Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by SuperDeadite »

Just saw it today. Overall I enjoyed it, but yeah the first half of the movie was rather poor. The second half quite made up for it. I certainly agree with the many that this movie relies way too much on the other movies. If 4-6 weren't already burned into my head, this movie would have been completely pointless. My wife has seen 4-7 before, but only once or twice, so she really had no previous emotions to attach to this one. As a stand alone movie, it completely fails, but if you have watched the movies over and over, played the (good) games, it's a nice addition.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Sadly, because SW is cocaine to us, we will keep watching these movies no matter how bad they are.

In 10 years time we could have doubled the amount of SW movies there are now.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Sinful »

Channel Awesome with Nostalgia Critic did a pretty fun show on Rouge One. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyzs1MPMXB4
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by neorichieb1971 »

Rouge is French for red. :lol:

Recently I've watched a few Disney movies.

Ranked in order of greatness

1) Petes Dragon
2) Jungle Book
3) Zootopia
4) BFG
5) Star Wars
6) Finding Dory
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Durandal »

Opus131 wrote:
Pixel_Outlaw wrote:So is the film supposed to be some semi-subtle contemporary social commentary for people who consider themselves intellectuals?
I've not seen it yet, no spoilers please.
No need for spoilers. Empire = white supremacists. All the good guys are teh diversity. That's about it.
This doesn't make too much sense considering there were several blacks in the employ of the Empire in TFA. Did they see the error of their ways halfway through the OT? Is not even the Empire safe from diversity?
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by atheistgod1999 »

When I saw TFA, I already knew that
Spoiler
Rae wouldn't be hurt whatsoever and be an instant-expert at The Force, due to her being a woman
. I think I mentioned that before.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Mischief Maker »

Durandal wrote:
Opus131 wrote:
Pixel_Outlaw wrote:So is the film supposed to be some semi-subtle contemporary social commentary for people who consider themselves intellectuals?
I've not seen it yet, no spoilers please.
No need for spoilers. Empire = white supremacists. All the good guys are teh diversity. That's about it.
This doesn't make too much sense considering there were several blacks in the employ of the Empire in TFA. Did they see the error of their ways halfway through the OT? Is not even the Empire safe from diversity?
More like some idiots in a board room at Disney wanting to check some demographics boxes and missing the point entirely. What's even weirder is the fuss they made about the female stormtrooper being all empowering and shit. Now little girls can dream of growing up to be genocidal space nazis, too? Huh?

It's kind of like how the gang in Death Wish 3 may have been nonstop rape and murder machines, but at least they were a beautifully inclusive rainbow of diversity.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by EmperorIng »

Though in that case I think that was a more cynical ploy by Michael Winner to prevent people from reading his revenge-fantasy action movies as "white guy mows down brown people - the series."

Not that it matters, because Death Wish 3 is great!

Disney's boardrooms are just obsessed with getting the product to appeal to as many people as possible while providing "positive role models for children" or whatever garbage Californian-speak they babble over there.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by emphatic »

Mischief Maker wrote:It's kind of like how the gang in Death Wish 3 may have been nonstop rape and murder machines, but at least they were a beautifully inclusive rainbow of diversity.
I heard a Swedish journalist speaking on national radio about how criminal gangs in Sweden has better integration of different cultural upbringings than anywhere else in this country. Sweden is in some parts turning into 1970's The Bronx. :(
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Mortificator »

Durandal wrote:
Opus131 wrote:No need for spoilers. Empire = white supremacists. All the good guys are teh diversity. That's about it.
This doesn't make too much sense considering there were several blacks in the employ of the Empire in TFA. Did they see the error of their ways halfway through the OT? Is not even the Empire safe from diversity?
It's not really the Empire in Episode 7, but a successor organization. Time, necessity, and change in leadership can lead to relaxing a hardline stance. The Confederate States eventually authorized black soldiers, and it would be asinine to say they weren't white supremacists.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Skykid »

supergrafx77 wrote:Just saw it.
It was beautiful in every way.
Couldn't have been done better.
As great as the originals. 5 out of 5.
Quoted for load of bollocks factor.

Ready folks? SPOILERS FULL STEAM AHEAD


ROGUE ONE

Late to the party, but IMAXED this one today and not particularly impressed. Some things are better than TFA, some things worse. Allow me to get into detail.

