I love Star Wars and I’ve never seen a bad one in theaters. I never had the experience of watching The Phantom Menace being bad or even worse Attack of the Clones in theaters. That’s an experience that I didn’t think was possible. Star Wars inspires me, The Empire Strikes Back takes me off my feet, and Return of the Jedi marvels me. What does Rogue One do? It bores me. For once on the big screen, Star Wars felt like a letdown. Not a betrayal. There’s not that much at stake here, especially with how decidedly shrug off able this entire production is, just a letdown. Star Wars is fine as gritty, but it doesn’t have to be boring. The problem here is in an almost depressingly uneventful tone. Original trilogy Star Wars might have had very little going on in it, but it was smart enough to find the balance needed to make everything feel involving and epic enough. Rouge One can’t manage to find that balance and instead feels too inconsequential to be effective. The first problem comes in the “character.” Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is not a classic character. In fact, she only gets a few lines in her own movie. The same goes for the other characters. Diego Luna as Cassian Andor just kind of stands around and is a rebel, Alan Tudyk as the robot K-2SO, is the “comic relief” doing a less entertaining and more blunt version of the TARS schtick from Interstellar, Donnie Yen sure beats the heck out of people and says, “I am one with the Force,” a lot. These aren’t characters these are character sketches, and saying Star Wars lacks a character driven storyline is like saying Indiana Jones doesn’t fight a foreign power. The lack of it kind of allows the magic of the film to fall apart. No, that is not me saying that all the Star Wars films must be the same, or that a genuinely different tone isn’t a good thing for long established franchises. I’m saying that if you’re going to change up the tone and the structure that has worked so far, you have better actually make a sound movie, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is not a sound piece of work. In fact, most of the movie is pretty perfunctory as the film finds itself covering just some Star Wars mythology and continuity for the first hour and a half. Nice for the fans, but doesn’t actually make for well-paced plotting. Rogue One is all over the place, at least for the first hour and a half, going from father daughter stuff, to dark empire killings, to espionage, all of which should work, but are just so boring. Forest Whitaker shows up as this familial friend of Jyn Erso's and is completely scattershot in character ruining the relationship. Many of the epic relationships that better writing could have salvaged feel weirdly stale. It is understood that since this is effectively a spy movie, everyone’s playing on the defensive, but if there’s no connection between the team, we can’t understand the individuals inside, and because the film is so darkly lit and hard to see (that said this might have been my projector. Seriously, I had some eye strain going on) there’s even trouble differentiating them from one another. This is super disheartening because if anything Star Wars was the colorful, but dirty universe not the grimy, I can’t see anything one. Speaking of things you can’t see, Gareth Edwards (not to be confused with The Raid’s Gareth Evans, a true master of the handheld cam) overuses his handheld camera to the point that the action at points doesn’t affect. I mean sure, you can see that Stormtroopers are shot and that ships are flying (If there’s one great thing here the final space battle is nuts), but there are very few just vista shots in the close quarters combat that the film is mostly built on. Another great thing that Star Wars has going for it is that wides of the characters fighting with sabers is just part of the scenery. Wides of blaster fire over precarious falls were as well, but in the effort to become “gritty” Rogue One abandons much of this for intimate combat that doesn’t feel that intimate. There’s also the matter of just how emotion drives action, and how Rogue One can’t really carry that as well as the other films. The action here is much less about the dueling ideologies between epic family members and more coincidence. Not that Star Wars isn’t coincidental, but there’s not really any other emotion than “Run” informing the depth of these characters and this combined with the shoddy action and whiplash pacing spoils Rogue One. This is all in service of saying though that Rogue One isn’t really bad, it’s just boring. There’s an active evolving badness about projects like Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Rogue One thankfully doesn’t go into that. The actors, though not afforded characters are great (but hey Felicity Jones and Ben Mendelsohn are great in everything), the film has good effects, and overall the whole thing actually pays off, even if it doesn’t deserve to. As Rogue One closes it becomes viscerally exciting and violent as the Star Wars we know and love enters the film. Too bad that too much of the earlier minutes just leave to little to care about. Rouge One: A Star Wars Story gets a 6.5 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |