Movie Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

So Conklederp and I braved the 31 F degree temperatures last night and walked to our local neighborhood theater to see the "midnight" showing of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which actually aired at 7pm, but who's complaining); we walked because the roads were covered with snow and ice and there was no way either of us wanted to drive in that (again).

And since this article is coming out on the official opening day, I am going to be as general and as spoiler free as I can be when talking about a fairly widely anticipated movie.  So, you know, just be cautious.

Let's start off with some of the few complaints I had about the movie.

First off, because this is a film set in the Star Wars universe, names are going to be weird.  First, you have some names that are just slightly different or have different spellings to our common names; Rey - Ray or Jyn - Jen (although it's pronounced like Gin), (Also, THERE IS NO CONNECTION!).  Then you have names like Chirrut Îmwe and Weeteef Cyubee which unless you see the movie multiple times, read a novelization of the film, or peruse the IMDb page (which contains spoilers as far as which characters and actors are in the movie if you don't know already) you are probably going to be having a hard time remembering names.  Conklederp had a bit of the same issue with the names in the movie, so I know it's not just me.  The problem here could lie in the fact that names were either not said as often or as obviously as is done in other movies.  What I like to think, is that in "real life," we don't go around saying names all the time, usually only when we want to get someones attention.  I will have a better idea after watching the movie for a second time, which will undoubtedly happen.

The other thing that Conklederp even pointed out, that while the main character was a woman, there seemed to be a severe lack of named female actors.  Yes, there's Jyn, Lyra, Mon Mothma, and that one ambassador/senator/lady-person in the yellow hood, but I don't recall ever hearing her name.  You'd think though that in a scene full of rebels, there's be at least one woman looking back towards (but not into) the camera.

Lastly, there were a few times during the movie where I felt that what I was watching did not feel like a Star Wars movie.  I can't really explain it, just that it could have been a sci-fi film or some steam punk film with not so much steam punkiness going on, but then some quintessential sound effect only found in a Star Wars production would happen and I would immediately be pulled right back in. 

Not so much a complaint as it is something that surprised me.  If you have seen any one of the numerous trailers, you may notice that a handful of scenes didn't make it into the theatrical cut. It is not that some of these scenes were cut, so much as what was shown in the trailer would not work in the film that was released.  This could have been because of the reshoots to make the film "less dark" which then altered the storyline.  Who knows, the point being, there were shots from the trailer that didn't make it into the movie, hypothesize away.  Oh, and I would have liked there to have been more Forest Whitiker (Saw Gerrera, who was also a character in The Clone Wars animated series) as I was rather surprised by his performance and I just wanted more after the movie was over.

Now briefly onto the things I did like.

Wow, this is actually much more difficult to put into words than I had thought before I started writing.  Don't get me wrong, there is plenty that I loved about what Gareth Edwards did telling this story, especially considering that this is his third .  Maybe a bullet list?

• Even though some primary characters had less screen time than others, they all felt fleshed out and not one dimensional.
• This has probably got to be the more ethnically diverse main cast in any Star Wars movie, let alone almost any movie that I've seen.  The principal actors are British, Mexican, American, Chinese, Australian, and Danish.
• Michael Giacchino did a great job with his first Star Wars score and it fits in very well with what John Williams has spent the last 39 writing.  In some ways the soundtrack is slightly more melodic than The Force Awakens, but maybe Giacchino was able to use more elements from the original trilogy as it dealt with familiar events and a few familiar settings.
• This movie did some fantastic universe building, more so than The Force Awakens, but this is a different movie, so there is that.
• The overall tone was fitting for the story.  It actually reminded me a bit of The Clone Wars, in some of the clone heavy episodes, which is to say that it is a good thing.
• Dat cape tho!
• The CG, in its many forms was quite good.  I would want to talk about the many instances when it was included for story purposes that I thought was pretty awesome, even if at times it was semi-obvious that I was looking at a computer generated image.

You know what, I think this is good for now.  I thought Rogue One was a really great movie that fits in exceedingly well into the existing Star Wars universe and franchise, and that both Conklederp and I will definitely be seeing this movie again.  I probably could have just used that last sentence for the entirety of the article to a somewhat similar effect.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  Can we just point out the fact that Michael Giacchino has now scored music to movies in the Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park franchises as well as multiple Disney/Pixar animated movies and now with Dr. Strange has entered into the Marvel universe.  I could go all hipster and say that I've been loving his music since his days on ALIAS, but there are plenty of people out there who had been listening to him for six years before I was introduced to him.  Odin bless this man and his musical abilities!  AND, I just found out that he wrote the music to the Sega Genesis game Gargoyles, which I never played because SEGA, but was one of my favorite 90s animated cartoon series.  Bloody damn!!

P.P.S.  And kudos to Warkwick Davis for making his way into another Star Wars film as a character whose name I had to look up because it was (as is almost always the case) never spoken in the film.  Made me want to go and watch Willow again.