Rogue One Was Weird.

 

 

Warning: there are as many spoilers in this post as I could fit.  I tried to put a few more in, but the internet started to crash so I left it as is.   

One year ago, I was working on a merger involving two health care-related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie.  This year, I am working on a merger involving two health-care related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie. The merger is quite a bit higher-profile than last year’s merger, but the Star Wars movie is quite a bit lower-profile than last year’s. Otherwise, my life is apparently on a merry-go-round.

Rogue One is obviously a big, tentpole, blockbuster extravaganza, etc., but there was minimal anxiety. When The Force Awakens came out, there was a sense of hope but also fear that J.J. Abrams would totally screw it up—which, you know, he likes to do. By contrast, Rogue One was mostly upside.  If it was spectacular, cool. If it stunk, well it doesn’t even have a number! Begone you blacksheep illegitimate weirdo stepchild imposter.

Unsurprisingly, Rogue One was neither spectacular nor smelly. Somewhat surprisingly, the overwhelming sentiment—at least pour moi—was how weird it was.  Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing—who is, you know, dead—had a starring role.  Back in the cockpit were Gold Leader and Jek Porkins and all of the Rebel pilots who we first met at the Battle of Yavin.  Princess Leia, who hasn’t been young in a long time, was suddenly young again. Darth Vader, who hadn’t done much more than shout “Noooooooo!” in the past thirty-three years on screen, was again a presence.  The film interlaced these characters into the story as best as it probably could, but after having memorized every inch of the Original Trilogy over the course of hundreds of viewings, there was no way to hear (and see!) Gold Leader, Red Leader, etc., without being wrenched out of the in-film universe.  

And it was probably not a good sign for the movie that the things I remember most are the things the movie did not create—i.e., Vader, Tarkin, the Rebel pilots, Leia, etc.  The “new” characters were unmemorable (with one exception, see below), and the story dragged out of the gate and then limped through its grand finale at an uncomfortably slow speed.  For the first time in my Star Wars viewing experience (which is… pretty extensive), I was, at times, bored.

To be sure, there were some cool moments.  I liked the Star Destroyer floating over Jedha City.  Le Chiffre played Galen Erso well.  Mon Mothma was great.  And Gareth Edwards should be the only person allowed to introduce monsters, villains, giant space stations, or really anything, in silhouette behind a cloud of smoke. 

But there were too many unforced narrative errors.  For instance, it had a nice opening scene that set up the main protagonist and antagonist with aplomb.  But then it jumped all over the galaxy showing you things that it was about to explain to you anyway.  There were at least three disconnected scenes with characters we don’t know, doing things we don’t understand, before the Rebel Command explains everything to Jynn Erso.  Why did we have those earlier scenes? What was the point?

There was also the continued compression of time and space that makes the universe small and uninteresting.  In A New Hope, there were scenes on the Millennium Falcon where the characters literally played board games because they were traveling and nothing was happening.  In The Force Awakens and Rogue One, every journey is essentially instantaneous.  There is no sense of the vastness of the galaxy. 

The final battle was interminably long, and very little of it made sense.  I won’t go into the nitpicking here, but from a story perspective, there was no clear goal.  We were promised a Star Wars heist movie, but the movie failed to set up its heist.  Any good heist movie establishes the target, explains the security problems, and then unveils its solutions in clever fashion.  This heist was muddled, at best.  There were obstacles here and there, but they came out of nowhere and their solutions generally involved running back and forth across a beach.  Moreover, the goal kept changing.  First they wanted to steal the plans, then they wanted to transmit the plans, then they did transmit the plans but apparently only one ship got them?  Heists provide a ready-made formula; you shouldn’t need to be asking these types of questions.

More importantly, the movie failed to make me care that all of the characters died.  The problem, of course, is that none of the characters had personalities; none of them even had heist movie personalities.  In most heist movies, you have a planner, a grifter, a technical wiz, an explosives expert, an inside man, etc. Rogue One didn't even get that far. Let’s look at our lineup.  

