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Also, for the record, I would much rather have a Mistborn TV series. Cramming everything into a single movie just doesn’t cut it for me anymore!

Also, on a COMPLETELY unrelated note, have you heard about the SNES Classic? I’m sure you’ve got a few things to say about that.

I passed on the NES Classic because I never had one growing up, so the nostalgia factor wasn’t enough to attract me. But the SNES was my first ever console, even if my grandma bought it for me after the 64 had already been released. I’m a little disappointed it only has the first Donkey Kong Country game on it, since I liked the second and third better, and where the flipping meatballs is Chrono Trigger? Other than that, looks like an awesome lineup and I I fully intend to buy one should one be easily available.

I’ve still only seen Rogue One once, so I wonder what my opinion of it would be on a second viewing. My initial reaction was “wow, how did they manage to give me so many things I wanted while still leaving me feeling completely empty inside?”. Unfortunately, the incredible trailers for the movie set up an entirely different film (with an entirely different, much better soundtrack). We’re lead to believe it will be a movie about assembling a crack team of experts to infiltrate the empire, where they will be forced to make difficult decisions that conflict with the morality of the characters, and maybe exploring the idea of dark side vs light side outside of the context of Jedi. Instead, we get a story about a bunch of people who just kind of fall in together haphazardly, get ordered around a bunch, and then finally decide to infiltrate a base in a super non-interesting way, at which point everything devolves into a big, cool battle sequence where no one in the more interesting space battle part of it is a character of consequence, even though one of the Rogue One team is a pilot of some sort.

Half of the stuff shot for the trailers was done with no intention of being put in the film. It’s extraordinarily frustrating to know that the director thought of all these cool, story telling visual shots, asked for them to be in the trailers, and then totally didn’t use them in the movie. What the hell? That should’ve sent off warning signals in his brain that maybe there was a more powerful story to tell here. It’s infuriating because there’s so much lost potential going on in the movie. Since I’m praising Skull Island, a movie that is far from high art, it clearly doesn’t take THAT MUCH to make me enjoy a film. All I need is some decent characterization so I give a damn about a film’s cast, that’s literally almost ALL I NEED! When a film as big as Rogue One fails to deliver on something that simple, I get pretty frustrated! (A coherent plot and decent editing are also a big plus)

“I believe someone called Rogue One a fanboy’s wet dream.”

When I ranted about Rogue One after I saw it, I called it a great Star Wars fan film, just not a great film. It’s got all the surface level Star Wars stuff if nothing else.

“She has no reason whatsoever to believe in the Light Side or the rebellion until the Empire shot her father.”

Except Jyn’s father wasn’t shot by the Empire, he was killed by an X-Wing doing an attack run, making her sudden love for the Rebellion even more perplexing.

“The prequel was a bit worse, but at the least it added to a staple of clichés.”

A bit worse?? Literally every action every character takes in each prequel film makes no sense in the context of their situation! Gods, I’d go into specifics, but it’s just easier to watch the Red Letter Media reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D

“It’s all about light sabers, strong female leads, space ships, space wizards, space scoundrels, bad CG/puppet characters and light sabers (yes I know I said that twice). It’s what you should expect, in spite of everything the trailer says. Especially now that it’s Disney.”

Yeah, I can’t disagree. I’m not even opposed to that list. But I’ll still complain on this site if a movie doesn’t appeal to me! I’ll just be ranting it up here in my safe space. (Also, lightsaber is one word in Star Wars canon)

Replying down at this level but actually including some stuff from further up the chain. SPOILERS naturally on the whole thread here.

Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to call the main cast flat, but I would definitely go as far as underdeveloped. I definitely agree that Washdroid was the only one who got a full
story arc. For me, the most interesting character was the blind man. Yeah, he certainly reflected a lot of movie cliches, but the interactions between him and his fellow guard were enjoyable, and I liked seeing one of the films start exploring the force outside of the Jedi/Sith division. The “extended universe” certainly did, and I gather the newer animated series might have done as well (haven’t seen it yet), but in terms of the primary movie stream, it was interesting seeing a force-sensitive character in the mix who was not Jedi or Sith and how he interacted with the force.

When I ponder on it, I don’t exactly wish that he was in the film more as it stands. I think, for the storyline it did follow, there’s just about the right amount of him in the film. The movie does a better job of establishing those two guys, the droid, and the pilot than it does most anyone else. If they had put more overall content into the story, though, I could have done with more of those two guys in that larger context.

I feel like the ending actually, while containing some of the coolest scenes, had some of the weakest parts of the film in terms of the way it chose to wrap things up on several levels.

One of those was actually killing everyone off. Washdroid’s death was great, as was the Director’s. I definitely do think Jyn and Ursa dying from the Death Star attack was the right call, but the way it was handled was wrong. The whole nuclear sunset thing was a bit of an incongruous note. I know what they were trying for, but it didn’t work for me because they hadn’t established the characters’ relationship enough to make it poignant and they didn’t really explain how they had time to get to that point either. It ended up feeling less like a sacrifice than if they’d died coming down the tower or something. But I also think it would have been better if the pilot and a couple of generic soldiers had pulled the blind man’s companion onto a transport of some sort and raced away to outside the blast radius, unable to get close enough to the tower to try to rescue Jyn and Ursa. It would have added a little more potential emotion, and the blind man’s companion was actually a good potential carry-over character, because he wasn’t so important as to require explanation as to why he wasn’t in the original films, but his arc of taking up the blind man’s mantle could have been played out in additional films or left to be expanded on in other media later. Similarly, the pilot did actually have some interesting growth starting, which could have been continued later if desired without leading to a “why wasn’t he a main character in the originals” problem. And we still had a few generic rebels alive in the doorway when the blind man’s companion finished taking out the Director’s guards, so there was someone right there if they wanted to try to drag him off and get him into a bacta tank later.

And while the Vader ending sequence was undeniably one of the coolest sequences in the film, I actually think it was a bad choice to tie things so closely to Leia’s vessel. For one, railroading the storyline to end at one very particular moment in time like that limited some of the options. It also did what people wondered if it would do, make the whole “many Bothans” line false, because we now have a complete story of the acquisition of the death star plans that doesn’t involve Bothans anywhere. If it were a little less tightly tied, there could have been room for them. But the biggest issue is, I think, that Leia’s presence there doesn’t make much sense. Why would a diplomatic cruiser be inside a rebel flagship’s bay the entire fight? It makes her “this is a diplomatic ship” defense much more hollow when Vader has litterally SEEN the plans carried onto her cruiser by rebel soldiers while it’s in the belly of the rebel flagship of all things. It would have been much better if some other ship had been the getaway vessel, and had been pursued to the point of its path crossing with Leia’s ship. You could then have Leia’s ship fleeing from that rendezvous as Vader’s ship arrives, ending it with the iconic moment of Vader in pursuit of Leia without tying it together quite so tightly. There’s a few different places you could insert Bothans into that sequence, including perhaps even replacing the generic NPCs of the Rogue One team with a Bothan intelligence unit that volunteered to go with her because their intelligence led them to believe what the main council was unwilling to believe.

I still enjoyed the movie on first viewing. Actually, the only things that really stood out to me on that first viewing were the weird beach ending and Leia’s ship being where it shouldn’t be. The rest is more a result of pondering and reading this thread. I’ve got it on DVD, and I’d now classify it as one of those movies I probably wouldn’t watch all the way through from start to finish except to introduce someone else, but could certainly see myself re-watching the highlight real, so to speak, with scene-finding features.

