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dx23 wrote:2. Alan Tudyk was playing a robot version of Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory

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3. Darth Vader's costume look like a cheap ass knockoff that wouldn't even pass as decent for a cosplayer. Why was this? The mask looked extremely loose and rubberish.

2. He's actually more of a lift of the HK-47 droid from the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG video game, but yes, the Sheldon Cooper comparison is also apt.

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3. Apparently they wanted it to match the somewhat imperfect suit/mask from the original 1977 film (asymmetrical imperfections, slightly cheap finish, etc.)

Yikes! Looked like bad CGI to me!

cdnchris wrote:Yikes! Looked like bad CGI to me!

Bad prosthetics/makeup have their own sins, too.

So I'm with most folks here, but I was personally less startled by the CG at the end, maybe because I was expecting it-but it still didn't rise above the quality of a video game. They could have skipped that scene altogether. Jimmy Smits line about said character is hilariously bad in retrospect to what follows.

Speaking of which, the worst was Saw Gerrera's interrogator. Yikes... Also, ditto the title font.

I'd rank this above ep ll and lll, but below every other one.

All I've seen for this in my Facebook feed is fawning praise. "Might be one of the best Star Wars films ever." I mean, I should hope so!

I think they forgot to put characters in this movie.

The only thing that could tempt me to watch this is the presence of Jiang Wen as what I assume to be a minor subsidiary character...

Michael Kerpan wrote:The only thing that could tempt me to watch this is the presence of Jiang Wen as what I assume to be a minor subsidiary character...

He's a full member of the ensemble, though I doubt he'd be worth seeing the movie for

Him and his friend are the best part of the movie by virtue of being charismatic.

I overall liked it a ton, I used to read and reread the thrawn trilogy and four rogue squadron books in middle school, and this film was very much like a blended style of the aesthetics of those two now defunct stories, but I was thrilled to get the feeling of the expanded universe in a film.

I thought the biggest problem seemed to be going to refinery planet, after she'd been told to go to the engineering planet it seemed pointless to go there or even to write her father as being there rather than on the engineering planet.

movielocke wrote:I thought the biggest problem seemed to be going to refinery planet, after she'd been told to go to the engineering planet it seemed pointless to go there or even to write her father as being there rather than on the engineering planet.

This is the film's biggest problem??

domino harvey wrote:

movielocke wrote:I thought the biggest problem seemed to be going to refinery planet, after she'd been told to go to the engineering planet it seemed pointless to go there or even to write her father as being there rather than on the engineering planet.

This is the film's biggest problem??

eh it was the only thing that bothered me actively during the experience of watching the film. Most franchise films fall apart after the fact, but this was the only part I was really bothered by during the film.

So while it might not be the biggest it was the one I found most notable in the moment.

Have to agree with Domino on this one - after being pleasantly surprised by the previous film, this one had nothing exceptional to offer. A dull, drab cast with video game pacing (and special effects - I can't say I buy in to the brilliance of the CGI actors, it was anything but seamless) and an average script. Very disappointing, I guess I'm back in the Star Wars curmudgeon camp again for a while.

Empire
Rogue
Hope
Jedi
Force

Skip the Prequels

In all seriousness, I loved Rogue One. Yes, the first 2 acts are rather sluggish and there were moments where I might have drifted off into sleep for a minute or two (I blame it on the 3D in IMAX, which added nothing to the film and ended up being distracting and exhausting). There were also numerous moments where events seemed to take place that we aren't shown, which could be blamed on either a poor script or re-shoots. For me, the last hour of the film really made up for everything and I'd say I liked this more than most of the other films purely for how different it was and how far away it strayed from what most were probably expecting. The CGI didn't even bother me much (although I too blame this on the hyperrealism of 3D).

I do get the feeling though that Disney and Kathleen Kennedy have no idea what to do with this series. Her earlier comments on the film were that it would be its own thing and not get in the way of episodes 1-7, however

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Rogue One completely renders the prequels useless by directly leading into A New Hope. Technically Rogue One should be Episode 3.5.

You needed a spoiler for that comment? Everything that happened in the prequels of consequence was told to us in the original trilogy.

Also, forget the oil refinery-the biggest problem with the movie was Krennic landing his ship so far from the Erso house.

I'd rank them
New Hope
Empire
Force Awakens
Jedi
Phantom Menace
Rogue One
and distantly Clones/Sith.

Star Wars films ranked in order of greatness based on the quality and number of good things in them:

1. The Empire Strikes Back (actual human emotion, huh)
2. Star Wars (characters, death star, force, jedi, lightsabers, etc.)
3. The Force Awakens (let's try one of these with good acting)
4. Return of the Jedi (Care Bear Guerrilla warfare)
5. Rogue One (one cool scene tacked on at the end (re-shoots?) that I wont spoil)
6. Phantom Menace (Duel of the Fates)
7. Attack of the Clones (Obi-Wan & Mace® Windex® vs Jango Fett)
8. Revenge of the Sith (last film directed by George Lucas)

Although it's not unusual these days for the release version of a film to include different takes of scenes witnessed in trailers, I don't recall ever seeing another movie where so much material from the trailers fails to appear in the film at all. In recent months I've been trying to argue that reshoots are conventional and that Rogue One wasn't necessarily "in trouble," but now that I've seen it, feel my arguments were more hopeful than informed. I enjoyed the film very much but agree with criticisms of Saw's character. Some of the easter eggs, even if entertaining, felt needlessly shoehorned in. Unfortunately for me the most jarring of all was

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the sudden brief appearance of C3PO and R2D2. Narratively, it might have made more sense for them to appear in the background on the blockade runner sequence at the end. However, their comic connotations would have been at odds with Vader's awesome fit of rage.

Were there possibly too many characters? Did Saw even need to be in this film at all? His principle raison d'être seemed to be to explain that Jyn was raised by someone after her father's abduction. Perhaps with fewer characters, the most compelling ones (e.g. Chirrut Imwe) might have time to have been better fleshed out.

I did very much like that

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everyone dies

and thus

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the audience is left with a sense of tragic sacrifice, of sadness

at the end. Something I'd longed for in a Star Wars film since seeing an unfinished trailer at a Star Trek convention in 1976 which made a mysterious forthcoming film called "Star Wars" seem that it was going to be much more serious than it turned out to be.

I'm pretty furious with a few major outlets like Variety spoiling the surprise of the film (unless there's more than one). I get many of these film writers have to churn out content, but it's shitty that we can't even make it through opening weekend without journalists spoiling the fun.

It sounds like I enjoyed this a little more than other detractors here, but not by much—there are individual sequences that are impressive or entertaining, and a few of the ensemble characters are endearing as well, but Rogue One is really inconsistent in tone and pacing. And the main characters somehow come off as both overwritten and underwritten at the same time, in the sense that I don't really feel I ever learned much about Felicity Jones' or Diego Luna's characters despite how often they seem to be trying to spell out their motivations in speeches. I thought it was just bad writing or poor editing when Richard Brody said this movie was "half-baked and overcooked"—how could it be both?—but after seeing it I now understand exactly what he means.

And yeah, as xoconostle said, I've seen lots of early trailers that had alternate takes and maybe an occasional shot that didn't show up in the finished product, but in Rogue One's case it really is abundantly clear the early teaser was selling a completely different film, and there's an abundance of material even in the later trailers and promos that's nowhere to be found. I mean, there were only four brief shots of Darth Vader used in all of the promotional material, and even two of those shots didn't show up, when you'd expect Disney would want to milk every second of Vader fanservice they had.

There are frustrating hints of interesting ideas here that go unexplored. E.g., it seems like Forest Whitaker, with his largely robotic body and breathing apparatus, was probably supposed to be some kind of counterpoint or mirror image to Darth Vader on the rebel side, and there was one very brief, interesting moment when Whitaker first uses the oxygen mask and the sound of his breathing seems to trigger some kind of post-traumatic response (or at least a terrified look of recognition) in Riz Ahmed's character. But the film doesn't even seem to acknowledge the comparison it has set up and does precisely nothing with it.

