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~