 

Jyn Erso: sort of the leader?  She is generally bitter about life, and she starts to care about the Rebellion, but she has not a drop of humor or interest to her.

Cassian Andor: the Rebel spy. I have no more to say about him because I searched for a personality and now I'm sleeping.

Imperial Pilot Defector: you’d think he could be the Inside Man, but instead, this “cargo pilot” apparently becomes, in a pinch, a communications expert, a moral authority, and a miraculously cured mental patient.  His only character trait, besides being a plot resolution device, is being weirdly wimpy for a defector.

 Chirrut Imwe: his role is to (1) be blind, (2) mumble a nonsensical mantra about the Force that makes you want to clog your ears with the first thing you can find and if it turns out to have been a half chewed sour patch kid fine just make it stop, and (3) contribute to further ruining any internal universe coherence by using martial arts and a stick to incapacitate armored soldiers holding actual weapons (and did I mention he’s blind?). At least he had a good joke, though.

Baze Malbus: his role is to be large and shoot at things.  A heist movie needs a guy like that.  If anyone else had a personality, his role would be more acceptable.

K-2S0: the comic relief, reprogrammed Imperial security droid. He was hilarious. He did his job. When K-2S0 “died,” I was saddened. There was sadness. It was a moment lacking in mirth.  I don’t think it’s a good thing that the character I cared about the most was the droid.

 

And on the villain side, did someone forget to create an actual character for Director Krennic?  His role in any scene was to be as evil and angry and deluded as possible.  Krennic randomly shot ten Imperial engineers because… that’s what Evil People do!  Of course, the Original Trilogy understood that evil is more insidious and more terrifying when it isn’t irrational, but that kind of nuance has no place in the new millennium, I guess.  If anything, all Krennic did was reveal how much more interesting Grand Moff Tarkin is. 

And that was a general problem: the only characters and moments that meant anything were either pulled directly from the Original Trilogy or had meaningful ties to it.  When Red 5 got shot down in the space battle, that was cool only because we knew that Red 5 had to get shot down because otherwise there is no Red 5 available for a far more interesting character to pilot in a far more interesting battle soon thereafter.  When Bail Organa says he is choosing someone he would “trust with his life,” it’s a great moment, but only because we already know about Princess Leia.  Similarly, when Bail returns to Alderaan, it is a poignant moment, because we know that he and millions of others will soon die there. 

All that said, where the characters failed, the imagery did not.  (In hindsight, I suppose it was predictable that the guy who directed Godzilla would be visually talented but unable to craft a character or weave a meaningful story line.)  There were Star Destroyers, there were AT-ATs, there was the Death Star being constructed, there were shots of the Death Star coming over the horizon, there were awesome shots of the Death Star blowing things up, there was that awesome arrival of the Devastator at the end when it wipes out the Rebel fleet, and then there was:

The Darth Vader scene.  I am wildly conflicted about this scene. On the one hand, it was utterly gratuitous and entirely out of character.  Vader doesn’t concern himself with random Rebel troopers.  His Stormtroopers would have taken care of boarding a Rebel ship, which we know because that’s what they'll do in roughly ten minutes at the beginning of A New Hope.  Moreover, it was previously well understood that Vader’s physical prowess had deteriorated in the many years between Revenge of the Sith and the Original Trilogy.  His duel with Obi-Wan on the Death Star is stilted and decidedly non-acrobatic because Vader had no reason to keep up his skills; he thought all the Jedi were dead, he didn’t know he had a son, and he had a literal Imperial Army to do his fighting for him.  The drastic improvement in Vader’s combative arts between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back was a result of him reapplying himself over the course of years, as he realized that Luke was out there.

On the other hand, holy @#$%!. I mean, holy %#$$@$#^%$&%*%*#$@^%^$%&%^#*%*#%!

And that more or less sums up the experience.  It was weird, mostly gratuitous, choppy, often boring, and it did not make much sense, but holy—

~Right Thumb~     

The Noble Futility of Lightsaber Duels

I rarely (never?) spend an entire post responding to a single article, but this article was about Star Wars, more specifically the lightsaber duels, more specifically their comparative quality, more specifically the way they reflect (or fail to reflect) the moral themes of the films. To say that such an article is in my wheelhouse would be useless, because I don’t know what a wheelhouse is or why it would be relevant, but longtime readers (all six of you) will know that the linked article addresses points that comprise 95% of my Two Thumbs Sideways posts.  To top it all off, the article is good (what were the odds!). But I think he misses one key point. This will be fun.

The article is spot-on in its diagnosis of the thematic impact of the Original Trilogy duels. To be sure, it fails to give the ESB and ROTJ duels the credit they deserve as sumptuous visual feasts.  The ESB duel, in particular, is the closest that Star Wars comes to surrealism (the carbon-chamber platform is more of a dreamscape than an actual physical location), which is pitch-perfect because the duel—as is true of all Star Wars duels—is an expression of a battle of wills, not a mere physical exercise. Nevertheless, the point remains: the OT duels are superb because they mirror and catalyze the character arcs and central moral dilemma: how does one respond to evil? The Original Trilogy’s answer was, of course, love, i.e., sacrifice, self-gift. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself not only to save the younger heroes but to show Luke—and, to some extent, Vader—that physical dominance is not the path to salvation.  In ESB, Luke refuses to let his friends sacrifice themselves for the Cause; accordingly, he winds up in a disastrous, damaging conflict that, in a stroke of poetic justice, puts his friends in greater danger by requiring them to reverse throttle and rescue him.  Finally, in ROTJ, Luke is willing to sacrifice himself for his friends and his cause, only to be goaded into a violent frenzy—but then, he controls himself and, as acknowledged by the hyperlinked raison d’être for this blog post, he can finally, accurately, name himself a Jedi. And that sacrificial act saves his father and brings down an empire.

The article is also generally correct on the prequel duels, in terms of their failure as thematic points, but the author misses the mark when he suggests the failure owes to the duels’ incorrect themes as opposed to their poor execution.  The author argues that the prequel duels are discordant because they valorize war-like strength and triumph in a saga that, at its core, is about rejecting a might-makes-right worldview. 

But the prequel duels were meant to play directly into those themes.  The leitmotif of the prequels, poorly executed but perceptible in their better moments, was simply an inversion of the Original Trilogy: if self-sacrifice and a rejection of the eternal Jedi-Sith war leads to salvation (OT), selfishness and an attempt to win that war through force of arms leads to destruction (prequels). The most obvious example here is Anakin’s fall, but the more interesting (and lesser developed) failure of the prequels is that of the Jedi. They see the Sith as a violent threat that requires a truculent response. They even hide their own inadequacies from the Senate, the public (and their own members) rather than show “weakness.”  Accordingly, the prequels should show the futility of the flashy, attractive, hyper-violent, and aggressive duels in which the Jedi engage.   

The prequel duels fail to achieve that purpose, but it is a failure of execution, not intent. The most obvious illustration is the utter failure of the climactic Episode I Duel of the Fates.  This is a horrible, rotten, no-good, dumb, disastrous lightsaber conflict.  It is interminable for no reason; has not one word of dialogue (well, okay, it has one: "Noooooo!"); and pits unfamiliar characters against each other.  (I fail to understand even why people think it is visually arresting—the choreography is clunky, the sets are silly and unmemorable, everything is too bright, the whole thing is absurdly contrived—but I digress.)  At the same time, the idea is present that anger, aggression, a will to win at all costs, etc. are, in fact, advantages in a Jedi-Sith duel.  Obi-Wan triumphs only because he gets pissy.

