FINALLY watched it.
I didn't feel invested in it for a long time, though. However, once the attack on Sharrif happened I felt like I was looking at a
Return of the Jedi reboot - and a damned good one, too.
So, mostly enjoyed it, with the caveat that there were far more minor criticisms than there should have been IMO:
- Forrest Whittaker's character is a rebel leader, who has been fighting much of his life, and then found the Empire on his doorstep. But ... when faced with the destruction of his rebel base, he just gave up.
- Evil castle on lava planet just looked cheesy. That was a poor and caricatured way to introduce Darth Vader.
- Vader also sounded wrong - not just his voice, but his dialogue. And, at the end, he acts in far too much of a cartoonish way. Remember, this is the man/machine who will enter Captain Antilles' ship only after squads of Stormtroopers have gone in - yet here he's running amok like a CGI Yoda. Continuity point lost. Also, not sure why his eyes always seemed to show as red - as if we couldn't guess he was the villain.
- CGI Tarkin - just looked odd. Wouldn't it have been better to try and reuse original shots rather than CGI? Doesn't anyone remember how well that old film called
Forrest Gump pulled this off in that way?
- Too many attempts to shoe-horn in references to Star Wars. For example, bumping into Walrus on Jedda, the singer from Jabba's palace, and male lead having a copy of Han Solo's gun (and was Jyn's a copy of Leia's?).
- Why was there no big fanfare and text opening like in every single other Star Wars film? I really missed that. Giacchino made a good effort at trying to imitate John Williams, but as with the missing introductory overture, it seemed he tried to achieve this more by cutting things out than preserving the cues, which he used minimally.
- Krennic was just a petulant bad guy. More restrained and intelligent would surely have been more impressive?
- Cassian Andor refused to kill Ryyn's father, but it was never really clear why he didn't do it. There didn't seem to be any big emotional change that caused him to refuse to follow orders. Additionally, if he couldn't do that, why not simply shoot the Director of the Death Star in the hope of causing some delay rather than not doing anything?
- And, after ordering Andor to assassinate Jyn's father, why did they the Rebellion just send out a squad of X-Wings to do it anyway?
- Blind guy downs a TIE fighting with a lucky shot. Just, no.
- There's a sense of restraint and understatement in the original Star Wars we didn't really get here. Rather than sweeping landscapes and considered letterbox direction - Luke standing under the 2 suns on Tatooine - there seemed too much focus on just showing as much frenetic activity on the screen as possible. More standing back to appreciate the world would have been nice.
- ALSO. Lucas was very good at putting in little details, but these sequel-sequels barely attempt that. I saw one moment in Rogue One - on a street in Jedha, someone was cooking something with tentacles and those moved. Aside from that, they're missing - replacement by in-film references, when we should be getting world-building details.
- Jyn's story didn't feel very well developed or considered. Her dad abandoned her to work for the Empire to build a super-weapon and never contacted her again - for which she bore him absolutely no resentment at all. She also variable called him Father or Poppa. Be consistent, writers. Also, there was a single flashback scene, which basically rehashed what we'd already seen. It seemed like the writers forgot to add more flashbacks, else than the intro wasn't supposed to be shown and the flashback was supposed to do that, but they left both in - resulting in repetition.
- Jyn killed one of Forrest Whittaker's crew, for which they imprisoned her. But then it kind of got forgotten about. The character behind the accusation was distinctive and I felt a little cheated that he just kind of disappeared about coming down hard on both Jyn and the pilot.
- We kind of have the irony that it was a diverse cast, yet there's a long-standing criticism that diverse characters are always killed off.
- In the full trailer Jyn - at the end, while on the tower - is confronted with a TIE fighter. That wasn't in the film.
- Another continuity concern is that in Star Wars, when Yavin was about to be attacked by the Death Star, why didn't the fleet jump in and help? I know they're bashed up, but still, the leadership was about to get decapitated.
- Another weakness no one seems to have mentioned: by giving the planet an all-encompassing shield, with a single weak point, it was basically a Death Star by proxy, wasn't it?
Minor niggles, but too many of them to be ignored, especially with Vader and Tarkin, who were both presented wrong for different reasons. And there remained a sense that the film was rushed and didn't have enough thought put into difference sections. The third act was impressive, though. AT-ATs and a grand space battle. And nice to see those references to Red Leader and Gold Leader - and was that Biggs, too?
I know people earlier on this thread said they preferred
Rogue One to
Force Awakens, but I enjoyed
Force Awakens more for the emotional undertone in that film that was otherwise missing in
Rogue One.
IMO both still decent films that I expect to watch over and over again, regardless of flaws.
2c.
