Star Wars Anthology shit talk (Rogue One, Young Solo, TBD)

trump smash hulk

so was "this is a 'stand-alone' Star Wars movie" a cover story or a hilarious joke?

is someone talking

I feel bad for people who went to this movie expecting some kind of female-led space opera Ocean's Dirty Dozen - oh wait I mean hang on what did people think they were going to?

The weird ethnic casting bothered me a bit, i.e. "Let's cast actors who look like the citizens of countries from which we want to extract mega profits!"

harrumph, much better when this exact practice took the form of all white dudes all the time

ARE. YOU. HERE...TO KILL...ME?

the worst Forest perf i have seen is, of course, his Oscar-winning turn as Idi Amin

i wonder what the heck an "extremist" in this rebellion looks like. does he stage terrorist attacks on imperial civilian populations or what? our heroes end up being a bunch of freedom-fighter saboteurs and assassins, right? is it just that he is willing to use the terrible octobrain in his interrogations?

IIRC, Saw has been openly assaulting the Empire's military operations for years at this point - there's a line about his outfit hitting the Kyber crystal shipments, which is apparently way too overt for the rebellion at this particular stage. That's why the debate later revolves around "talk to the Senate (more)" vs "begin blowing shit up immediately"

overall it's fine but kinda disappointing because it gets so close to being really great.

sarcasm aside I do genuinely feel bad when people go to a movie and come away with this feeling. I was glad to have a couple of "meh" reviews under my belt to temper my excitement going in, I think it actually helped me have a lot more fun. I even liked the joke when they put the hood on the blind guy.

i haven't read many of the takes on this but i thought this was vv good. some very minor issues, but i loved its look and its variety of different worlds and settings. i didn't mind the callbacks or the CGI Cushing and Fisher. liked the nods to Red Leader and Gold Leader (but where are thou, porkins??), loved the FX, the use of crippled star destroyers to open the shield was some sweet space action, really enjoyed the cast overall. Whitaker was his usual oddball self but for a paranoid fringe lunatic character i thought it worked.

i guess the final (admittedly fantastic) space battle seemed to be a cover version of the final battle in Return of the Jedi. Multiple nods to it, which i noticed. it didn't diminish things for me. i always like seeing fish admirals fucking up the imperial fleet.

also, i suspect based on my memory of the conversation between Leia and Vader at the beginning of Ep IV that the events at the end of this film involving her don't quite line up logically w/her denials and Vader's line of questioning. I could be wrong. I had always imagined that there was a lot more subterfuge and secrecy as opposed to a huge Imperial-base destroying fight immediately preceding things. it's not a huge deal for me, it doesn't remove some of the mystery and enjoyment the way the events of eps 1-3 did.

You were on a diplomatic mission? Dude, you were blowing shit up around our tropical planet base just 5 minutes ago!

I explained that incongruency away in my head as the rebels basically rehashing their usual traffic stop talking points because they don't have anything better

"You just fled the scene of the first major Rebel-on-Empire space battle, and you stole the Death Star plans, and I saw you do it"
"I don't know what you're talking about officer this is a diplomatic vessel, we're all diplomats here"
"Also you just shot a bunch of my men when we came on board"
"Diplomatic cargo sir, diplomacy stuff, nobody here but us diplomats"

i can't believe how eye-rolley people are about cg leia. my favorite five seconds of the movie.

I disagree with their premise. I thought this one succeeded specifically *because* of all the connections to A New Hope. Whereas The Force Awakens felt redundant, because it *was* A New Hope.

yeah ... this does not bode well for non-prequels, imo. nor does the fact that my second-favorite scene was hallway vader. and i say this as someone who cringed often during TFA fan service.

not sure what rian has up his sleeve but it better be good, adam driver can't provide the new direction the series needs all on his own.

one complaint - the way things went down it wasn't clear that riz's sacrifice meant anything. maybe it didn't? you can't tell me him plugging that cable into the little cargo ship had shit to do with the giant satellite dish uploading the plans to dropbox.

Isn't that the action that allows them to talk to the fleet and say "open the shield now"?

Not that "open the shield" could be that far down the list of tactical goals.

was Saw even necessary to the plot? That section introduced the gang but not much else. Could have cut the film by 20 minutes.

one complaint - the way things went down it wasn't clear that riz's sacrifice meant anything. maybe it didn't? you can't tell me him plugging that cable into the little cargo ship had shit to do with the giant satellite dish uploading the plans to dropbox.

I thought the fate of his character was the first gotcha. He's back on the ship, transmission sent, home free, right? Then the shore trooper chucks one right into the open door.

Some weird tactical stuff going on in that beachhead cover shooter sequence. You pretty much just had dudes with rifles only blasting away at each other, right? Are grenades only allocated to whoever's playing the grenadier class on the imperial/rebel side? What's a standard trooper loadout?

