OK, maybe the music in isolation, granted. I never even watched the second two in their entirety, ever, so great was my distaste for Episode One. One time, Attack of the Clones was being shown on TV late at night and I figured I’d record it. Got as far as less than 10 minutes in when our friend Jar Jar showed up and said NOPE. Did they learn nothing??
I’ll have to look up the OSTs. Thanks for the tip.
To be clear, I’m not really disagreeing with you. I think there are a lot of movies out there that are a lot worse than those three, but for the series they were pretty bad. Here’s the thing though… they kept the franchise alive, and there is a generation of kids who watched those neon CGI filled movies and the animated series that are now shifting to TFA or Rogue One, maybe both. There’s value in that in addition to the fact that the scores in these movies were actually well done, the stand out is probably “Across the Stars” (if only the actual love story came close to it), and “Duel of Fates”. There are several more though.
The worst blunder for the prequels was when they released the Ep1 soundtrack before the movie and we all saw the song title “Qui-Qon’s Funeral.”
Hm. Dialog was even worse than I remembered…
The most powerful scene in the entire franchise is in the third act of Jedi, with Vader/Anakin’s redemption. For that reason alone, Rogue One has to go after Jedi, for me.
I really enjoyed Rogue One, hell of a film with all the incredible battle scenes both in space and on ground. But there was very little emotional impact. The characters felt a bit too flat. That or the lack of chemistry…can’t really put my finger on it. It just lacked heart.
I still liked it better than Awakens due to that film’s rehashing of the originals, but the characters were more likeable, better presented in Awakens.
But that 2nd scene with Vader. So satisfying. I thought James Earl Jone’s voice was mixed too high in his first scene, though. And it sounded too natural, less coming-out-of-a-machine as it did in the originals.
Finally saw it, liked it, probably my 3rd favorite Star Wars movie. But nobody should pay much attention to that, as I’m barely a big enough Star Wars fan to get my geek license renewed.
Overall it was probably really about as good as TFA, but I liked what Rogue One tried to do better. TFA felt much like most latter-day Bond movies - it was a remix of things people liked about previous movies, and presented as exactly that. “Hey, remember those great ski chases? We’ve got another coming up! Except this time it’s in Austria instead of Switzerland.”
There’s still a bunch of that in RO (or is it R1? I didn’t get an acronym memo) but the crucial thing is that RO made me believe the characters didn’t know they were in a Star Wars movie - they actually felt like they were going in blind and fighting a possibly hopeless battle, even though we the audience know what happens eventually. So I bought into the the whole war-movie framework, and it made the movie much better.
It had one big flaw, though - the characters were completely undercooked. Now it’s not like characters in this sort of movie are normally all that deep, but usually the screenwriter goes in and gives each member of the ragtag band of doomed misfits a brief moment in the sun - a scene, a line, a gimmick. Apart from Blind Martial Artist dude, that never really happened. And the characters themselves felt like they never got past the early brainstorming stage - Blind Martial Artist dude felt like he was simply copied and pasted from a list of Pop Culture Tropes Star Wars Hasn’t Nicked From Yet, and his sidekick never felt like he got beyond the descriptor “sidekick.” So when we got to the end, I didn’t feel nearly as much as I should have.
(It’s actually much easier with reality-based war movies. There you don’t even need to create a compelling little cameo of a character, you just need to convince the audience that this is an everyday person you might meet in normal life and let the brutality of war do the rest.)
So I liked it as a Star Wars movie, but in terms of ragtag band of doomed misfits movies it’s no Seven Samurai/Dirty Dozen/Great Escape/Wild Bunch. It’s not even a Guardians of the Galaxy. (Honestly if I could count Guardians of the Galaxy as a Star Wars movie, it’d be my third favorite. So like I said, not exactly a Star Wars die-hard.)
[quote=“Relayer71, post:752, topic:76559, full:true”]The most powerful scene in the entire franchise is in the third act of Jedi, with Vader/Anakin’s redemption. For that reason alone, Rogue One has to go after Jedi, for me.
[/quote]
I’ll see your throne room scene and raise you a Jedi Rocks musical. In either version. Also, ewoks.
But I did already agree with you about act three.
Went to see it tonight. The movie restarted 5 times around the 1-hour mark when they crash on Eadu or whatever it is called, we sat there for 45 minutes, and finally around 2330 they sent us all home with rainchecks.
I really wasn’t feeling anything exciting by that point. Is it worth going to finish if I wasn’t into it then, or should I try and find something else to do with my freebie?
The extended battle scene at the end is the best part. If you weren’t feeling it after an hour, however, not sure it’s worth sitting through that first hour again.
It’s better than the second trilogy and arguably better than The Force Awakens, but that’s not setting a high bar.
Why are you asking me?
Quit dodging the question! Your Honor, permission to treat the witness as hostile?
Also, that whole Force thing sounds fishy…
Thanks, Mark. I think I’ll catch something else and just finish this one when it hits rental, then.
THE ORGANA DOCTRINE
Most historians now see the Stardust/DS-class superweapons as relatively minor parts of the Empire’s war machine (The Imperial-class Star Destroyer remained the primary engine of its force-projection capabilities), but Organa demonstrated the importance of stymieing these and similar efforts through her landmark analysis of the Empire’s ideology and political economy. Later published as The Head of Clay: Elitism, Warlordism and Weakness in the Galactic Empire, her papers proved that as competition for political prestige motivated the Empire’s factions, they would necessarily centralize power, organizing capital in progressively less efficient “superprojects:” initiatives a clique could explain to the Emperor and his inner circle in simple, direct terms, and control through a centralized command structure. Superprojects caught the eye of the inner circle, while more complex proposals (such as Holonet infrastructure improvements) and those requiring cross-clique cooperation (such as maintaining Clone Wars era advanced military technologies) fell by the wayside.
The superprojects trend began during the Palpatinian Republic (and possibly earlier, if GAOR clone forces could be considered one of them), reaching an early peak in Stardust/DS-1 itself, a massive undertaking that consumed 1% of GaDP over nearly two decades. Alliance attacks on superprojects inflicted devastating economic damage and often led to the death and capture of key Imperial influencers, who preferred to personally supervise their work in case a competitor attempted to sabotage or seize control of it. Each attack made the Empire more reliant on successor superprojects to recoup losses and keep systems dependent on its common economy, but each failure prompted peripheral worlds to secede and escape the fallout. Although it would later become famous as a verse in Interstellar People’s War, Organa first explained her doctrine’s essence to Wilhuf Tarkin himself: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Yet the Empire remained locked into the cycle, to the point where the Emperor personally commanded a successor to Stardust/DS-1 in the hope that this economic necessity would at least create a viable terror weapon.
The Organa Doctrine is widely believed to have won the Galactic Civil War. According to Admiral Gial Ackbar (Ret.):
“It was impossible to defeat the massed Imperial Starfleet, so the question was always one of choosing the most effective targets. The Sienar and Kuat combines possessed redundant facilities to the extent that we could barely put a dent in ship production. The Organa Doctrine identified the Empire’s critical weakness and through rigorous materialist analysis, showed us where to hit the hardest, and hurt them the most. And as one faction fell with its project, another took its place, eager to please the Emperor with some new, grand mission. It was their trap – inescapable, embedded within their political praxis.”
I thought this was fantastic. Vastly better than the prequel trilogy, and better than Force Awakens. Certainly the first Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi that I’ve been excited at the prospect of re-watching.
A friend from work who, prior to release, wished that this movie wasn’t even being made, came out of the theater absolutely thrilled with it.
Now if only LucasArts would make a new X-Wing game…
@tbaldree shared this on Twitter the other day:
https://twitter.com/TwinStickGames/status/815748296530534401
It made me angry and sad at the same time.
This is nice.
That’s pretty darn awesome.
That is awesome! Thanks for posting that, Clay. As a card-carrying Rogue One detractor, I gotta give it huge props for how few white people are in it.
-Tom
I watched it yesterday and liked it pretty much!
Which is a great relief, I also had read positive impressions, but after the disappointment that was TFA, I didn’t trust shit anymore of what I read on Internet related to Star wars.
This is much better than TFA, in character arcs (Rey and Finn seem good characters too, but they lack a proper character arc, they have left it for VIII and XIX I suppose), in action and in many other things. I liked the Empire in the sacred city, it had the tone of occupied city by the nazis, which is totally fine by me as SW has always taken stuff from WW2 movies. I liked the more complex, divided, conflicted rebel alliance, while they still maintain the message of “hope” they show how it isn’t as straightforward as ‘these are the good guys’. And of course the third Act is great, reminiscing of my favorite part of SW, the battle of Endor, combining the ground and the space battles, with the thrill of impossible odds in battle, their almost success, the arrival fo the rebel fleet, and the slow trickling death count as things turn harder and harder.
I also liked the secondary characters in their small roles (robot, blind jedi, retired guardian), they were a likable bunch. Photography was pretty good, with some powerful scenes. Darth Vader is used so effectively, the film isn’t about him so they don’t abuse using him too much, but the pair of times he appears he’s fearsome and spectacular, you feel those are special moments.
Even the Death Star is more fearsome than the Planet Buster of TFA, in TFA the one-upmanship felt silly (now it destroys not one planet, but 3 or 4 at the same time!), but the fact the Death Star only destroys here small parts of a planet means we can be witness of the incredible destruction they are capable, as we see what happens in first person at surface level.