The only thing I didn’t like in Rogue One, besides CG Tarkin, was the lack of character in the leads. Cassian is supposed to be this conflicted spy/agent in the rebellion, but it’s inconsistent as heck. He’s shooting a guy in the back one minute just to make his escape, then he’s inexplicably torn about assassinating the person he’s been told is the lynch pin to the Empire’s new superweapon. Jyn is introduced as the streetwise grizzled mercenary orphan who does not care about the galactic conflict, and within a span of 40 minutes is giving a stirring speech about the rebel cause and doing what’s right.
Throughout it all, they both seemed bland as oatmeal. I never really got a sense of what they were about, their backstories, or why I should care about them other than the presentation of being the lead characters.
In contrast, Rey’s intro of scavenging, looking wistfully at a ship in the sky, seeing herself as the old woman, settling in for the night, and marking time on her hovel’s wall told me more about her character than all of Rogue One told me about Erso. Hell, Finn’s stumbling, largely silent, shocked stormtrooper antics in the initial village assault did more as well. I grant that Rey and Finn didn’t emotionally change much throughout The Force Awakens, but I found them much more satisfying as characters.
It’s funny but that’s how I felt about Rey and Finn. Never really knew them, didn’t much care about them, and didn’t understand why they cared about each other.
Well, I’m not about to argue that you should care. If that’s how you felt, so be it.
My argument is that The Force Awakens established their lead characters and kept them consistently depicted throughout its run-time a heck of a lot better than Rogue One’s dimly sketched dirty duo. Other than wanting to get to her father, nothing in Rogue One told me why Jyn gave a shit about the rebellion. (I assume much of that was on the cutting room floor with Saw Gerrera footage.) She just suddenly takes charge of the rogue mission, cajoling the rebels to act, right after we had a scene of her blaming Cassian and the rebels for killing her father with their air strike.
[quote=“Telefrog, post:770, topic:76559”]
The only thing I didn’t like in Rogue One, besides CG Tarkin, was the lack of character in the leads. Cassian is supposed to be this conflicted spy/agent in the rebellion, but it’s inconsistent as heck. He’s shooting a guy in the back one minute just to make his escape, then he’s inexplicably torn about assassinating the person he’s been told is the lynch pin to the Empire’s new superweapon.[/quote]
I’ll do a quick counter-argument for each of these, though I will grant that you have to do a lot of work (more than your should in an action movie) to get where I’m pointing.
Cassian is a spy and an assassin. He’s done all sorts of shitty things (like killing the wounded guy so he wouldn’t be caught by the Storm Troopers), and he’s pretty damned tired of it. He’s always rationalized that doing this stuff in the service of a good cause was necessary, just as it was important to keep the dirty details of that work hidden away from the idealistic nobles leading the Rebellion. Jyn’s faith that her father is a good man, shining through all of her other cynicism, is finally enough for Cassian to recognize that he’s become a monster, and that made him want to redeem himself.
This bugged me too, through much of the movie. Jyn is shown to be a loner on the run from everyone and caring only about herself and reuniting with her father. When she’s rescued from the Empire, she immediately attacks the rebels helping her to try and make her own escape, indicating that she cares not a whit for their cause.
It’s only later, talking to Forest Whitaker, that we learn that she is a veteran Rebel herself who spent a large chunk of her life fighting against the Empire with Gerrara’s band… up until the point when he unceremoniously ditched her. She DID care about the conflict at one point, it’s just her fear of abandonment that made her distrustful of everyone. After getting pulled back in by Cassian & Co., she quickly finds herself getting swept back up into the Rebellion that she’d been avoiding for so long.
Yeah, Jyn’s arc is weak and confusing. But I thought that Cassian was pretty well-drawn, especially when you consider how little he’s actually needed to propel the plot forward.
I agree, up to a point. Like I said, I’m pretty sure a lot of Jyn’s backstory was edited out with the changes and whatever happened with the re-shoots. We know for a fact there’s more to the Jyn/Saw relationship because the trailers have that footage of the younger Saw saying things that never got said in the movie. I’m curious if we’ll ever see those scenes.
Even assuming the best for that missing footage, the rest of Jyn’s motivation doesn’t add up. She literally berates Cassian for getting her father killed with the air strike, then flies back to Yavin IV and rallies the rebel troops to help her snag the secret data. It’s a stunning and puzzling reversal for someone that (in the film’s presentation) was moments before accusing the group of murder.
As for Cassian, I don’t buy it at all. Tired of killing he may be, but the film shows us that he’s willing to plug someone in the back to complete his mission, then it tries to make us sympathize with him by showing us he can’t bring himself to kill Jyn’s dad - the guy he’s explicitly told will increase the Empire’s power dramatically if he’s allowed to live. Come on, man. I can only accept so much inconsistency.
Oh, and just to be clear, I liked the movie a lot. I just think it had some really weak character building.
Yahoo Movies: How much of the film’s final third changed?John Gilroy:
It changed quite a bit. The third act has a lot going on. You have like
seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a
bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much
detail about what had been there before, but it was different.We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived.Because
you needed to figure that out, and everything else changes. Everything
was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change
all the other venues, so really we had to… we were working on that
until the last minute, because we working closely with ILM, they were
giving us temporary shots and we’d put them in, we’d work them, we’d
reconceive again.
I don’t think the movie plays this very well, but I will say that Diego Luna’s character is told, just before the assassination attempt, that Jyn’s father is the only direct source of evidence for the Death Star plans. His hesitance may be more self-motivated than comes across, since the best outcome for the Rebellion may be to capture him alive and get the plans from him.
That never really bothered me, because I feel like the first instance was clearly different. It was an informer, obviously not a close ally or friend, and someone he probably thought was about to sell him out to the Storm Troopers. It was a hard choice in a hard situation. In the latter case, it was someone he had reason to suspect was a rebel sympathizer and had an indirect personal connection to through Jyn. He also had been given an obviously sketchy order after all the talk of extraction, and one he suspects commanders above Halleck may not have approved of. I think he really called this out later with the speech before departing Yavin about all the volunteers having done bad things they wish they could forget.
Well, it just goes to show that different people can interpret the same scenes differently. I disagree that Cassian’s motivations are clear. He just seems to function as a script hook for showing the rebellion is prepared to do morally gray things, but conveniently turns “to the light” just in time for the climatic battle.
Hey, but can we talk about the tentacle thing Saw used on Bodhi? Because seriously, that looked terrible.
Oh yeah I forgot to comment about Tarkin. WTH they were thinking… it would have been much better to just use a similar actor, then use traditional face prosthetics/makeup, maybe some digital touch up in post process.
I knew they used a real actor whom has a kind of similar face, but seeing the result, I think they used his ‘digital acting’ like Gollum, or like in Avatar, and the face seen on screen is fully CG.
Ok people who are having issues with Cassian’s motivations and change of heart regarding Jyn’s father are simply not thinking it through. Come on, look at Jyn. Shes hawt and rebellious. Cassian knows if he kills her father that he has zero shot at tappin that booty. So what were Cassians motivations? He did it all for the nookie. Unfortunately the Empire then committed the most impressive act of coitus interruptus in galactic history. Occams razor, people. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
It’s true the character arcs are pretty simple (from rebellious girl that don’t believe in anything to wanting to make true his father dying wish and blow up the Death Star and defeat the Empire, from scummy rebel to rebel with a heart of gold that wants to do the right thing) but I felt they were enough for the movie, which in the end it’s a action/adventure sci-fi flick.
I think Jyn’s a better written character than Rey. Rey’s an inversion of Luke that never makes any kind of sense. Rogue One runs into trouble later on, when it starts having unearned character turns, and fails to deliver any kind of payoffs, but from the opening sequence to the Death Star test on Jedha though, Jyn pretty clearly sketched in terms of what motivates her.
The difference is that Daisy Ridley has the charisma to transcend the crappy writing through more or less sheer force of will. (And in fairness to Felicity Jones, the Force Awaken’s more playful tone gives Ridley way more space to do that.)
Saw this over the holidays and really enjoyed it. Yes, it was just a simple action/adventure flick. Yes, the character development was sparse (for a reason, as seen in the ending). Yes, it could have benefitted from some extra screenplay revisions and a little more continuity in the final 30 minutes. But in the end, it was a great action story about the people who came together to steal the plans for the original Death Star, and that’s all I really wanted out of it. In the original movie there’s a scene where someone says “a lot of good people died getting these plans for us” or something similar, and I always thought “that would be a cool story”. Turns out, it was!
I know a lot of people hated the clunky look and feel of the costumes and some of the set designs, but to be honest, I thought they were perfect. I have always thought Star Wars popularity presented it with an unprecedented problem in movie history, how do you keep futuristic tech looking futuristic over the span of 40 years when modern tech has long surpassed what you envisioned future tech to look like in your original movies. I mean, come on, in 1977 we had a Death Star that could flit about the galaxy and destroy entire planets with a laser beam, and it was controlled by a bunch of guys in elongated helmets pushing shiny clicky buttons on consoles and pulling on levers. =) I really liked the fact that Rogue One was able to combine the modern special effects for so many scenes with the 1977 look and feel of the costumes and some sets, to me it lent the movie a strange sort of authenticity. You’re telling a story set mostly in the days leading up to the opening scenes of Star Wars, so some kind of consistency with that movie is to be expected. To me, rather than feeling cheap and “B team”, it felt like an homage, a subtle nod from the filmmakers that “yeah, this is all really hokey looking in 2016, but remember how badass it all looked in 1977?”.
Maybe it’s because I was 7 years old when Star Wars came out, and saw the movie like a dozen times that summer in the theaters (for like $2.00 each time, so I spent less on 12 viewings then than I did on two tickets for Rogue One!), but rather than turn me off, the throwback look of the uniforms and sets made me feel a warm nostalgia, like I was a kid experiencing the magic all over again. Rogue One won’t go down in history as the best Star Wars movie, not by a longshot, but it is still a welcome addition to the lineup, and I enjoyed it completely.
The Red Letter Media crew have done a series of videos on Rogue One. I loved the movie, while they don’t, but their points are valid and humorous as always.
I’m just so fucking sick of that form of commentary. I don’t care if they make “good points”. It’s just depressing that people spend so much time and effort trying to tear things down instead of being productive and beneficial members of society. All this “cynical Brit / angry whatever / everything wrong with blah” bullshit is god damned toxic.
It’s why I love Movies with Mikey so much. Find a unique angle for why something is awesome and ignore what you don’t like instead of nitpicking shit to death.
