Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

[The Stingray]

3 hours ago, Hatebox said:

Damn. Looks like I'm going to have to be a stick in the mud, but I thought it was a total clusterfuck.

 

I really wanted to like it, especially as the girl I was with was clearly having a whale of a time, but I'm at a total loss as to why they thought this story was worth telling. I guess I like the idea of delving into the more obscure aspects of the SW narrative, but I just couldn't care about any of the characters (Felicity Jones was fatally miscast) and the last half hour was a cross cutting mess.

 

I will say one thing though: it looked great. I loved the scenes on planets where they showed everyday life — the places felt real and lived in, not just a chance for the moviemakers to show off CGI creatures.

 

But yeah, looks like I'll have to chalk this up to another Jurassic World where I'm resigned to thinking everyone's insane for loving it. Oh well.

 

 

 

 

Agree with the highlighted part. 

[Alpha]

Third act was great, and I especially loved the gutsy ending they took by killing off all the main characters. But it's filled with too many cliches, too much exposition that it distracts itself from telling a compelling story with good characters. I think Rukaio already echoed it best, but more plot doesn't equal better film. The first two acts were a slog and things really didn't ramp up for me until Mads Mikkelsen died and we actually got to the "let's go steal the Death Star plans" part of the film.

 

I just felt disappointed. Seems like everybody involved had some pretty good ideas that ended up coming together in the third act, but they all got crammed together so poorly that it ended up being pretty formulaic.

 

Highlights were, of course, the entire third act (especially the ending), along with the visuals and Darth Vader kicking ass per usual. Performances were decent (Mendelsohn was a big highlight for me), but they could've been strengthening by better characterization.

 

Overall, just bleh. C+

 

Rankings of the SW films now:

 

1. The Empire Strikes Back

2. A New Hope

3. The Force Awakens

4. Return of the Jedi

5. Revenge of the Sith

6. Rogue One

7. The Phantom Menace

8. Attack of the Clones

[dashrendar44]

By the way, Vader still looks like an incompetent goof. I mean this is the badass that made a blaster aiming him flies across a banquet hall room after deflecting shots with his hands while standing still but he can't force grab the tiny floppy disk plans across a smokey dark airlock corridor out of the rebel's hand right in front of him while deflecting blaster shots with his lightsaber? But we wouldn't have that fanservicey videogame cutscene when he channels a berserk Terminator poser slowly going for every rebel one by one, right. That scene was ridiculously contrived, all style but made no sense on examination (Vader waiting in the dark to make a slow shit-panting reveal even though he is in a hurry to retrieve the death star plans).

Edited December 18, 2016 by dashrendar44

[Plain Old Tele]

Is "videogame cutscene" the new "cash grab"?  

[Lordmandeep]

Compared to Sw7 it really does a good job at world building and exploring the SW world.

 

The last act is well done and will likely be a SW classic.

 

I think it's a well done effort and imo with a year full of medicore blockbusters this easily stands out as above the rest.

 

A-

[Grand Moff]

11/10 as perfect a film as I could have wanted.

 

Only thing that I can compare it to is TFA which I think is close to equal.

[miketheavenger]

A pretty good film that serves as a nice Bridge between Episodes III and IV. The visuals and the cinematography were terrific (like every SW movie, even the prequels). Tarkin looked so realistic I honestly thought the actor had come back from the dead. Unfortunately, I have to echoe the sentiment that most of the characters were kind of bland. I really only cared about Jyn, K-2SO (who stole the show with his lovely sarcasm), Donnie Yen and to a lesser extent Diego Luna. All of the others were forgettable and thus them being killed off didn't really hit me all that hard. Yes the final space battle was great and Vader proved again why he's pretty much the best villain ever, but that wasn't enough for this movie to be truly great. I liked TFA better because the characters were much more developed and charismatic. Overall still a rather enjoyable movie with an excellent third act, but the buildup to that and the characters weren't as good as I wanted.

 

Grade: B or 7,8/10

[CaptainJackSparrow]

Was there a Godzilla Easter egg in this??

[Impact]

Saw it on Thursday night (which I noticed a lot less nerds this time around, maybe they only show up for the number ones!)
Anyway very enjoyable film and the visuals were top notch. My one complaint was the 3D-The film seemed to dark in 3D and some scenes were hard to see. Other then that it was really good and I enjoyed the new characters. (Even though I went to the bathroom when R2 showed up!)

A

[redfirebird2008]

I loved it. Best Star Wars since Empire. 

 

A- (9/10)

[The Stingray]

On 2016-12-18 at 6:01 AM, dashrendar44 said:

By the way, Vader still looks like an incompetent goof. I mean this is the badass that made a blaster aiming him flies across a banquet hall room after deflecting shots with his hands while standing still but he can't force grab the tiny floppy disk plans across a smokey dark airlock corridor out of the rebel's hand right in front of him while deflecting blaster shots with his lightsaber? But we wouldn't have that fanservicey videogame cutscene when he channels a berserk Terminator poser slowly going for every rebel one by one, right. That scene was ridiculously contrived, all style but made no sense on examination (Vader waiting in the dark to make a slow shit-panting reveal even though he is in a hurry to retrieve the death star plans).

 

This has to be the strangest criticism I have seen leveled against the movie.
 

[Goffe]

1 hour ago, The Stingray said:

 

This has to be the strangest criticism I have seen leveled against the movie.
 

 

 

it does make sense, does it not? it's not like he's talking nonsense. It didn't bother me, but honestly, at that stage I would take anything that had a pulse.

Edited December 19, 2016 by Goffe

[Jessie]

Okay so beginning scene was okay, started the story well but then we end up going from planet to planet watching pointless scene after pointless scene for atleast an hour. It was like the first hour of godzilla where you can feel a build up except I didn't care about a single character or the story it was tryingg to tell, every scene up until that final show down seemed like a space filler.

 

The crew of rogue one could have been fleshed out a little more,  how does a movie manage to kill off its entire main cast yet pack zero emotional punch? This seemed like a great movie somewhere but it ended up being lifeless, tedious and even pointless.

 

This is one of those films where people will look back a year from now and realise it really wasn't that good. You're all still caught in the hype, give it time and you will all come to your senses.

 

C-

[dashrendar44]

11 hours ago, The Stingray said:

 

This has to be the strangest criticism I have seen leveled against the movie.
 

 

And I didn't even mention how this portrayal clashes with how Vader is presented in New Hope's intro. So he goes berserk and takes a bloodthirsty glee in massacring rebels one by one with his lightsaber on his own but once he boards the Tantive IV in the sequence that directly follows those events, he lets stormtroopers die dispatching rebels when he could have done what he just did, forgets to use his lightsaber, the force (his rage should be amplified at the rebels barely squeaking from his range, not be tamed), is blatantly being taken for a bubbling fool by Leia (to unwanted comical effect, he just saw her escaping like a scoundrel with the floppy disc he had in sight, hopped back into his destroyer to try to board it all over again ), looks like an arthritic geezer when he fights similarly old geezer Obi-Wan. And so on. 

 

I've read how this scene is supposed to be the absolute epitome of the movie (after two plodding and dull first and second acts), the fanboy dream coming true but it doesn't even gel with the movie character's it's supposed to set up by going for a superficial flashy action beat instead of being logical. That was like Walking Dead's Negan in Vader's garb (could almost imagine him grinning like a psychotic mofo underneath the mask). Now I understand what people who hate Lucas prequels really wanted from them, a self aggrandized fanfic footnote full of 1977 era fanservice from A New Hope's opening roll set 10 minutes before its beginning that doesn't inform us of something crucial we needed to understand the OT events.

 

I didn't learn anything worthy in this movie that shed a new light on Episode IV except that rebels sucked hard at effective rebellion if it was not for the guy who built the death star superlaser with an obvious embedded flaw for all to see and his dull daughter who couldn't give two shits about the rebellion until she realized her daddy was alive.