It is easy to take that point—Obi-Wan “wins”—and draw the conclusion that the duel mistakenly grants honor to a might-makes-right aesthetic. But the failure was one of execution, not concept.  For instance, in ROTJ, Luke also  triumphs over Vader due to a sudden fit of sibling-protective belligerence. Yet few viewers would come away from that duel thinking "gee whiz, good thing Luke got all riled up!" Luke's subsequent introspection and rejection of violence, Vader's suddenly pitiable countenance, the Emperor's goading, etc., make clear that Luke's outburst was a mistake, or at the very least, futile. By contrast, Episode I fails to establish adequately that Obi-Wan’s “triumph” over Darth Maul was a pyrrhic victory; if anything, Obi-Wan's aggression in Episode I is accidentally lauded. The ending of Episode I is “happy”—there’s literally a parade—even though later films would reveal that, in actuality, the Jedi, Amidala, the Senate, etc., played directly into Palpatine’s hands. The denouement of Episode I was a triumph for the Sith, not the Jedi. That the movie fails to make this apparent is a fault but not a fault particularly attributable to the duel.

The lightsaber duels at the conclusion of Episode II suffer similar failures.  Obi-Wan’s attempt to tangle with Dooku is a somewhat stilted affair, but if it is seen as a misguided-yet-noble attempt to eliminate the Sith, it has a kind of tragic aspect to it. Obi-Wan loses because he will never win this battle. He is, in a sense, too virtuous to triumph. Unlike the impetuous, emotional Obi-Wan of Episode I, the mature Obi-Wan has control of his emotions; but he cannot overpower Dooku’s sadism and years of darkly festering self-aggrandizement. Obi-Wan has not—yet—discovered the key to defeating the Sith, and so he fails, plain and simple.

Anakin’s attempt to meet Dooku’s aggression with his own is an interesting parallel to Luke on Cloud City. Both father and son hope to “save” their friends, both rely on emotion and physical prowess in combat, and both lose appendages. Each has given in to a Hobbesian, might-makes-right, amoral landscape, and each, being weak, is irreparably damaged. (Both get a second attempt, and their responses are diametrically opposed, but we’ll get back to those.)

These two Dooku duels would probably look better on reflection if not for the disaster that follows them. There is perhaps no more disturbing non-Jar-Jar sequence in Star Wars than that of a ridiculous, two-foot-tall CGI whirlwind out-maneuvering Dooku.  I have no defense for the practicalities of this duel.  Yoda never should have had to duel. His strength in the Force is such that Dooku should have trembled in his wake and never been able to move.

But if we set aside the logical incoherence, the duel is another example of a Jedi in the prequels failing to achieve anything through physical combat.  Yoda is the superior swordsman, but what does that fact accomplish? Dooku escapes, the Clone Wars commence, etc. The major failing of the duel on screen is that it lionizes this failure in its celebration of the “coolness” of seeing Yoda do something other than limp. And for those who wonder why anyone ever thought this was cool, remember that people burst into applause during the original theatrical run. The audience, too, was suckered into the notion that the satisfying and efficacious response to evil is superior physical power.

Returning to Anakin’s parallels with Luke, in Episode III Anakin obtains a rematch with the man who owes him a limb—much as his son would decades later.  Anakin, like his son, is now stronger and more experienced.  Anakin, like his son, deprives his antagonist of a limb(s) in a duel before Palpatine. Of course, the major difference is that Anakin goes where his son refused to go and murders Dooku. This is not exactly subtle stuff, but it is thematically correct. But this duel fails, too, because the trappings are so light as to blow away. The set is obnoxiously fake, the duel arises so early in the film that no stakes of any kind have set in, the score is so unmemorable I barely even remember if there was a score--and, most hideously, Dooku, formerly a scion of elegant, oily, evil nobility, is ruined forever by his entirely unnecessary introduction through a CGI somersault that I wish I could unsee.

The prequel duel that comes the closest to achieving its intended themes is the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan contest on Mustafar. There remains the deeply tragic aspect in that Obi-Wan, paragon of virtue though he is, can never win this duel. He “wins,” but in doing so accomplishes little more than unleashing Darth Vader on the galaxy. Moreover, this duel does a serviceable job of establishing the absurdity of what Obi-Wan is doing. The duel is chock-full of the same acrobatic, whirling, choreographed, samurai-esque skills as the other prequel duels, but on this occasion they are revealed, rightfully, to be pointless. The duel choreographers tried to make it look like the two combatants were essentially mirroring each other—they knew every move, jink, and juke the other had, and no one would ever get anywhere. Reasonable minds can differ, but the heavily-stylized Anakin/Obi-Wan dance number plays that tune for me.

When Obi-Wan and Vader duel on the Death Star almost two decades later, they are still locked in the same never-ending combat that they began on Mustafar and that no one will ever win.  But at this point Obi-Wan finally breaks the standoff by giving his own life, saving the young heroes and proving that he did learn the lessons of the last war. To physically challenge the Sith is, in some sense, to lose. The Sith made conflict their weapon and conquered the galaxy. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and through them, Luke, were only victorious via a rejection of power-plays; it was in giving up material power that they restored the potential for peace.

No doubt, some of the prequel duels are simply indefensible on any level (let’s pretend the Obi-Wan/Grievous thing just never happened), and none of them perfectly strike the nails they were meant to strike. But the seeds are there. As with everything prequel-oriented, it could have worked, which makes it all the more frustrating that it did not.

~Right Thumb~

The Blog Awakens

(Warning: There Be Spoilers Ahead. And Possibly Ravenous Piranhas.)

It’s been a year or three since anyone updated this blog, but the re-release of Star Wars: A New Hope in theaters seems like as good a time as any to get back in the game. They even brushed A New Hope up a bit with a new name and new actors, and I daresay the TIE-Fighters look slightly different. (Okay, cheap joke, but what can I say? Left Thumb is off doing Important Medical Things, and he’s the one who brings the funny to this blog. Except the jokes about closed captioning. Those are all mine, baby.)

My style is more “amateur theological sanctimony applied to pop culture,” but I won’t bother you with any of that nonsense here. For one thing, given how late I am getting around to writing anything down, others have already written interesting things about how Kylo Ren is a (distressing) villain for the modern era, how The Force Awakens is a sign of the decline of civilization, etc. For another, The Force Awakens is more of a beginning than a full story, and it is hard to draw too many moral narratives out of it. (Similarly, twas not A New Hope but The Empire Strikes Back that provided the artistic and moral center of the Original Trilogy.)

All that is left, then, are my thoughts on the movie. Normally I wouldn’t assume those were worth writing about, but so many people have asked me, it is easier to write them down once and link people here.

As a subjective matter, my movie-going experience was incredible. When I sat down in the theater, I could not stop smiling. The possibilities were endless. Even though I fully expected the movie to disappoint me, it hadn’t yet, and it was the first truly new Star Wars movie in my lifetime. The prequels were exciting, but they were a story that we (more or less) already knew. Moreover, I knew I would never have this feeling again: the first truly new Star Wars movie I will ever see. Even if Rian Johnson makes Episode VIII into a masterpiece worthy of a Klingon Opera, it will still not be the first. I'll never again have the feeling of watching those beautiful trailers with X-Wings and TIE-Fighters for the first time. So, disappointment or not, the trailers and opening scrawl made everything worth it entirely on their own.

And then something weird happened. The movie was not disappointing me. The opening scrawl was perfect. “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Bang. The early scenes focused on what Star Wars has always been about: backwoods, middle-of-nowhere, almost forgotten areas of the galaxy. Star Wars isn’t about sprawling metropolises, even though we know that the galaxy has those. It’s a story about heroes from unlikely beginnings and unlikely places, where the rich and powerful never bothered to look.

Tatooine—err, I mean, Jakku—was a perfect nod back to the original movies. Bombed out Star Destroyer hulks and AT-AT carcasses, without explanation or context, gave a sense of the transformation of the original stories into myths for a new generation. Rey’s daily routine grounded us in the notion that her life was real and probably tedious and not conjured up out of thin air to provide the basis for a cool story. Though there were lots of characters to (re)-introduce, each one was given attention and detail, so the passage of time had actual weight to it. Against all odds, J.J. Abrams—he of the endless smash cuts, frenetic pacing, lens flares, and heavy-handed effects—actually had the feel of Star Wars down.

About halfway through the movie, everything was rolling. The old characters’ place in the universe made sense, and Han Solo’s wisecracks never go out of style. It wasn't quite clear where the story was headed, but that was a good thing. Abrams had said something about how he wanted to return the movies to emotional stories about characters, instead of intellectual explanations of massive social forces, like what (mostly) happened in the prequels. He was succeeding. Halfway through, I was starting to believe that I would exit the theater with all my dreams having come true. (And yes, Star Wars is way, way too important to me.)

Then the First Order blew up the “Republic” with a “Starkiller” and the movie was no longer perfect. Abrams’ inability to tell a story with a sense of time crept back in, as a million things happened at once, in numerous different star systems. Plus, the story stopped making any sense: why is there a Republic and a Resistance? Wait, is the Republic gone now? How do you blow up a Republic that stretches across the entire galaxy…? How did the First Order build an entire solar system-destroying weapon without anyone, umm, noticing? And how come the “Resistance” only started thinking about destroying this weapon now? Mightn’t they have tried a few days earlier and stopped the massacre of all those people on all those planets that were apparently important somehow though it is not clear how? Why does the entire military force opposed to the First Order apparently consist of ten X-Wings?

 

One of the great things about the Original Trilogy is that it left a lot of things unexplained, which gave a sense of breadth and depth to the universe. But there is a huge difference between declining to explain certain details and telling a story that is simply nonsensical. In its first half, The Force Awakens did the former, and it was awesome; in the second half, The Force Awakens dove toward the latter, and it was not awesome.  

Abrams’ need to rush everything particularly weakened what should have been the central moment of the movie. The Han death scene, though decent, should have been … better. It should have been less pre-ordained, less obvious, less catwalk-y. And it definitely should have been dwelt upon for longer than it takes to sum up Donald Trump’s policy positions. When the heroes return to Leia after the battle, there should have been at least a ten minute funeral. Instead, Leia kind of shrugs.

This is Han Solo. He has literally saved the galaxy on multiple occasions. His death deserved more.

And finally, the last scene, I just don’t understand. The story was complete. Imperfect and derivative of A New Hope though it was, the story was enjoyable, it was satisfying, and the next movie still had the biggest poker chip to play: the revelation of Luke Skywalker. The Force Awakens should have ended with Rey and Chewbacca going off to hunt for Luke, not find him. Why would you waste that moment?

Of course, it could be that it all works out. If Rian Johnson does turn Episode VIII into a worthy descendant of The Empire Strikes Back, most of the errors in The Force Awakens will be (basically) forgiven. As I’ve written before--and in fact, linked to before, in this very post--it was Empire, not, the original Star Wars, that made Darth Vader into Darth Vader and bestowed on the Original Trilogy every last bit of gravitas that it has. If Empire had stunk, I highly doubt anyone would remember A New Hope as anything more interesting than Jaws or E.T.—a momentary cultural phenomenon, but nothing that a 26-year-old who wasn’t even born at the time of its release would spend thousands of hours obsessing over.

(…way, way too much.)

So here’s to Rian Johnson. He hasn’t made a bad movie yet and he’s made at least one great one. If he parks Episode VIII, I’ll remember Episode VII as an imperfect but engrossing story that started us afresh and gave us another mid-trilogy masterpiece. Otherwise, The Force Awakens was a fleeting but unique moment of anticipation, anxiety, thrills, irrepressible smiling, and not-quite-but-almostism. Either way, I walked into the theater a jittery mess, and walked out a jittery mess, and it was awesome.

~Right Thumb~