That's one of the interesting bits I dig about having Wen Jiang there, as we haven't had an armored heavy weapons guy yet, correct? Chewbacca pretty much just had a semi-automatic bowcaster.

Wish they woulda spent 5 minute or something more just on characterization, as I don't even remember their names, much less identifying traits.

I remember all of them

*touches the face of rogue one memorial, drags finger across Blue Leader, Red Five, Chirrut Imwe, Baez Malbus, Bodhi Rook...*

Body Rock.

They had to go to Saw to get the video message, right? What is not clear, and I suppose there's a whole bunch of stuff that is not clear, is what Saw was planning to do with the information. Maybe he was just extremely ... lazy.

They went to Saw for help getting contact with her father. The message arriving there was just lucky timing, I think.

They had word that someone had gone to Saw with a message from Mads. I can't remember how on earth they heard that, but that was the idea. Saw had the message but hadn't decided what to do with it, since he thought it might be bogus. He'd at least confirmed, via the brain squid, that Vaughn Bode was not lying, but I guess after that he was like, 'shit... but that tells me nothing about whether Mads is lying, why did I even bother?' Man this is needlessly complicated though. I guess they were working extra hard to disguise the New Hope hologram-delivery business, or invert expectations or sth. On paper, ''what if Obi Wan had been a paranoid old guerilla, survivor of too many traps and assassination attempts, who tortured Luke and then refused to believe Leia?'' is maybe kinda interesting but they didn't execute it very well and just jamming it into an already crowded first act was probably not ever going to work.

They heard about Bodhi defecting and learned he was headed for Saw (Galen's only contact he could trust).

So the Captain is sent with Jyn to get the details from Saw so that he can find and kill Galen; because they don't understand yet what the Death Star is or that it's already complete.

People all remembering how ice cold it was that Capt Andor shoots his crazy informant in his first scene but forgetting why he was there in the first place

It seems like Sam's part was cut down or changed quite a bit in the reshoots

Me back in April: Also does anybody else think they cast FW basically just to be the guy who says the trailer stuff? I bet you he has one scene and we just saw most of it

Well if so then the reshoots made me mostly right, therefore hooray reshoots

funny that in decades of Star Wars films, the last two are the first that actually have Imperial motherfuckers defecting.

looking forward to when Kylo Ren switches teames in the next one.

Yeah but realistically how did the guy who told Andor come by this information? Did Bodhi go around telling all his stormtrooper buddies ''hey peace out, Mads Mikkelsen's a traitor and I have a secret message from him to Saw Ferreira?'' It's just a really contrived plot IMO.

You guys pining for the days of over-explanation from the Lucas prequels lol

maybe they'll make a movie explaining how the Bodhi defection information was acquired

Bodhi went to a trading post and started asking around about how to find Saw Gerrera. Word gets out.
The dialogue explains pretty much all of this.

Here's the War is Boring review (warning: prose bad)
https://warisboring.com/rogue-one-shows-us-the-dark-side-of-the-rebellion-d6aebf38bf6e#.eo75nbkc8

"you guys" = not me! I got it all the first time thanks

there was also an APB for Bodhi on Jedha too with his actual likeness - which made it kind of funny to me that he shows up on Skariff and nobody recognizes him when he comes on board for the inspection. but w/e, they were all ready to blast away anyway.

I still love the reaction of the derpy Imperial employee who gets asked to comb through his records:

"ALL of them?"

so Droopy-esque.

You guys pining for the days of over-explanation from the Lucas prequels lol

― Nhex, Thursday, December 22, 2016 8:59 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah, fuq that. much of the original trilogy wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny either, but frankly who gives a shit

I mean the universe-building is swiss cheese and succumbs immediately to any attack of logic, like all space opera, but the reasons why people go places and talk to other characters are all pretty well explained imo

Yeah honestly the plotty stuff is only distracting to me where the story isn't working as a story (momentum, character arcs, emotional investment, tension and release). The prequels are actually Exhibit A here - it's a real fucking boring story and so virtually every scene I can find myself getting distracted by how much the minute-to-minute plotting makes no sense. Yeah, the big picture stuff is gratuitous over-explanation but that's not what I'm talking about here.

Plus, there's plenty here that I'm sure is 'explained in the dialogue' but, as with the whole master switch confusion, that's not really the problem - it's that things have been made unnecessarily complicated and the story itself has stopped working. Film Crit Hulk is OTM about the third act problems (tho IMO that was still the strongest chunk of the movie and he's way off about the first act).

looking forward to when Kylo Ren switches teames in the next one.

― Neanderthal, Thursday, December 22, 2016

and blows Luke.

The Force Awakens

I dunno, I felt like the bar is somewhere around the climactic action in Dirty Dozen / Kelly's Heroes where an ensemble is all doing different stuff in different places and it probably all makes sense to the commanding officer but pretty much nobody else, and there's always something or other that throws a wrench into the plan and requires valiant workarounds. I didn't mind. To me the shield gate + radio dish shenanigans are all of a trope, no different than having a blind guy who is superlative at all forms of combat

a blind ASIAN man

Yen's character reminded me of Shaw Brothers' Crippled Avengers

I was annoyed not that they cast an Asian actor (there are no "Asians" in Star Wars world, anyway), but it seemed a little on the nose that they also made him a blind martial arts expert. Like, any of them could have been blind and good at fighting, they just happened to give those attributes to Donnie Yen.

I agree the reshoot stuff clearly affected Whitaker the most. Why didn't he join them on their adventures? Because that would have involved reshooting every subsequent scene. Better to just have him say "I give up."

idk I think the Hulk dude and RLM are right on this: heist/caper/mission movies have a certain structure that wasn't used here (or replaced with something else that works): you establish what everybody's trying to do, what each of their roles are in the plan, the obstacles they expect to overcome... and then the tension comes from whether they pull off those obstacles, things going wrong, they turn the corner and where they thought the door would be open, there's guards there!, or, we were counting on the blind semi-Jedi to do this but he's dead, etc. (Funnily, in The Great Escape one of the things that goes wrong is that one of their team goes blind along the way.) Here the obstacles were mostly invented on the fly - oh now we need this cable and this switch, oh there's a previously unmentioned satellite adjustment switch down the catwalk - following the logic of video game mission-padding.

Also in that sequence: I think it was a mistake to have BOTH the X-wing battle above and the squad of faceless Nam vets on the ground, because both basically have the same role: we don't really know these characters but they're doing something that supports the mission and adds a sense of desperation and doom as they all die. Having to keep cutting away to both drains time from the main cast whose heist we should be invested in. I'm spending so much time thinking about this because I think a lot of the material was THERE (and maybe ended up on the cutting room floor) so it's kind of an interesting mental recut exercise, how few things you'd really have to change for this to end up being one of the all-time heist movie greats.

My theory would be that the X-wing stuff was added (or expanded) by Disney. It forces that kind of confusing scene with the Rebels debating whether to act on this new intelligence, and it makes the least sense to the plot insert anyway. If they transmitted the Death Star plans to this whole fleet, why would the copy that Leia is transporting in A New Hope be of any particular importance? Why would people in A New Hope be surprised to discover the Death Star and its destructive power? Anyway it just "feels" wrong, as others have pointed out - it always seemed much more like the plans had been slipped out by a small covert team rather than in a giant space battle that everybody in the galaxy would know about. It's certainly a lot cooler that way.

It wasn't totally coherent, but this was *not* a heist movie, more like a modest race against time/point A-B-C movie, a la "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (Though obviously it's no Raiders).

funny that in decades of Star Wars films, the last two are the first that actually have Imperial motherfuckers defecting.

Darth Vader defects in Return of the Jedi!

If they transmitted the Death Star plans to this whole fleet

only the flagship has a big enough receiver, you see. and then it has to be written to a disk. this isn't just commodity equipment we're talking about!

I was annoyed not that they cast an Asian actor (there are no "Asians" in Star Wars world, anyway), but it seemed a little on the nose that they also made him a blind martial arts expert. Like, any of them could have been blind and good at fighting, they just happened to give those attributes to Donnie Yen.

What were they called in TFA again? Culture Club?

At least they didn't back the plans up onto multiple devices and networks. A lesson for us all.

THERE ARE NO NETWORKS IN STAR WARS

jfc

So many Original Trilogy plot devices hinge on 70s-era mainframe computing, as discussed in that gloriously nerdy storage article linked earlier in this thread

Another Disneyfication problem might be this: we don't really get to see the Empire's atrocities at a vivid enough level for the characters' motivations to make sense. They blow up that city, which is obviously a horrible war crime, but c'mon, give me a T2 shot of people disintegrating, or idk have the kid that Jyn saves be playing with a doll and then the doll's horribly burnt head comes flying out of the wreckage or something. The Empire's exploiting the planet and mining its crystals? Go Temple of Doom and show us the kids getting whipped and the families impoverished by this colonial imposition, or have the guard at Saw's base talk about how his aging father had his hands cut off for publishing forbidden literature, or something.

I think this would all help make Jyn's arc make more sense: she starts out thinking her life's story is about individual survival and is grimly satisfied with that, and gradually she comes to realize that these other people's suffering is hers too, she gets her consciousness raised and she realizes she needs the Rebellion. TFA has this problem a little bit, but Finn's horror at the slaughter in the opening scene is able to stand in for a lot of this because it's so immediately human - a lot of it can just happen in the acting.

That evil empire stuff has already been established in the other six movies...

Though I think the alternate Jyn arc you're talking about sounds like what the movie would have been in the original, pre-re-shoots version that was hinted at in the trailers

Curious about that, because I didn't find the Jyn character particularly interesting or fleshed out. She kind of seemed to flow with whatever the plot needed her to flow with, and other than "generally rugged survivor", I'm not exactly sure what her personality is supposed to be.