Here's the good:

It's more original than TFA by virtue of not being a rehash of New Hope. It's fair to say, despite its plot being an existing backstory, that this is the most original attempt at a new SW entry to date. There are some nice visual arrangements in the movie. Star Destroyers hovering over things, busy marketplaces, and space battles with a decent sense of scale and weight. The dead people, Fisher included, being CGeed back in was a little forced, and there were probably one too many afterlife cameos occurring throughout the duration - but it didn't hurt the effect of tying the movie into the beginning of ANH.

Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen were actually a likeable duo and probably the most interesting characters - limited in screen time though they were - in the entire movie.

Mads Mikkleson wasn't total shit like he was in Dr Strange.

It's a much better film than Godzilla 2016, but then that's not difficult. If you make a film as bad as that twice in your career you may as well kill yourself.

Here's the bad:

Right. Well let's start with the opening title shall we? That was shit. No idea why they did the whole holding off on the traditional SW drop just to make it so perfunctory after a fairly poor initial sequence.

Music was used badly. Some irksome shades of the prequels in the scoring, and it was overscored with too much music, which got irritating during talking sequences where it was implying drama when there was none present.

The dialogue was flat as a pancake, had zero elements of fun, and that kind of summarises the movie as a whole. Additionally, Gareth Edwards is NOT party to the Spielberg playbook, and shoots the movie in a very basic modern style with lots of close ups and handheld cameras. It doesn't hurt the movie too much, but by removing all the classic screenwipes and some of the artistic elements that Abrams managed to recall in terms of cinematography, it removed a layer of fantasy the the SW universe requires. It helped in certain areas: some of the shootouts were fairly decent - but on the whole I would have preferred more thought to have been placed into the cinematography and cinematographic styling.

Forest Whitaker was totally wasted. His character was a non-entity. He did nothing of any note, and was a crap character with no gravity whatsoever. Didn't need to be in the movie at all.

Jiang Wen was the best actor in the movie because... He's the best actor in the movie - but he barely had a word to say. Partnered with Yen was a better shoehorning in of the Chinese element than expected, but both characters were used as background filler and had no personalities of any note. Which brings me on to my climatic finale:

This movie has ZERO CHARISMA. Felicity Jones was about 2.1% better as an actor than Daisy Ridley - who's really fucking shit - but she was about 50% more of a wooden plank than Ridley. Great. So we have a female lead who can't act and is as boring as shit for the duration. A single unhappy expression of a woman with bad hair. That's sure what I dig about Star Wars! Coupled with that was her counterpart and the male lead, Diego Luna, who was equally shit an actor and equally boring, who says and does nothing of any personality for the entire movie.

What in the fuck are these people thinking? Gareth Edwards bears full responsibility for making a Star Wars movie with a cast of characters with zero charisma. It's his movie, no getting out of it. He's the one who approves his cast and then directs them. HIS - FUCKING - FAULT. Nobody else's.

For all of the faults in TFA, at least Abrams understood the need for characters with some semblance of personality. Edwards does not. Edwards believes he can cast a bunch of shithouse amateurs from the dirty streets and get them to say lines and build a movie around them. A bit like Lucas in the prequels.

It doesn't work that way.

There's no argument about "it's meant to be dark" or any of that drivel. ESB shows you how to make a darker movie with even more personality than its upbeat predecessor. The fact is, Rogue One's cast is about as exciting as a watching a frame of CSI paused for two hours. They're completely rubbish. I didn't give a shit about any of them. There was no human element, no believable relationships: it was all cardboard propped up with CG action sequences. As such it has more in common with the Prequels than TFA.

The best part is they all fucking die. Colour me relieved! I've never been so happy to see those two PO faced leads get apocalypted on a beach.

And this is overlooking all the stupidity in the script, because it's a space fantasy adventure movie so I don't care about the stupidity. I can accept the stupidity as long as it has fun characters that I enjoy watching. I can accept that Forest Whitaker died for no reason and we didn't care. I can accept that for no reason the ripple from the an explosion that destroyed a city is happening in slow motion - or at the same speed it's seen from outer space - which is completely retarded. I can accept Carrie Fisher's CG doppleganger is a really awful final shot. I can accept even the idiotic writing, with holograms leaving URGENT MESSAGES prattling on about their assumed dead daughter for the first five minutes before getting to the fucking point.

But I can't accept bad actors with no personality, no charisma, no dialogue, and no brains, attempting to carry a Star Wars film. I feel as though there are elements here that are starting to step in the right direction, but its just not good enough. It was boring. Yeah, boring! Fuck, I admit it, I'm saying it out loud. I was shifting in my seat and sighing. I was waiting for the part where I was gripped for a minute or two. I was searching the screen for something to grab and hold my attention. But in the end I got a few thrills from seeing Tie Fighters flying about, fleeting flashpoints of nostalgia seeing old characters brought back from the dead - but those moments weren't enough. I need more. I need a film with my bitesized nostalgic shoehorned blips, but didn't get one.

Ultimately I don't know why they gave this to Gareth Edwards. My faith in him has not been reestablished. Monsters was a fluke. Stop giving him movies. Let him go work in a kebab shop. He's shit.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Strider77 »

Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen were actually a likeable duo and probably the most interesting characters - limited in screen time though they were - in the entire movie.
I thought Donnie Yen was the corniest element of the movie.... generic forced blind kung fu monk, bo staff and all.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Skykid »

Strider77 wrote:
Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen were actually a likeable duo and probably the most interesting characters - limited in screen time though they were - in the entire movie.
I thought Donnie Yen was the corniest element of the movie.... generic forced blind kung fu monk, bo staff and all.
Yeah but compared to the rest of the human shaped alabaster he was a work of fucking art!
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by EmperorIng »

Bland or no, they were at least the most interesting characters, imo.

But the entire time I was waiting for the movie to tell me who all these people were, and why I should care about them. But it never came. I don't even know the names of anyone in the movie. I don't remember the two Asians saying "hi I'm x", or thick-accent-man saying "I (who by the way am x and have done z my whole life) am very conflicted about this mission."

Agreeing that Whittaker's character, semi-neat design and all, was a baffling waste of space and talent. Apparently he was merely a tie-in to the Disney cartoon Star Wars Rebels. Which gives you an adequate sense of how Disney feels about these movies.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Durandal »

EmperorIng wrote:they were at least the most interesting characters, imo.
The movie should have just been around the friendship of those two over the course of many years of space adventures until their demise and encroaching Empire power.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Skykid »

Durandal wrote:
EmperorIng wrote:they were at least the most interesting characters, imo.
The movie should have just been around the friendship of those two over the course of many years of space adventures until their demise and encroaching Empire power.
A movie about characters would have been far superior to a movie with none, which is what we got.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Zen »

Finally watched it but I don't have the heart to review it so soon after the witnessing its depths. Posting in the Rogue One thread as I don't want to shit up the movie thread with rantyness :lol:

re. skykids review;
On the whole I agree with your assessment. There are a few questions that you pose and points that you make that, when taken together perhaps shed light on each other. To wit;
Skykid wrote: Gareth Edwards bears full responsibility for making a Star Wars movie with a cast of characters with zero charisma. It's his movie, no getting out of it. He's the one who approves his cast and then directs them. HIS - FUCKING - FAULT. Nobody else's.
Skykid wrote:Ultimately I don't know why they gave this to Gareth Edwards. My faith in him has not been reestablished. Monsters was a fluke. Stop giving him movies. Let him go work in a kebab shop. He's shit.
Gareth Edwards, in the context of Disney's scale of operations, is a nobody. He was hired to fulfill the "role" of director. Casting and directing on a Disney film of this scale, especially one laden with Disney's vision of Star Wars . . well, I think Mr. Edwards had final say on absolutely nothing.
Skykid wrote:Music was used badly. Some irksome shades of the prequels in the scoring, and it was overscored with too much music, which got irritating during talking sequences where it was implying drama when there was none present.
Two points to make. Firstly, your bang on here. The scoring was dire and made worse by the clumsily inserted Williams pieces. The man responsible is Michael Giacchino, who you may recall, Shat aural canker all over Star Trek (2009).
J.J Abrams left things up in the air with regards who would score Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). In the end Williams was confirmed and Abrams buddy Giacchino got a "cameo" as a storm trooper.
Fast forward to Rogue One (2016) Alexandre Desplat was contracted to score a Williams-less Star Wars. In September 2016 Desplat said fuck this, i'm out and Giacchino was hired, giving him four weeks to score the film. Giacchino at that stage it seems, had no problem with being passed over twice, dumping Williams nor with the indignity of being given a month to score a Star Wars film.
Which brings me to my second point;

"It does borrow from traditions that both John Williams and George Lucas borrowed from when they made the original Star Wars, you know. George was looking at Flash Gordon, the old serials, and John was looking at Gustav Holst and different composers along the way to get a baseline for what he wanted to communicate. There is a wonderful musical language that John put together for the original films. I wanted to honor that vernacular but still do something new with it, something that was still me in a way.

—Michael Giacchino on balancing the musical traditions of Star Wars with his original music for Rogue One."

"Gustav Holst and different composers". Indeed.
Ultimately Lucas loved Williams score, because it perfectly complemented his specifically European/Western representation of the generally universal myths being portrayed in Star Wars (1977)

Please pardon the long narrative but unfortunately it is necessary to answer the following important point you raised:
Skykid wrote:Right. Well let's start with the opening title shall we? That was shit. No idea why they did the whole holding off on the traditional SW drop just to make it so perfunctory after a fairly poor initial sequence.
If Disney is willing to spend $4.05B to buy out Lucas, fully engages its new acquisition in the culture wars, plots with the "creature" Abrams :mrgreen: and hires patsies like Gareth Edwards to "cast" and "direct" casting liabilities like Deigo "what did he say??" Luna and Felicity "Queen of perpetual resting bitch faces for now and evermore" Jones, well then, are they going to fuck it all up and have "basically Wagner" blast out gloriously during the famous crawl?
I think not. Its just a matter of good housekeeping.

In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if the likes of Lisa Gerrard are surgically inserted into future scores. Something like her "Now we are free" which she did for Zimmer but more sci-fi, you know?. Just in time for Luke's coming-out reveal. Fabulous.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

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Zen wrote: If Disney is willing to spend $4.05B to buy out Lucas, fully engages its new acquisition in the culture wars, plots with the "creature" Abrams :mrgreen: and hires patsies like Gareth Edwards to "cast" and "direct" casting liabilities like Deigo "what did he say??" Luna and Felicity "Queen of perpetual resting bitch faces for now and evermore" Jones, well then, are they going to fuck it all up and have "basically Wagner" blast out gloriously during the famous crawl?
I think not. Its just a matter of good housekeeping.

In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if the likes of Lisa Gerrard are surgically inserted into future scores. Something like her "Now we are free" which she did for Zimmer but more sci-fi, you know?. Just in time for Luke's coming-out reveal. Fabulous.
A good point, but don't you think that that's perhaps serendipitous rather than intentional? The film, unsurprisingly, scored well with critics and fans because the majority of both are fatheaded peabrained bastards; and on that note I don't think anyone actually thought "let's hold off on giving Edwards the proper Star Wars titling because this is bound to be an underwhelming barrel of monkey spunk based on the facts of its creation", rather, as luck would happen - as you've rightly pointed out - it is not graced with the magnificence of a true title sequence by way of pure god-given luck.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Zen »

It was indeed a mercy not to have the classic opening before this awful film but perhaps we are on cross-threads here. I did not mean to imply that Disney were reluctant to risk giving Edwards spin-off, full Star Wars recognition and therefore pulled the iconic crawl and score. Rather, that Disney does not see Williams in their vision going forward. If anything, the missing classic crawl in Rogue One may have been a test run.
I'm suggesting that Disney have already intentionally made fiscally dangerous moves with their billion dollar baby. Sacrifices, if you will, on the road to more a "inclusive" "Disneyized" Star Wars. The Wagnerian score fits in with this vision as much as blond-haired, blue-eyed, benign, white male leads (like the young Mark Hamill of 77) do. Which is to say, not at all. So Williams has to go. Far fetched? The the score for the next installment will be telling.
Disney is counting on the idiocy of the average viewer not to find any of this painfully forced bullshit incongruous with the tripe they are consuming. In fact, they are banking on the public lapping it up. You know what? They are probably right.

And, Jesus wept, in case someone takes all this out of context, I couldn't give a fuck who plays what, where. Cast the best actor for the part, for Christ sakes. The forced casting choices are a large part of why Disney's Star Wars does not work.
And in the end, whether a film works or not is all that matters. Everything else is secondary.
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by copy-paster »

Rewatched this yesterday, to me this film is just as compelling as Empire or ROTJ. Watching ANH right after finish Rogue One is quite an experience.

Also I made a tier list of all movies:
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by Mischief Maker »

This is a troll, right?

Putting the original Star Wars below those godawful tie-ins?

And much as I love the good parts of ROTJ, it's a much weaker film overall than the original.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

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Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- spin-off SW film...

Post by copy-paster »

I'm goddamn serious smh.

Looking back, ANH may break new grounds and originality (I still like it!) but when it compares to similar premise like Solo or Rogue One, both wins. And yes ANH is slightly weaker compared to two original films.
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... no.
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