Michael Giacchino's score has all the same problems as the movie, trying really, really hard to go for big, broad, impactful gestures built on very thin and sketchy material. Like the film itself, there are individual sequences that are very well done...

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he knocks it out of the park during the final Vader scene, conjuring up all the gothic horror it requires to be suitably "epic"

...but overall Giacchino just doesn't have the right touch for this material, even allowing for the fact that he was hired very late and had only four weeks to put this together. Worst of all are his new title theme and the new theme he wrote for the Empire, both of which sound like cheap knockoffs of Williams' material, like the kind of thing you'd find in a parody that couldn't afford the rights to use the real thing. The fact that he also uses Williams' themes only makes the knockoff versions sound worse in comparison (and makes their very existence kind of baffling). Most of it isn't bad, just mediocre; none of it rises even an inch above the film it was written for, as Williams' prequel scores did.

Of course, none of this matters. Judging by the responses I've seen so far, it seems like the movie could have been absolutely awful in every conceivable way and most of the audience would still love it as long as they pulled off that one scene at the end.

movielocke wrote:I overall liked it a ton, I used to read and reread the thrawn trilogy and four rogue squadron books in middle school, and this film was very much like a blended style of the aesthetics of those two now defunct stories, but I was thrilled to get the feeling of the expanded universe in a film.

I thought the biggest problem seemed to be going to refinery planet, after she'd been told to go to the engineering planet it seemed pointless to go there or even to write her father as being there rather than on the engineering planet.

Wouldn't everybody have been much better off if they'd spent the movie at the day spa planet after they'd returned their books to the library planet?

It's been a long long time since I read any Star Wars novel, the last one I read had Mara giving birth to Ben skywalker, but Donnie yens character would be described as someone who can feel the currents of the force, thus, timing etc he can do, but he is unable to directly manipulate the force, and thus not a Jedi, right?

The faith walk he had at the end was one of the most amazing moments for me, the methodical slowness and confidence it took was incredible. It reminded me of chow yun fat in the bamboo trees at the end of crouching tiger, all calm Jedilike surrender to the environment (and therefore master of said)

movielocke wrote:Donnie yens character would be described as someone who can feel the currents of the force, thus, timing etc he can do, but he is unable to directly manipulate the force, and thus not a Jedi, right?

Basically, yes. Force-sensitive, but not a Jedi. Described in the film as a former Guardian of the Temple of the Whills. Described by me as Zatoichi the Ip Man.

I liked the previously unseen detail of his force chant. Very Buddhist.

Mostly delivers the Dirty Dozen experience I was seeking - matched with eye-popping Star Wars action-adventure, of course. I could have left a couple of the cameos behind, and the middle act spins its wheels a bit, but for a film that had to fit hand-in-glove with the 1977 original and also expand out the mythos it's pretty great entertainment. (I also appreciated how it goes about bringing in old EU ideas like the Whills and kyber crystals to the feature films). 9/10

I also liked it. It's not perfect – there are problems aplenty with the first half – but it does far more right than it does wrong. It's about as downbeat and ambigous a film you'll get from this franchise – and that's easy to hate on given Hollywood's grimdark obsession – but I think the tone was perfectly suited to it's Men-on-a-Mission scenario. That this is a Star Wars film that can evoke Battle of Algiers about sums up its charm, as well as it's square-peg failings. But it's mostly good. And for all the gripes about cameos and callbacks, Vader's final moment was more satisfying than any fanservice moment in Force Awakens. And the final scene feels unusually poignant given the events of the week.

I saw Rogue One over the holidays and thought it was an average action film, but nothing special. Since then, my opinion of the film has only gone down.

What's lacking at Lucasfilm right now is an artist with vision and imagination. At this point, Lucasfilm is just recycling and rearranging George's ideas from 40 years ago. I'm sure the main saga will be fine at least through Episode 9, but what Lucasfilm really needs now is not a bunch of Han Solo and Obi Wan and Boba Fett fan-service standalone films that have to operate in this confined, small little time period, they need another big, original saga, with bold, brand-new ideas, set either long before or long after the Skywalker saga, so the two sagas are unrelated in terms of direct storyline connections, aside from the Force.