takes place the week before Episode IV, so it makes total sense that it would borrow as much of the EpIV visual aesthetic, even down to the way X-Wings blow up (as seen both from inside and outside the cockpit).
The biggest drawback, if any, is Michael Giacchino's hackneyed musical score. Overbearing horn sections (almost Vuvuzela-like), cloying and sappy-sentimental string pieces, and a recurring piece that sounds way too much like the Anakin/Padme love score, which was a very poor choice of things to imitate. That being said, he shouldn't be judged too harshly perhaps, since he was a last minute replacement for Alexandre Desplat and only had four weeks to write the Rogue One soundtrack. Still, his work on Jurassic World and other recent projects felt equally bland.
The humor in Rogue One was really on point, never particularily clunky, and I thought it was appropriate in its frequency (like ANH, really).
Another point of strong improvement in "Rogue One" is that, in total contrast to the inertia-less and touch-less feeling of the Star Wars prequels (most backgrounds are full-CGI and very few objects have any weight, dust, or grime on them, and the actors almost never interact with the actual environment), Rogue One takes back the physical props, the real fighter models and shuttles, and there is one scene where two deck hands refuel an X-Wing that makes it look almost sexy in its faithful detail: they run over with a giant plasma cell, a conduit cable, and a nozzle coupling, and they ram it up into the X-Wing's fuel intake, and secure the safety lever to start the fuel transfer, and you see how both the ship, the equipment, and the worker gloves are dirty and frequently used. The ship deck of the large Rebel Cruiser is like any real-life trainyard, having to work 24/7 since the Alliance is undermanned and spread over such a large area. This scene demonstrated with delicious simplicity how good Sci-Fi fiction best when it is robust, concrete, and tactile.
The Black elite stormtroopers were very creepy and had a wonderfully horrific garbled communication language. Their inhuman, almost inorganic presentation and uncompromising attitude (part-DALEK dna it seems) really helped reimagine The Empire as really very nasty.
Darth Vader is redeemed fully, present again as the ANH/TESB force of nature, striking a perfect tone of amused sardonic remarks backed up by mortal threat, he is a total polar opposite of the whimpering, pouting Emo beta-male portrayed in Revenge of the Sith.
But none of this is as important as one other fact of "Rogue One", which many people discussing the movie on the internet seem to have missed - Star Wars got its balls back, and this has way larger positiv ramifications than anything else.
In the beginning, a character (I won't spoil who) makes a split-second decision to kill another character rather than have them be arrested. It is cold-blooded murder, which ties into future events in the narrative. This is a scene event very similar to Solo shooting Greedo in cold blood. It shows that Disney will now allow visionary directors free reign to do their damn job, instead of scrutinizing every inch of their craft and testing it with focus groups and Concerned Parents.
I will not celebrate in advance the death of the "moral panic" PG-era, and the brutally harmful effect it has had on the movie industry, growing exponentially after Janet Jackson's nipple shock at the SuperBowl, which resulted in such unmemorable and horribly pathetic soft reboots as "Total Recall" (2012) and "Robocop" (2014), now without any balls or emotional investment.
While "Rogue One" is not literally bloody, it introduces ten new ways of how to kill a Stormtrooper, and one of them (the pincussion shield scene) had me and my brother literally laughing out loud in our seats, for the almost literal "Paul Verhoeven"-factor of it.
The Original Trilogy had henchmen getting their upper body bitten off by a Kaiju monster, pulled down into an oversized vagina-esophagus, crushed into mincemeat in a log trap, and exploded to bits when flying headfirst into a fir tree at ballistic speed.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were two of the most inventive and graphic movie creators of the '70s/'80s, but they have proven beyond doubt that they lost their touch at the turn of the millennium, now instead only producing kiddie-safe schlock.
An example: in "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull", a small jungle monkey jumps down on a russian crew transport and distracts the driver into driving into a ravine, and then they waste thousands of dollars of extra CGI-seconds JUST to show that the monkey makes it off the transport in time and is alive and well. This is the length Spielberg will go to in order to placate worried mothers.
Thus it seems the passing of the torch has now finally begun in truth and it involves people who grew up being the biggest fans of Spielberg/Lucas and now are in a position in the movie industry to take back the imaginative, nasty, sexy touch which defined the works of their childhood idols, without it becoming gratuitous crap.
With current and recent movies like Deadpool (ultraviolent), Mad Max Fury Road (displays a live still-birth and the simultaneous death of the mother, without anyone batting an eye, and at the same time the movie has not one instance of verbal profanity), and the astonishingly powerful march of quality TV shows with masterful violence like Game of Thrones, Westworld, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, I feel the world of visual entertainment is finally coming back on track.
posted
I thought the CGI-revival of Peter Cushing and the short Leia-cameo were quite ingenious. I didn't expect that, so that were two jaw-dropping moments.
The first half hour or so was a bit hectic with all the planet hopping, but then we got bad ass Vader, a top-notch space battle and a Pacific theatre like ground battle.
The only thing I really didn't like was the omission of the Star Wars theme. I always get goose bumps when I hear it in a movie theatre.
-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
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My brother bought his son a TIE Striker (the two-winged attack shuttle), I was as surprised as him when the wrapping came off. I think I sat with it for at least five minutes straight, checking all the doodads. It shot red foam missiles clear across the room, into your milkshake.
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
TIE Striker.
Ted Striker.
Think about it.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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The TIE Striker is an atmosphere only craft, which is interesting since most TIEs can operate in space and in the air. According to Wookiepedia, its also experimental, TIE/sk x1 experimental air superiority fighter being its official designation (x1 label is from X-wing Alliance!). Guess it never got out of Beta.
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The TIE Striker is an atmosphere only craft, which is interesting since most TIEs can operate in space and in the air. According to Wookiepedia, its also experimental, TIE/sk x1 experimental air superiority fighter being its official designation (x1 label is from X-wing Alliance!). Guess it never got out of Beta.
Registered: Feb 2005
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You think they named it specifically after an Airplane! character? Surely you can't be serious!
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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I must also second the disappointment I had in Michael Giaccino's score.
We ARE used to John Williams + Star Wars - and MG did well with the Star Trek reboot soundtrack, but he just missed the mark in Rogue One. A disappointment to read above that Alexandre Desplat was going to score it. I loved his scores for Harry Potter - they are brilliant and moody. I wonder what happened?
Also I must add that I was REALLY blown away with the sound effects of Rogue One - the cinema was just shaking at some points. Excellent work.
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
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