Star Wars: Rogue One: Non spoilery review
Dec. 15th, 2016 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI quite liked it!
It didn't grab me at first, it was a little emotionally dry and started with like...five scenes cutting to a new planet with new characters in a row, which made it hard to keep up momentum. But eventually I got invested in everyone and the end was as thrilling and emotionally intense as you'd hope. The writing was servicable, with a few awkward one liners and LOOK LOOK THIS IS A CAMEO BY A BACKGROUND CHARACTER FROM THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY, but the visuals were great if you like HUGE SPACE STUFF AND EXPLOSIONS, which I do.
Heavy handed cameos aside it tied in with what I remember of Episode 4 pretty well, and even has some nice callbacks to the prequels. I'm curious what watching them all in chronological order would be like but not enough to do it right now.
It's very ethnically diverse and great at not being about White Dudes, but asides from the female main character (who is fantastically badass in a very believable way) does tend to be about dudes. And in the second half the casting director seemed to just...forget women existed for a while? As in literally every one of the like 30 background characters who happen to show up during that period are dudes, including generally woman-heavy contexts like the Alliance. There were a moderate number of background women around before and after that point, so it was just bizarre.
The treatment of disability is good for a Star Wars film, which is to say ok-ish by normal ones, and it does hit some unfortunate buttons every now and then.
The tone is much darker in parts than the other Star Wars films, I really liked the way it showed the moral complexities of war (for a Star Wars film, this is still not the deepest movie ever) and I came out of it feeling ok, but it hits a common trigger I shall elucidate at the top of my no-spoiler review.
Also, this isn't a flaw per se, but every time Ben Mendelsohn's objectively awful Imperial character came on screen I just wanted to pinch his cheeks. He did his best to be evil but apparently he will always be That Adorable Actor to me, at least when he keeps his accent.
But whatever else I might criticise about the casting, Felicity Jones, Diego Luna and Riz Ahmed are all pretty 30 something brunettes who made the film more fun to watch ;)
It didn't grab me at first, it was a little emotionally dry and started with like...five scenes cutting to a new planet with new characters in a row, which made it hard to keep up momentum. But eventually I got invested in everyone and the end was as thrilling and emotionally intense as you'd hope. The writing was servicable, with a few awkward one liners and LOOK LOOK THIS IS A CAMEO BY A BACKGROUND CHARACTER FROM THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY, but the visuals were great if you like HUGE SPACE STUFF AND EXPLOSIONS, which I do.
Heavy handed cameos aside it tied in with what I remember of Episode 4 pretty well, and even has some nice callbacks to the prequels. I'm curious what watching them all in chronological order would be like but not enough to do it right now.
It's very ethnically diverse and great at not being about White Dudes, but asides from the female main character (who is fantastically badass in a very believable way) does tend to be about dudes. And in the second half the casting director seemed to just...forget women existed for a while? As in literally every one of the like 30 background characters who happen to show up during that period are dudes, including generally woman-heavy contexts like the Alliance. There were a moderate number of background women around before and after that point, so it was just bizarre.
The treatment of disability is good for a Star Wars film, which is to say ok-ish by normal ones, and it does hit some unfortunate buttons every now and then.
The tone is much darker in parts than the other Star Wars films, I really liked the way it showed the moral complexities of war (for a Star Wars film, this is still not the deepest movie ever) and I came out of it feeling ok, but it hits a common trigger I shall elucidate at the top of my no-spoiler review.
Also, this isn't a flaw per se, but every time Ben Mendelsohn's objectively awful Imperial character came on screen I just wanted to pinch his cheeks. He did his best to be evil but apparently he will always be That Adorable Actor to me, at least when he keeps his accent.
But whatever else I might criticise about the casting, Felicity Jones, Diego Luna and Riz Ahmed are all pretty 30 something brunettes who made the film more fun to watch ;)
