I really disagree with that consensus. Leia, by virtue of being 10 seconds on the screen, was tolerable for half her screen time. Tarkin was a puppet monster from hell.
On the other hand, maybe that’s why acting was so bad in this in general. They had to make the CGI actors blend it so they told the humans to ham it in as much as possible.
That’s a great point. Also what Jason said about the lighting for Tarkin. I mean, I still think they looked wretched, but I guess by those rationales, I can understanding thinking one was worse than the other.
It certainly rankled me more seeing Grand Moff Gollum propped up in place of Peter Cushing. A big part of it is that I know Peter Cushing so well, and not just from Star Wars (I have long asserted that Cushing’s is the only good performance in Star Wars…seriously…everyone else is pretty terrible). But as a horror fan who doesn’t particularly care for most Hammer horror (Christopher Lee? Yawn…), I have always had a weakness for Cushing’s unflappable seriousness and his angular face. He’s just so…I dunno…majestic. He projects an ineluctable nobility, even when there’s some silly B movie going on around him.
So I was appalled to see him rendered as a weirdly hollow puppet. It was just so tasteless. They would have honored Cushing more if they’d cast a different actor who tried to capture his essence, similar to the way Ewan McGregor’s performance was basically a tribute to Alec Guinness. Or if they’d just left him as a reflection in glass, with his back to Mendelsohn.
Ugh, don’t get me started or I’m going to start trashing up the thread with the hundred and one other reasons I hated this movie…
-Tom
Nevermind. Getting old really sucks. Pass me that ginko and some of that fancy sudoku.
EDIT: That’s what I get for not reading the post on the QT3 podcast first. Could have avoided this Sarlaccian trap.
By the way, didn’t the Director have one of the crappiest cloaks ever seen in cinema? Looked like thin cotton, and it was always getting tangled up around him. Horrible fashion design. Should have made it one of those abbreviated capes that cut off at the shoulder, or else made it out of some substantial heavy fabric to allow for drape. I’m surprised that the costume people should have half-assed it so badly, unless it was deliberately intended to look stupid.
I quite liked the movie. Sure, this is coming from a guy who used to consume non-essential SW stuff, books mostly, up until they dropped a moon on Chewie, so a SW story that doesn’t exactly “feel” like SW isn’t an issue for me.
Liked it better than TFA in some ways, and I think I really enjoy the changed look at the SW world mostly absent powerful space wizards. You know, it’s not that storm troopers can’t shoot, it’s the force hierarchy of the world.
Powerful space wizard: Don’t bother to shoot them unless they’re real distracted.
Force sensitive: You can shoot, most will miss, but you’ll get them eventually.
Normal: You can actually hit them.
Got to see this, and I have to say I enjoyed it as much as episode VII.
I wonder how it will feel/look when we get this on home media and can watch Episode IV right afterward. I gotta believe Tarken and Leia are gonna look even more fake. But I accept the CGI additions as they were sorta needed for the story. I am pretty sure a hologram Tarken would have gone over better.
Vader was so awesome in this, how much did he age by the time Episode IV events happened? heh…
Also this dude was pretty enjoyable.
I went to watch it on my own the other night. Couldnt hold off any longer.
What a trip. I really liked it. Better than last years’ episode. Far better than the prequels. Proper StarWars. Loved the zoomzoom pew pew, the gorgeous vistas and the big ol’ drama.
One of the thing I really liked was how it shows the rebels to be rebels. They are insurgents. Terrorists. The ones’ the establishment fears and fights and surpresses. Yet their cause is worthy, so we sympathize and call them a heroic resistance instead of terrorists. Its all a matter of perspective with those terms. Its good that the greater moviegoing public is exposed to a sympathetic viewpoint to insurgents. Americans should start acknowledging they have been playing a pretty verbatim impression of Darth Vaders’ Evil Empire in the middle east and Afghanistan.
‘I am one with the force, the force is great’ or ‘God is great and god is with me’ isnt all that different, is it?
Props to the scenario team for that. Y’all rocked. Also props for the ending. Very good. Romantic. Very un-disney. Or is disney changing? maturing?
Our sources say Carrie was on a flight from London to LAX when she went into cardiac arrest. People on board were administering CPR.
We’re told the emergency occurred 15 minutes before the plane landed in L.A. A flight attendant asked if there were any medical personnel on board and an EMT who was sitting in the back of the plane came up to first class and administered life-saving measures.
The plane landed just after noon in L.A. and paramedics rushed her to a nearby hospital.
Fuck you, 2016, fuck you.
I actually felt that way about pretty much all the costumes in the movie. They looked horrible. From the not-pens in the officers’ pockets to the not-katanas on Jen’s back to the chintzy Vader outfit that looked like something from a Halloween store to the dippy G.I. helmets from World War II to the mujahideen rebel ambushers. Horrible design all around, and so horrible that it actually called attention to itself.
And sure enough, if you check the credits on IMDB, you’ll see the costume designs were by two people, one with no experience, and one who had been a long time costume assistant/supervisor, but who had no design experience. You get what you pay for?
Meanwhile, Force Awakens had a design veteran named Michael Kaplan. He got his start in costume design with a little movie called Blade Runner (he has a commentary track on Fight Club where he talks about how no one knows what became of Deckard’s iconic coat). Just look at Kaplan’s credits. That’s the kind of guy you hire for a AAA tentpole! Going forward, Kaplan is doing costume design for Episode VIII, of course.
And guess who’s doing costume design for the standalone Han Solo movie? Yep, the same two guys from Rogue One. Seems Lucasarts is interested in doing these standalones on the cheap, without much regard for talent. Why bother making a movie good when you can just make every alternating movie good to keep the franchise thriving?
-Tom
Since you mention it, I agree the costumes in general were pretty weak. Vader was bad too as has been pointed out, and those gimcrack rank insignia things on all the soldiers from both sides looked like they might have come from Star Trek TOS; they really pull the viewer’s attention to their cheap, halfassed appearance. And whose idea was it to make those elite rebel soldiers look like they warped in from the Normandy beaches?
But that thin white cape stood out for me as the worst of the worst. Since it was so blatantly bad, I wonder why the director and the actor stood for it? I daresay a competent tailor could make a superior one from scratch in an hour or two.
Oh, right, I forgot about those! They were so weirdly plain and plasticky. Like something you would get for a quarter from one of those toy dispensers where you put in the quarter and turn the crank.
I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with the dynamics of movie making. In terms of the director, I don’t think Garth Edwards has any idea what he’s doing, so I’m not surprised at the dime-store production values.
But in terms of the actors saying anything, I imagine it’s the same reason the average professional actor doesn’t try to correct bad dialogue or lighting. It’s simply not his job. 99% of actors know to just show up and do what they’re told. Sometimes they’re involved in a collaborative process, but usually, all the creative input on a big budget movie is rigidly segmented, and the only ones who get to oversee how everything comes together are the director and the higher level producers putting up the money.
-Tom
Do you expect a movie set in medieval times or the disco era to have actors dressed well by today’s standards?
Because this is really a period piece set to match the lower budget look of movie it directly precedes in the SW timeline. Episode IV wasn’t filmed with the budget or intent of being timeless and catering to 2016 tastes. I personally love how Rogue One took me back to that SW period. I’m sure both movies will fit very nicely when viewed back to back.
Saw it last night and really enjoyed it. I thought it was better than Force Awakens (which had a lot of very discordant notes mixed into that same old refrain.)
I didn’t mind Tarkin CGI but thought the Leia CGI was bad for some reason.
I would probably put this at #3 in the film lineup after Empire and Star Wars.
3 or 4 for me too. I still have a fondness for Return of the Jedi. The second Lucas trilogy was garbage and Force Awakens was a step in the right direction, but I wasn’t crazy about it.
It makes Episode IV so much better IMO. It almost like Rogue one has become apart of the original trilogy and it now has become a four part series.
Now back to your regularly scheduled Tom Chick hate train on Rogue One…
I finally saw this yesterday and liked it quite a bit - I wouldn’t call it excellent, but solidly above-average, sure. Easily better than The Force Awakens, though that isn’t saying much because I’ve been way down on TFA from the first time I saw it, and I’m maybe even more down after subsequent watches. I don’t necessarily think that Rogue One is less flawed than TFA, but it’s… differently flawed. In a way that comes together as a movie that works for me, more or less.
The things that bug me about Rogue One are individual pieces: they went with the next-best costume team, or music team, or even director, where TFA got top priority on all of that. The problems I had with TFA were much more central to the movie: I didn’t really like any of the characters other than Rey, Poe, and Chewie, and I didn’t care for most of the big-picture writing/plot decisions. I’d rather spend two hours with the cast of Rogue One than the cast of The Force Awakens, and it’s not particularly close. I will say that the “best” version of Rogue One would probably run closer to 2:00 than 2:15.
The fan service/callbacks that bugged me were the obvious ones: R2 and C-3PO for no real reason, the terrible Leia CGI, and that first Vader scene, which seemed completely unnecessary at the time. The latter totally paid off with the scene at the end, though. Unfair (though not entirely so) final thought: seeing a properly menacing Vader and the Death Star again really brings forward the silliness of Kylo Ren and Starkiller Base in comparison.
Honest to god, my first “uh-oh” moment was the lingering shot of the blue milk in the blender, or whatever it was Aunt Beru used to store/serve blue milk.
All aboard!
…what, no one?
-Tom
That’s a pretty good defense, Wendelius, but I’m not buying it. Seems to me – like many of the issues ranging from script to cast to direction to visual effects – a case of people who aren’t necessarily the best for the job being thrown a bone because they’re inexpensive and pliable.
-Tom
