Showing how rebels often had to get their hands dirty, even killing their own allies once they became a liability. And K-2SO lobotomizing a fellow security droid to download a map of the Imperial facility was pretty hardcore.
This was really the first time Darth Vader had a chance to really kick some ass on screen by wiping the walls with the rebel soldiers. As in, literally picking up their bodies and wiping them all over the walls.
Best “wiseass grumpy robot who reluctantly follows orders just because he lacks the free will to do otherwise” since Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Not a setup for a sequel!
Things I didn’t care for:
The story jumped around to like 15 different planets in the first 10 minutes of the movie. What am I, an astro-navigator?
It was impressive how they were able to digitally resurrect characters from the original trilogy but they were really pushing it by giving Grand Moff Tarkin so much screen time. Still getting “uncanny valley” vibes. I think it would have been more effective to leave him mostly offscreen, facing away from the camera or partially obscured in poor lighting so his videogame-cutscene appearance wouldn’t contrast so obviously with the other actors.
So Mads Mikkelsen was able to smuggle out a holo-recording telling everyone he had secretly built a fatal flaw in the Death Star but he couldn’t just smuggle out the plans themselves? Don’t give me the “there wasn’t enough storage capacity on the thumb drive” nonsense, because that disk the rebels had the plans on in the final scene was about the size of a playing card! For that matter, why bother with the plans at all when he could have just said “shoot a proton torpedo in the exhaust port at the end of the perimeter trench?”
K-2SO’s impressive performance against flesh-and-blood stormtroopers was yet another reminder that the prequels didn’t make any sense.
The pig-face and walrus-man cameo was a little gratuitous, but whatevs.
Things that were surprising revelations:
Jimmy Smits finally got to be in a watchable Star Wars movie! Good for you, Jimmy. Now off to Alderaan with you…
Mon Calamari come in different colors now but all have the same voice? Who knew? Of course that means now I have to question whether the guy at the briefing in The Force Awakens was actually Admiral Ackbar or just a random Mon Calamari.
Man, all this time I thought it was Rouge One. You know, because that’s how the pilot who says “Red One standing by…” would talk if he was part of the French Resistance.
Was that Kurt Russell Looking like a bad ass iron monger in the rebel base intro?
Also, uncanny valley-city yo. Maybe the re-edits in ten years after the re-edits in eight years after the re-edits in five years after the re-edits in three years will be up to par.
The eyeballs definitely didn’t sit in the sockets quite right. Cushing-synth had a shitload of screen. More than all but the two stars, it seemed, tho that’s probably the valley talking.
Yeah. Leia worked because she had about 3 seconds of face time and they probably were able to use the living Carrie Fisher as a base. For the life of me I can’t figure out why they gave Tarkin more screen time than he had in the original movie. If you’re going to fake in a human character you have to do it sparingly, like de-aged Anthony Hopkins in Westworld.
I absolutely loved it. It was everything I’d want in a Star Wars war movie, and it had some deeply geeky references to things like Khyber crystals, the Journal of the Whills, and even a call-out to Hera Syndulla from “Rebels”.
What was interesting was how much of the footage in the trailers wasn’t in the final movie. And not small stuff: scenes like Jyn saying “I rebel!”, Saw Gerrera’s “What will you become?” speech, Jyn facing off against a TIE Fighter, Krennick yelling about the Death Star. The reshoots/edits really changed the final movie.
It didn’t bother me too much. My wife on the other hand was very bothered by the uncanny valley aspects.
In all I quite enjoyed it and was happy to see the break from traditions in storytelling to try something new (even though we all knew how things would end up in the end).
Also watching Darth Vader kick ass (finally) and drop a couple of great zingers (“don’t choke on your ambitions”) was great.
Vader’s “choke” line was very divisive with the group I was with. Some folks loved it, but others thought it was so bad that it nearly ruined the movie for them. It worked for me!
I thought the “choke” line felt out-of-character for the severe, he’s-more-machine-than-man-now Vader that I understood him to be. Which I suppose was probably the whole point of having him say it; try to inject a little more humanity into the character to help lessen the abruptness of his heel-face turn right at the tail end of the later-in-continuity-but-released-earlier films.
It didn’t ruin the movie for me, but it was definitely a surprising character choice, at least from my point of view.
I believe they are setting up the Darth-Vader-working-against-Darth-Sidious-the-whole-time angle.
I mean, that’s what the apprentice is supposed to do in the ‘there must be two’ thing the Sith have going, but revealing him to still have some capacity for ironic self-awareness provides the character with a more subtle depth than just ‘broken, looming menace’.
I liked a lot more than i didn’t but yeah, there are some annoying decisions. I would’ve far preferred a looky likey for tarkin, the uncanny was strong in this one. I think people would have easily accepted someone doing an impersonation with some prosthetics or whatever, they could’ve de-aged carrie fisher as well like they did to great effect with michael douglas in ant-man and robert downey jr in civil war.
What’s with all the stuff missing from the trailers? Like the shot of them all running along the beach with at-at walkers everywhere and other stuff mentioned. Shots like that and jyn facing off against a tie fighter must’ve cost a fortune yet it gets cut.
Funny how the jedha capital city takes a direct hit from the death star yet the imperial base on scarif gets a reprieve of several minutes. Was the targeting system screwy? Or maybe it allowed for a bit of dramatic tension. But in a way using the death star in low power mode like that felt far more affecting and real to me than when it destroys an entire planet, gareth edwards is great at doing that sense of scale thing. See also the star destroyers being pushed into the shield gate or when the rebel ships jumped to hyperspace except a few getting obliterated by vader’s destroyer jumping in.
Talking about vader, i loved his reveal to krennic, with his shadow looming over him but he just didn’t move right and his suit seemed off to me. Was he also shorter as well? I don’t know the height of the guy playing him but he just looked shorter next to krennic. How amazing would it have been if the first shot of him was on the rebel ship lighting up his saber in the dark, that whole sequence made you fear vader again.
For what it’s worth, I saw Rogue One with someone who’d never seen a Star Wars movie before (!?), and she had no idea that the CG Tarkin was anything but a real human; I think we’re extra-attuned to seeing it as CG simply because we all know that it has to be CG. I thought it was brilliantly done and didn’t bother me at all; I had to wonder for a bit whether it was just a fantastic lookalike.
One thing that really struck me afterwards was that even though I’ve seen A New Hope umpteen times and grew up with it, Rogue One managed to give that movie new depth of meaning, more weight – it almost feels like it improved it. And that’s a surprising feat.
But in a way using the death star in low power mode like that felt far more affecting and real to me than when it destroys an entire planet, gareth edwards is great at doing that sense of scale thing. See also the star destroyers being pushed into the shield gate or when the rebel ships jumped to hyperspace except a few getting obliterated by vader’s destroyer jumping in.
