SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
One year ago I decided that Star Wars was dead to me. After seeing the highly anticipated The Force Awakens, I was convinced that there would never be another good Star Wars film ever again. I formally declared that no longer would the anticipation of a new Star Wars movie get me excited anymore. I’ve been fooled for the last time. It was time to move on. Give up. Be an adult. Star Wars has been sold out to Disney, who has no interest in actually making a decent movie. All they care about is cashing in on a franchise that can potentially carry their over-bloated company along after they run out of Marvel characters to exploit. They’ll just keep hiring more corporate stooges like J.J. Abrams to just remake and reboot the original trilogy over and over for new generations of suckers.
But who cares anymore? Nothing will ever change, so why even worry about it? Nobody gets excited for movies anymore anyway. Movies these days are basically marketing scams that use nostalgia and phony hype to try and trick you into a theater for a mediocre non-refundable waste of two-hours. The best thing we can hope for is a short distraction from our trivial and stressful lives, and if we’re lucky we may actually be slightly entertained enough to actually remember how it may have used to feel to actually love a movie.
Personally, I’ve started to wonder if love itself even exists. Isn’t it arguable that love is just some endorphins running through your brain that can be easily replaced by drugs, alcohol, or cutting your arms with a razor blade? Not that I even remember what love feels like. Would I even recognize love if it ever happened to me again? No. Not possible. Not anymore…
The following is why I absolutely loved Rogue One.
Rogue One is so good that I still cannot believe it! Of all the modern Star Wars movies on Disney’s seemingly never ending roster, how could this be the one that can be this incredible? It’s another prequel! ANOTHER PREQUEL! It’s about a situation that was explained already in the FIRST MOVIE! We already knew that the rebels are going to get the Death Star plans! We already knew that nothing really will happen to the characters that we know, and all the new characters were surely going to die. This movie has absolutely no business being this exciting, or this interesting; and certainly it has no business in being this IMPORTANT to the Star Wars saga! But it’s more important that I could’ve even imagined possible...
First of all, one of the biggest plot-holes in cinema history has been answered, in an intelligent and completely non-cop-out-ty way! We now know why the weakness was in the Death Star! We now know why nobody in the Empire, including Darth Vader knew it was there, and why it was so accessible from an exterior exhaust port! It was a trap planted by the Death Star’s conflicted lead scientist while he was designing it! Being a life-long Star Wars fanboy, this revelation knocked the wind out of me. This plot-hole has been an ongoing joke for decades. This is Star Wars’ own “the-eagles-should-just-fly-Frodo-to-mordor” dilemma, and now it’s brilliantly solved! But this isn’t all that Rogue One solves for us geeks…
Rogue One also revealed that the Death Star gets it’s fire power from Kyber crystals. As I mentioned in my previous Star Wars movie review, I had read a great many of books and comics in the expanded universe; and if this detail was EVER revealed in the past, I had never seen it. The Death Star’s power had been something that I just accepted as some kind of unexplained laser beam. But now we know that its powered by the same force-filled crystals that power the light sabers. Of course they are! Why wouldn’t they be? It’s so smart, and so perfect!
We also learned about how secretive the construction of the Death Star was. With people dying trying to leak out information. We saw how even internally at the Empire, its construction was controversial and mostly a secret. (Which makes The Force Awaken’s “Starkiller Base” seem even the more stupider).
We learned about how regular people who are not strong with the force live and can still feel it, like the blind swordsman Chirrup Imre and the Ancient Order of the Whills. Any true Star Wars fan knows that George Lucas’ original outline was titled Part 1 of the Journal of the Whills. With there never being any canonical explanation of what the Whills are (usually rumored to be Yoda’s species), the sheer mention of the term proves how this movie was written by true fans.
We also learned about the relationship between Tarkin and Darth Vader, which always used to confuse me. I never really understood Tarkin’s role in the Empire before. Was he Vader’s superior? How did he not know about the Death Star’s weakness? We now know that Tarkin was a malicious military leader that schemed his way hastily to command the Death Star. Eager to use it despite what Vader’s opinions might be. It makes their competitive relationship in Episode IV seem more warranted.
In fact almost everything in Episode IV seems more warranted now. After seeing the difficulty of stealing the Death Star plans, we now know how crazy and hopeless it seemed to have them floating around inside R2D2 through the entire movie; and how unbelievable it is that they ended up getting brought right back to the Death Star. The rebellion are mostly just portrayed as the “good guys” in the original trilogy. But now we can see how bureaucratic, inefficient, and desperate they were before Luke blew up the Death Star. There’s a masterfully done scene where Mon Mothma and the other rebel leaders discuss what to do with the information that there “might” be a weakness in the Death Star. It just felt so realistic and conflictive. Showing a typical scenario of what happens when decisions are made by committee. When the collective can get nothing done, it becomes up to the individuals. The rogues…
All the new characters in Rogue One felt real and motivated. Somehow after The Force Awakens just finished force-feeding us politically correct female and ethnic characters, Rogue One manages to do it so naturally that it seems awkward to even point it out. Jyn Erso is not only an awesome role model for girls, she an amazing role model for boys, adults, the young, and the old! Not for trivial reasons like being a good fighter, or a funny personality. Jyn Erso is a role model to everyone because she has PURPOSE. She knows what’s the right thing to do, and she’ll die for it. This is the first Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi where the characters have real motivation and purpose. The Empire is such a real unstoppable evil at this time. Not like whatever was going on in The Force Awakens. These characters are desperately watching their family and friends die all around them, and will do anything to stop it, not for fame or glory; but because it’s the right thing to do! It’s the most nobel group of characters I think I have ever seen. Even the droid K-2SO is nobel, being a former slave to the Empire, he also knows that he is now fighting on the good side. He does more than just follow orders, he goes the extra mile to keep from becoming what he ones was. Unlike that zero-personality idiot BB-8.
It is hard to believe that The Force Awakens came out only a year ago. Rogue One triumphs over it so embarrassingly that it seems like that it’s already over ten years old. Everything that I even thought was good about The Force Awakens gets outdone by Rogue One.
I thought that the practical effects were the best part of Force Awakens, but they’re not half as good looking as Rogue One.
I thought the music was great in Force Awakens, but it pales in the spirit and tension that the Rouge One soundtrack has.
For every hokey joke and bad effect there is in The Force Awakens, there’s depth and realness in Rogue One. (Can you imagine a wise-cracking character like Finn in Rogue One? It would be painfully out of place!)
I thought that the references in Force Awakens were fun, but they were pathetic compared to seeing it done so tastefully in Rouge One.
This movie wasn’t just about the “member berries” (South Park’s brilliant new symbol for nostalgia’s feel-good effects). Seeing glimpses of the cantina bar patrons, blue milk, and rouge pilots were not obnoxiously in-your-face; and references to Bail Organa, moisture vaporator farming, and Darth Vader were actually integral to the story.
Speaking of Vader, who would have ever guessed that this would be the movie to finally show Vader at his most ruthless, most scariest, and most badass?! There were widely publicized reshoots to supposedly make the end of the movie more exciting. Whatever they did worked, because the climax of the movie is definitely the most thrilling and exciting ending of any Star Wars movie yet… and you ALREADY KNOW WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN! I eat every word I’ve ever said about prequels. I’ve been the loudmouth claiming that there’s never been a good one in the history of anything! But now I know that if it’s done right, and if it’s a story that needs to be told, then prequels can not only be great, but make the original movies even better.
The only real complaint I have about the movie is CGI Tarkin. It looked like a video game character, and it did take me out of the movie every time it was on screen. I think there are better ways the movie could have inserted Tarkin like only showing him over holograms, in dark lighting, or just briefly like they did with Leia. It was a poor and disrespectful decision, but I would assume the filmmakers chose to do this rather than re-cast the role in an effort to pair this movie relatively seamlessly to Episode IV, so I consider it forgivable.
In fact I’ll forgive any mistakes that director Gareth Edwards or any of the talented filmmakers behind Rogue One may have made, because of what they managed to accomplish. Not only did they make a brilliant Star Wars movie, but they made a brilliant movie, period. More importantly than just giving me back my affection for Star Wars; they gave me something back that I thought I lost when it came to loving movies…
...hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment