Rogue One Review (Spoilers)

[ccs]

The very idea of Vader being scary, without ever having to demonstrate why people should be afraid of him, strikes me as rather absurd.

And yet there it is, right there in Episode IV.
Vader doesn't do very much at all in that movie. Not even when he & Obi-Wan have their lightsaber duel. But yet we KNOW, right from his initial entrance, that this is one of the greatest movie villains of all time.... And all he did was walk through a hatch.

 

[Ryujin]

And yet there it is, right there in Episode IV.
Vader doesn't do very much at all in that movie. Not even when he & Obi-Wan have their lightsaber duel. But yet we KNOW, right from his initial entrance, that this is one of the greatest movie villains of all time.... And all he did was walk through a hatch.

Oh course *WE* know he's a badass villain, 'cause movie and voice of James Earl Jones. How do people in the Star Wars Universe know he's badass? Because he took a rebel cruiser virtually single handed.

 

[Eltab]

You know this a spoiler thread, right?

Not having seen the movie, your premonitions are very accurate.

In reverse order,

Thank you. Maybe I should offer my services to Disney / Lucasfilm as a scriptwriter? It seems the Force is with me, even though I am untrained in its use...

I came looking to find out of the movie is good (or not), and why. Movie tickets are expensive! Better to find out before I unload myself of a day's pay.

 

[Eltab]

and voice of James Earl Jones

I liked the more mechanical voice in the original movie, over the more human voice in Empire.

OK, as a kid Anakin was a mechanical genius, always tinkering with his gear. We see this in the prequels.
But as an adult he would want people to be afraid of / intimidated by him more than he wants them to notice his smooth vocal modulation. I think (but Lucas's team disagreed, alas); Sith feed on fear, after all.

 

[Ryujin]

I liked the more mechanical voice in the original movie, over the more human voice in Empire.

OK, as a kid Anakin was a mechanical genius, always tinkering with his gear. We see this in the prequels.
But as an adult he would want people to be afraid of / intimidated by him more than he wants them to notice his smooth vocal modulation. I think (but Lucas's team disagreed, alas); Sith feed on fear, after all.

What are these "prequels" of which you speak?

 

[tomBitonti]

I found it to rather middling. There were a lot of interesting parts, but on the whole it doesn't come together very well.

The two main faults were, to me, very large dramatic inefficiency, and underdeveloped characters.

I thought that it had a decent story idea at its core, but that it failed to realize that story.

One bit of dissonance was that the flaw was described to the rebels before they had the plans, but the flaw was discovered by analyzing the plans (in episode 4).

Another failure of the movie was to incompletely present the redemption of the two leads, by failing to show their failings strongly enough, then to fail to show the growth that brought them around.

I did think the rebel attack on the data vault was ludicrous. But it was on par for Star Wars battles.

Thx!
TomB

 

[PurpleDragonKnight]

Sorry late in the game... this movie was epic! audible gasp from the audience during that very last scene. True movie magic!

 

[Imaculata]

For me, all of the hope and excitement that Force Awakens gave me when looking forward to more movies was brutally force choked into near oblivion by Rogue One. The combination of being let down by both the recent Battlefront game and Rogue One has critically wounded my enthusiasm for future products.

This is exactly how I feel as well. And I'm a huge Star Wars fan, and I wanted to like this so badly. There were many moments in this movie where I tried to forget the messy 40 mins opening of the movie and just enjoy myself, and then there would be a random cameo of the alien from the Tatooine cantina (why is he on this planet, and how did he escape the destruction later on?), or a random cameo of R2D2 and C3PO. If these characters serve no purpose to the plot, then what you have is just a random wink to the fans. But you shouldn't be constantly winking at the audience. As a filmmaker you need to tell a story as well, and make the audience care.

 

[Water Bob]

I liked the film. I liked it a lot.

I thought it was slow in the beginning, but it built. It kept on building to the best battle ever recorded for a Star Wars movie.

My order, from best to worst...


The Empire Strikes Back
A New Hope
The Force Awakens
Rogue One

Return of the Jedi

Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace

 

[Ryujin]

I found it to rather middling. There were a lot of interesting parts, but on the whole it doesn't come together very well.

The two main faults were, to me, very large dramatic inefficiency, and underdeveloped characters.

I thought that it had a decent story idea at its core, but that it failed to realize that story.

One bit of dissonance was that the flaw was described to the rebels before they had the plans, but the flaw was discovered by analyzing the plans (in episode 4).

Another failure of the movie was to incompletely present the redemption of the two leads, by failing to show their failings strongly enough, then to fail to show the growth that brought them around.

I did think the rebel attack on the data vault was ludicrous. But it was on par for Star Wars battles.

Thx!
TomB

The flaw was described to the rebels before they had the plans. The plans told them how to exploit it.