Rogue One
After the huge personal disappointment that was "The Force Awakens" (or "A New Hope Redux"), my personal bar for new "Star Wars" cinematic outings was set very low - so much so that when "Rogue One" was released I didn't bother going to see it. I wasn't going to be caught out wasting my money again. I knew that it was going to end up with those Death Star plans inside R2-D2 and I wasn't really interested in the continuity implant of how they got there. The "Star Wars" franchise seems obsessed with telling variations of the same story about a giant super-weapon and I had no interest in yet another. The movies may have been part of my adolescent years, but I can't say that I was ever really a full blown fan after the first one. I watched the sequels sure, but if we are talking big movie franchises I was always more of a "Star Trek" guy.
But in the months since, I've heard reasonably good things about this particular prequel story - even from those who held similar opinions to me about Episode VII - so when the home media version came out I decided to give it a whirl...
Well that was much better than I expected.
Sure "Rogue One" is not without problems. The pacing feels off in the first half. The main characters are likeable but quite thinly sketched. I'm getting seriously bored of desert-like planets. Forest Whitaker was just appalling. But who doesn't want to see Imperial troopers stomping through the sea while AT-AT walkers prowl in the background and a massive dogfight carries on overhead? This oddly felt like proper "Star Wars" rather than the reheated greatest hits of Episode VII.
It's a pretty dark story and it's a brave choice to have none of the characters make it out alive. It really does hark back to those classic war movies of my youth like "Guns of Navarone" or "The Wild Geese", as our band of "heroes" battle to achieve their goal against overwhelming odds but are picked off one by one. Maybe that's why I liked it - it's riffing on two different parts of my childhood.
I'd obviously heard some noise about a returning character through the use of a computer generated double, but when Grand Moff Tarkin turned up I was pleasantly surprised. The CGI were not perfect but it was certainly good enough to allow the suspension of disbelief (this is a franchise about spaceships, 'magic' mental powers and sentient robots after all). I'd not mentioned anything to my wife, so she was frankly astonished. Her only real criticism was that the voice could have been "older". It was not the same story with the digital Princess Leia at the end though , which was both unnecessary and of a much poorer quality.
The other callbacks to the previous instalments (and there are a lot) are headlined by the presence of the man in black himself - Darth Vadar. Thankfully he's not overused but restricted to a couple of excellent scenes that are used to empathise what he is truly capable of. A darkened corridor. An ignited lightsaber. A swift violent massacre. This is the Dark Lord of the Sith as I remember him.
All in all it's thoroughly enjoyable, stylish if downbeat film and shows that different directors not slavishly worshipping at the altar of the original trilogy can bring something new to the table. Now I'd like to see them really go off and tell other, brand new stories within the franchise universe - ones totally unrelated to the core "Skywalker" narrative. The book, comics, and animated series have managed it. It's time for the movies to do the same.
But in the months since, I've heard reasonably good things about this particular prequel story - even from those who held similar opinions to me about Episode VII - so when the home media version came out I decided to give it a whirl...
Well that was much better than I expected.
Sure "Rogue One" is not without problems. The pacing feels off in the first half. The main characters are likeable but quite thinly sketched. I'm getting seriously bored of desert-like planets. Forest Whitaker was just appalling. But who doesn't want to see Imperial troopers stomping through the sea while AT-AT walkers prowl in the background and a massive dogfight carries on overhead? This oddly felt like proper "Star Wars" rather than the reheated greatest hits of Episode VII.
It's a pretty dark story and it's a brave choice to have none of the characters make it out alive. It really does hark back to those classic war movies of my youth like "Guns of Navarone" or "The Wild Geese", as our band of "heroes" battle to achieve their goal against overwhelming odds but are picked off one by one. Maybe that's why I liked it - it's riffing on two different parts of my childhood.
I'd obviously heard some noise about a returning character through the use of a computer generated double, but when Grand Moff Tarkin turned up I was pleasantly surprised. The CGI were not perfect but it was certainly good enough to allow the suspension of disbelief (this is a franchise about spaceships, 'magic' mental powers and sentient robots after all). I'd not mentioned anything to my wife, so she was frankly astonished. Her only real criticism was that the voice could have been "older". It was not the same story with the digital Princess Leia at the end though , which was both unnecessary and of a much poorer quality.
The other callbacks to the previous instalments (and there are a lot) are headlined by the presence of the man in black himself - Darth Vadar. Thankfully he's not overused but restricted to a couple of excellent scenes that are used to empathise what he is truly capable of. A darkened corridor. An ignited lightsaber. A swift violent massacre. This is the Dark Lord of the Sith as I remember him.
All in all it's thoroughly enjoyable, stylish if downbeat film and shows that different directors not slavishly worshipping at the altar of the original trilogy can bring something new to the table. Now I'd like to see them really go off and tell other, brand new stories within the franchise universe - ones totally unrelated to the core "Skywalker" narrative. The book, comics, and animated series have managed it. It's time for the movies to do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment