This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: Rogue One.
I saw Rogue One yesterday, and I am not quite sure how to word my feelings. It wasn't a bad movie, but it wasn't a very good one either. Decent enough, I guess.
The truth is that Rogue One commits the same sin as most modern action movies: there is too much action.
As a result, you can't really tell much about the characters, as they spent 95% of their time being shot at, shooting people, or running away from stuff. The characters certainly seemed serviceable enough, though I don't really remember their names or much about them.
The action set pieces all seemed fine and well done. I do wonder if the movie would have been better as a pure infiltration/heist piece, rather than the warzone of the last third.
I did like the bureaucratic in-fighting in the Empire, with both Tarkin and Krennic struggling to make sure they got credit for the Death Star. That felt very true to life.
Tarkin was CGI, and I thought that was pretty decent. I hope it doesn't start a trend of making movies with dead actors, though.
Vader's cameos were pretty good, especially at the end of the movie.
I don't really know what else I can say about Rogue One. A bunch of disjointed observations for a movie which really was a bunch of disjointed scenes strung together. Each individual scene was pretty good, but it never really became a whole, complete thing.
I felt that it would have been better as a trilogy. I didn't get to know the characters very well and there was very little flavour to them (as you mention) - which made me not care about their fates and/or what they were doing. Why they were doing it was very unclear, outside of the main character.
ReplyDeleteA trilogy would give more character moments, true. But so would replacing a few of the early action sequences with character moments.
DeleteOr reducing the number of characters involved would be another way to go.
I loved it! Sure it had weak points but then what film doesn't. I loved the CGI Tarkin as I wasn't aware that they were doing it so actually was a massive surprise for me and found it quite chilling to see the great Peter Cushing on the big screen again.
ReplyDeleteAll in all my daughter and I haven't been as hyped leaving a cinema after watching a film like this is a long time and reassured that Disney have some great things planned for the Star Wars universe.
Good to hear that you liked it. They did do a lot of things well in the movie, and I may not have given them enough credit for that in this post.
DeleteI'm with you on the "it was decent, not sorry I saw it once" thing. I don't feel like I wasted my money, but I also don't feel like I care if I ever see it again either.
ReplyDeleteI didn't see a lot of scenes that were in the trailers, so apparently the rumored re-shoots that were done were quite extensive. That or they intentionally did some scenes just for the trailers either to make them "really cool" or to throw people off thinking they knew more about the movie than we actually did.