Fuck You, Rogue One

One year ago, I made the mistake of liking TFA upon release, and this chat gave me loads of well-deserved shit for it. Mea culpa. But now, George, this is your moment. This is the moment where you are so indelibly, indefensibly wrong that it cannot be wiped from your record. To quote Rogue One, "Take hold of this moment" as I completely fuck you and your shitty, dumb opinion up.

Rogue One positives:
The Chinese dudes are cool
It looks pretty sometimes
I want to smash Felicity Jones like a priceless antique vase

Cons:
Literally everything else

Okay, let's start off at the beginning. The first half of this movie is a fucking mess. The second half, thankfully, is merely terrible, mostly for reasons that the first half establishes.

I liked the short prologue with Jyn and her family. Immediately after that, everything goes to shit. The editor should have his fingers removed for the job he did on this movie (and by "editor" I mean Tony Gilroy, who was in charge of the reshoots, rewrites, and post-production). For the first 30 minutes, every scene consists of two shots and two lines of dialogue, then jumps to an entirely unrelated scene on an entirely unrelated planet. Several of these "scenes" could be removed, and those that can't certainly could have been knitted together more cleanly with the others.

After this stage-setting, we go to see Saw Gerrera (and what the fuck is Forest Whitaker doing with this performance, seriously). Nothing about Saw Gerrera makes any sense. First, we are told that he is an extremist, but we never learn why. Then he puts Bodhi in a mind slug thing that is never referenced again and serves no purpose in the story. Then he has a little scene with Jyn, where a TON of dialogue exposition is dropped (more on this later), then he decides to die because he's "tired of running," but why doesn't he just fucking walk outside and get on the ship? Goodbye, Saw, I didn't know ye at all. Saw's death serves no purpose except to push Jyn against the Empire, but this is never expressed by Jyn or anyone else.

Then we go to another planet, because 99% of this movie is "we have to go to a place and do a thing." It feels like TFA in that it moves WAY too fast, and with too much urgency. We needs periods of downtime for our characters to talk, exist, just BE CHARACTERS. In Rogue One, we don't get them. So we see Mads Mickeymouse get killed in a bombing run, and this might matter if a) we knew about his character at all or b) if we cared about Jyn. Which we don't. Galen's death has no effect on anything that comes after, and honestly he's only there to a) further motivate Jyn (still not expressed) and b) cover a plot hole IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MOVIE.

Now, the most interesting things that have been happening so far have been in the background -- seeing how the Rebellion operates, or barely manages to operate. I wanted a movie about the balding British Rebel leader, because he actually seemed interesting. It was the closest the movie came to emulating the films that obviously influenced it, like Saving Private Ryan. But now we get into the third act, which is 45 minutes of shoot-em-up, some characters we don't care about die, and nothing is resolved except a plot hole from Episode 4 that nobody has ever seriously cared about.

This movie had two purposes: to close a plot hole (which it does) and to give us a grun'ts-eye-view of the Star War. In this second regard, I think it failed. I never once felt that the Rebellion was overwhelmed -- in fact, the only time it ever feels that way is when the Death Star fires. So in every encounter the Empire gets thoroughly BTFO, then their deus ex machina saves them to keep the plot moving. That doesn't feel like desperation. That feels like a guerrilla fighting force defeating their overwhelming opponents for no real reason and then getting killed by a superweapon that we already know they will overcome. Conceptually, Rogue One should have been TOTALLY reworked, from the ground-up. But they could have at least softened the pain if they'd made any characters worth caring about.

Let's start with Jyn. Jyn is not only stonefaced and inexpressive, but she has no character development throughout the entire movie. Whenever the Rebellion wants her to do something, she does it. Wow! Drama! She's not as hyper-competent as Rey, and actually gets beat up a fair bit, but at no point did I feel like she was struggling with an internal conflict. The most special thing about her is that she happens to be the daughter of a certain man. Her becoming a rallying point for the Rebels feels totally ridiculous, because we never see anything to suggest that she has an ounce of leadership ability, that she cares about their cause, or that she's connecting with them. We're left to assume that she can do these things because she's our protagonist.

The other half of the charisma vacuum at the center of the movie is Cassian, the most disappointing thing about the film. Cassian could have been a VERY cool character, but unfortunately, his character arc makes no sense, and he happens to be played by Diego Luna. I think Luna is a good actor, but this was a role meant for someone like Harrison Ford or Humphrey Bogart -- someone who could put some real darkness and edge in it. Someone who could feel threatening, and feel threatened. As it is, Cassian's development consists of shooting a guy at the beginning and then later choosing not to shoot a guy.

This softening of the heart would be okay if there was a reason for it, but aside from maybe 30 seconds of back-and-forth with Jyn, we don't get anything even approaching a reason. Why does he suddenly decide to not obey his superiors? Considering that his later decision to flee the Rebellion is contingent on this change of heart, it really needed a solid reason, but we don't get any. It's just something that happens because the movie needs to pretend that it's made by humans for humans.

It's not. Rogue One feels like a movie made by robots for robots. There are no moments of genuine human emotion. I couldn't even muster up feeling for a girl watching her mother and father die. The movie never lingers on sadness or pain, but is always in too much of a hurry to get to the next one-liner, to the next action sequence. It wants to entertain, but entertainment without meaning or feeling isn't that entertaining.

By the way, one-liners: they didn't belong. The movie tries to be both a tragic war flick and a comic heist, and it impales itself on the fence it's trying to straddle. It's neither comic nor tragic. It's a tonal catastrophe. This is what happens when you lavish more care on the moment-to-moment than on the overarching threads of the story. You can keep the audiences entertained, but they will walk away with nothing.

Now, the supporting characters. Like I said, I liked the Chinese guys. No complaints -- except for how they relate to the main characters. Like when Baze says "Good luck, little sister" and hugs Jyn despite having not spoken to her AT ALL.

By the way, the timeframe is also way too short for believable character relationships. Doesn't this whole movie take place over the course of a single day? Why do these people care about each other, all of a sudden?

Also, I would have REALLY liked to see a Star Wars movie that not only leaves out the Jedi, but also the Force. Chirrut is basically just a Jedi stand-in so that they can have their cake ("no Jedi...") and eat it too ("... but there's this Force-sensitive guy with a powerful melee weapon!").

The droid is also okay. Though he feels a little meme-pandery, I didn't mind him. I DID mind his introduction, which is as subtle as "This is Katana, she's got my back." (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9MjMPoWERY) "I'm K2S0, I'm a reprogrammed Imperial droid." That is an actual quote, and is prompted by absolutely nothing. The movie doesn't really seem to know how to handle him, since he also has no development and because his backstory is related entirely through dialogue.

Which is a big problem the movie has in general: way too much backstory and exposition through talk-talk-talk. Lots of big info dumps. The movie seems to try and retroactively explain itself as it goes along to make up for the giant fucking holes in character and reasoning.

Then there's Bodhi. Bodhi's place in the movie baffles me. First he gets fucked by a mindslug, then everyone forgets about the mindslug and he seems a little confused, then he's suddenly un-fucked when they have to escape the temple, then he has this little thing about "making things right" through EVEN MORE backstory-through-dialogue (this time with Galen, and why didn't this come earlier?), then he gets grenaded. Why was he even there? Was I supposed to care about him? WHAT WAS HIS CHARACTER? The entire time, he seems kind of mildly nervous and twitchy, and that never changes in the least.

By the way, the mindslug never comes back into play. That scene could have been totally axed.

Now, I don't have a problem with characters not changing, especially if they're supporting. Obi-Wan never changed in the original trilogy, after all. In this movie, Chirrut and K2S0 and Bodhi never change. These are all supposed to be characters on par with Obi-Wan's importance within the story, but who are never granted the depth of feeling that he is, because Rogue One is constantly zapping back and forth between five or six different things that are all going on at once. The last third of the movie is an absolute clusterfuck of editing, where the battle has multiple storylines happening that it can't dedicate more than a few shots to at any given time. Even before that, it's VERY unfocused. I never learned anything about any of the characters because none of them were afforded proper screentime.

I don't need a huge, complicated, tragic backstory; at the very least, I need depth and warmth. Rogue One provided neither. It has too much going on on-screen, but not enough going on within its characters.

The movie attempts to complicate a simple storyline (good vs. evil) by introducing shades of grey (Cassian shooting an informant; Galen getting killed in a Rebellion bombing). But then it forgets about the shades of grey in the end and goes for speechifying and "HOPE." It tries to simplify the story it's been complicating, and as such it feels very thematically muddled. That's because it wants to strike out on its own, but is still dragging the other seven movies around like a ball and chain. The callbacks aren't as obnoxious as they are in TFA, but they are arguably more important and therefore more distracting. First, we have Zombie Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher, who both live in the depths of the uncanny valley. Then we have the Darth Vader scenes.

If we cut Darth Vader from the movie, what would you lose? Well, you lose the first scene where he chokes Krennick out, and what Krennick is doing there to begin with I'm not really sure. Don't they have holograms to communicate across space? Anyway, Krennick receives no advice or orders, and the scene exists only to set up Vader. The scene has no setup, and it has no effect on the rest of the movie. Surely Vader will serve some important purpose later! Nope, not really: instead, in a coda that comes after the main story has ended and everyone we supposedly cared about is dead, Vader kills a bunch of dudes in a dark hallway. It feels utterly tacked-on and serves no narrative purpose except to show Vader killing a bunch of dudes. Sure, it's cool, but cool does not equal good.

Okay, so what else? How about the visual style? I actually liked that Star Wars went for the ground-level view of things, and wasn't afraid to get a little shaky -- but then it completely undermined that "cinema verite" (yes, the director actually said this is what he was going for) style with multiple crane shots. A few bad apples can ruin the bunch.

I don't think Rogue One was unsalvageable. There were a few things I liked. Most of them (and there weren't a lot) I've already gone over. So let me just tell you about one thing that really plucked the olde heartstrings: the final shots of Cassian and Jyn on the beach, getting ready to die (which were then ruined by packing in that dumbass Vader scene). That was the first and only time I felt something during the movie -- when the characters felt like physically and emotionally vulnerable human beings, their relationship progressed (about fucking time), and where the movie itself seemed capable of legitimate, unforced, non-cliched human feeling. Even this scene, however, is undermined by the lack of progression in their relationship up to this point.

Where TFA's flaws could have been mostly rectified with a few slight tweaks, Rogue One's cover everything from the superficial to the conceptual level. The movie is fundamentally flawed. The only thing I can think of, less than 6 hours after watching the movie, would be to combine the characters of Jyn and Cassian. This character (male or female doesn't matter) would have Jyn's father and audience perspective, and Cassian's moral arc (which could be further developed this way) and occupation (Jyn's background beyond her father didn't figure into the story at all, and Cassian's relationship with the Rebellion is more interesting). But that's neither here nor there, because Rogue One is what it is now, and it is bad.

(Side note: terrible score. Faux John Williams. Would have much rather heard Desplat's work, and I can only assume that it would have fit the original, darker tone of the movie much better)