Down We Tumble

Conditions: Fleeting

Film Review: Rogue One - A Star Wars Story

You know I've been watching a lot of movies over the years.  A lot of different types of films - dramas, action films, comedies.  Star Wars movies are basically exactly what it says in the title, war movies set in space.  Rogue One however is a different type of war movie than the previous ones.  This is a Dirty Dozen style men-on-a-suicide-mission.  We're introduced quickly to a bunch of characters who are brought together and tasked with a dangerous mission, and set off to carry it out.

The key here is in the setting.  This film is a direct prequel to A New Hope, and it sets out to answer the question that only real Star Wars nerds had ever asked: how did the resistance actually get the Death Star plans (and how did they know how to blow it up)?  A New Hope works perfectly fine without that information, it charges along with it's own characters and mission.  This one is totally and entirely separate, despite being set in the same universe, and effectively about the same thing.  Complicating that is the fact that the film makers of course pepper the film with callbacks and shout outs to various background characters and locations from other films.  A lot of this is pointless and distracting.

The initial setups aren't all that bad.  The main character is called Jyn, and of course in a flashback we learn her father is the chief designer of the Death Star.  He tries to get away with his family, but gets dragged back, so Jyn ends up on her own.  We meet her in an Imperial prison, from which she's then busted out by the resistance.  When they figure out who she is they try to use her as leverage, but she takes control as she finds a message from her father, telling her he deliberately put a flaw in the Death Star, and that it can be blown up.  Surprisingly this doesn't impress the Resistance.  It certainly didn't impress me.  Is there no quality control in the Empire?  So ultimately Jyn and her crewmates, who have basically been picked up along the way, all decide to grab a captured Imperial ship and launch a suicide mission against the main data library, hoping to find the plans and get them back to the resistance.

Ok, if someone put a gun to my head and forced me to compliment it, I'd say the world building is terrific, the secondary characters are endearing, and the final battle is very well done.  But here's the thing, all of that is irrelevant when you consider the actual tone of the movie.  What is the movie about, what really is any movie about?  Is it just a series of plot points and songs?  No, ultimately a film is about it's tone, and the tone influences how the film makes you feel.  This film, directed by Gary Anderson who did the recent Godzilla, has a terribly weary and defeatist tone to it.  Everything is grim, everyone is tired, dirty, worn down.  There is an overall feeling of what is the resistance worth if so much sacrifice and death must be done in it's name.  We end up stuck on the beach of the Imperial planet, among the sacrifice and fear of battle as the characters get knocked off one by one.  The final two actually manage to transmit out the plans (duh) and then promptly give up in exhaustion.  Not to the movie Empire, but seemingly to the real Empire, Disney, who decreed that no one gets out of this film alive, so not to sully the original films with missing heroes.  So while in the end Vader gets his moment, and so does Leia, these characters we churned along with for two hours are sacrificed in the name of hope, I guess.

It left me feeling very depressed.  And apparently I'm in the minority but I don't think Star Wars movies should leave people feeling depressed.  I didn't like this film.  I didn't really enjoy any part of it.  I'm certainly not interested in seeing it again, and I don't get why anyone would enjoy it at all.  Yes, there have been films that end in everyone dying, but a lot of those retain something, perhaps some key secondary character gets away so the memory survives at least.  I've never been more aware of watching a movie as I watched the end of this, telling a story that cannot actually be told, because anyone who could have told it was killed in it.  This is like a new level of disposable entertainment, a sequel that literally can be thrown away.  What was the point?  Zero land avalanches out of five.

- Peace out