Edited December 19, 2016 by dashrendar44

[The Panda]

The movie's grown on me.  The imagery, the build up, the climax.  It's a solid A- now.

[Ozymandias]

11 hours ago, Jessie said:

Okay so beginning scene was okay, started the story well but then we end up going from planet to planet watching pointless scene after pointless scene for atleast an hour. It was like the first hour of godzilla where you can feel a build up except I didn't care about a single character or the story it was tryingg to tell, every scene up until that final show down seemed like a space filler.

 

The crew of rogue one could have been fleshed out a little more,  how does a movie manage to kill off its entire main cast yet pack zero emotional punch? This seemed like a great movie somewhere but it ended up being lifeless, tedious and even pointless.

 

This is one of those films where people will look back a year from now and realise it really wasn't that good. You're all still caught in the hype, give it time and you will all come to your senses.

 

C-

 

Hey Dawg I gave it a C+

 

Funnily enough, the character death in this that by far had the most impact on me was the smug sassy robot lol, what a trooper going down like that!  Felicity Jones and Diego Luna dying on the beach at the end from the death star blast was amazing by itself, but it didn't necessarily feel earned because I didn't really care about them, that could've been a powerful classic scene.  I think the relationship between Felicity Jones and her father was supposed to be the emotional core of this movie(besides the sacrifice at the end) but it didn't really land and felt underwritten.  Forrest Whittaker's dollar store Vader felt pointless to me.  The blind Chinese guy with the force was a pretty cool idea, but they didn't do enough with him I thought.  The other Chinese guy with the big gun could've been removed entirely to give more time/development to other characters but since China is becoming such an important market now, Disney heads probably demanded at least 2 Chinese guys be in this movie.  And the pilot played by the middle eastern guy that got assaulted by the brain rape slug, what was the point of his character again?  I honestly can't remember that or his character's name.

 

Thats the problem with this movie, it doesn't have any particularly memorable characters, and I think this movie needed that more than usual since we already knew how this story ends in the opening crawl of STAR WARS.   Daisy Ridley was very charismatic in TFA and carried that movie(really looking forward to see what Rian Johnson takes her).  Felicity Jones in this was just boring most of the time, I'm not sure if its just the writing or being miscast or Gareth Edwards being a good visual/action director but seriously lacking when it comes to drama and characters(hi Godzilla).

 

I didn't hate this movie or find it offensively bad like Episodes 1-3 were in nearly every way, I just didn't really care much for it at the end of the day.  Standard action movie.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 2016 by Ozymandias

[Plain Old Tele]

9 hours ago, dashrendar44 said:

Now I understand what people who hate Lucas prequels really wanted from them...

 

Not at all, I'd be perfectly happy with the general story and sequence of events from the prequels had they actually been good movies.

[Amadeus]

1 hour ago, Grand Moff Tele said:

 

Not at all, I'd be perfectly happy with the general story and sequence of events from the prequels had they actually been good movies.

And with what do you compare TPM when you say "good [i suppose you mean conventional] movies"?

[Plain Old Tele]

9 minutes ago, Amadeus said:

And with what do you compare TPM when you say "good [i suppose you mean conventional] movies"?

 

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think TPM is very good at all, though I like two sequences in it. By "good" I don't mean "conventional", I mean "good".  Well-paced, well-acted, with characters I care about, in a story that makes sense to me.

[Amadeus]

1 hour ago, Grand Moff Tele said:

 

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think TPM is very good at all, though I like two sequences in it. By "good" I don't mean "conventional", I mean "good".  Well-paced, well-acted, with characters I care about, in a story that makes sense to me.

Just happened to have a wild night at the pub (after R1) where I and some friends ended up fighting with a bunch of 19 20 year olders who just kept on quoting RLM and who just didn't put any thought into analyzing the film in question and what it really is instead of what it is not. Just mad about that.