You’re very right about the Bothans, and now that you said that, I remember someone pointing that out before and I’d forgotten it again. 😀 I’m going to totally blame the internet for that. 😉

On Immwe, I definitely agree there was more that could have been done with him, though I would also add not to forget the subtle things. One of the things I did like with him was the way he kept showing subtle things that quietly reflected the force sensitivity. Like him being the one to recognize that Cassian was going to kill. Him sensing Jyn in a crowd in the first place, because of the necklace. And the scene where he tests the wind and then shoots the tie fighter so that it takes out the turret is really cool. He didn’t waste movements much, waited for the moment, and then acted. Which said a lot about his relationship with the force without really talking, and I liked that about the character. It made him a good contrast with his friend, and I actually thought they did a lot with the two of them without actually focusing on them. He always seemed to be patiently waiting for the next moment that action was required.

I can definitely understand that in terms of the character interaction. I think that was a major place that the movie suffered from the knowledge that the characters were throwaways. The secondary characters got developed while the primary characters were tied too tightly to their plot mechanisms. It kind of feels like, when you look at what they did do with the secondary characters, that they felt constrained with the primary characters by the need to make sure they hit all the parts of the storyboard. And I think at least a part of that constraint was caused by tying the final moment of the film too closely to the starting moment of the old films, making the clock a very heavy presence throughout where they had to hit all the right ticks to get everything to tie into a neat package. There’s a lot more creative freedom when you’re not trying to tie two things together down to mere minutes apart.

That’s another reason personally that I think having it be Leia’s ship leaving the cruiser was a bad idea, because it left them no wiggle room on the plot. They had to make everything happen in the relatively short length of time it takes a hyperspace-capable universe to get from one event to the next. When your story absolutely has to hit a series of specific beats, the characters can become servants of the timeline instead of the story developing from the characters.

I remember many years ago, I used to play on a text-based RPG MUSH. They were effectively collaborative novels, really. One of the worst experiences I ever had in those games was playing with one particular GM, because at some point in the narrative he tended to pre-write the ending. I don’t know where in the process he did it, I just know that at some point it was already written as to how he thought the story should end, and if you came up with something for your character to do that he hadn’t though about and which would make the ending not play out as he’d written it, he’d brutally crush your characters’ efforts in one way or another to force things to line up with the ending he’d written. One of his best friends was a player in that one, and the way he tried to force her into what HE thought her character should do created a rift that destroyed their friendship and grew to affect a good 30 or more players because all sorts of ongoing stories were tied to both of them in some way and the GM carried over his animosity from that scene into other scenes, further compounded by a long-running plot where he and another GM were managing different parts of it and when the two parts intersected this GM took away things the other GM had approved, to the point that the head admin ended up stepping in with a hammer to try to stop the problems. I kinda burned out on the game after that, because I ended up as the “good listener” who got to hear all the complaints from a dozen or more friends who were involved including a couple of the GMs, and also ended up being the guy who had to pull the head GM aside when he was in his hard case ban hammer mode and lay out a complete story of six months or so of events to him to show that the understanding he had gotten from his GMs was only pieces of the whole story. It did get sorted out in the end, but the stress level was exhausting and burned me out on the game. To bring that back on topic: none of his endings were bad. But his endings were HIS story, not the story coming from the characters themselves, and he tried to force our story to match his. And I think Rogue One suffers some from trying too closely to force Jyn and Cassian’s story to match with the opening of the originals instead of letting it develop more from the characters.

I can generate quite a number of words when I set my mind to it 😀

I do agree, there were hints of the bond between her and her father in a few dialog bits, but they started the story so close to the action that we only barely got introduced to the family before they were split up. There are definitely times there’s value to telling a backstory through action, but you can go too far with that just as much as you can go too far with exposition.

It feels weird to say it, but where the prequels spent entirely too much time on politics, this movie could have used a little more of it. Not long-winded speeches but a touch of connect the dots for individuals and positions they held.

I did think, though brief, the scene where Cassian met the informant was actually decently well done. The little cameo of the two desperate characters in it was nice. And it moved the plot along while telling us a little bit about Cassian in his actions and expressions.