Hacker Cinema
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
2016 · Film · 133 min
Directed by Gareth Edwards
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
A rogue band of resistance fighters unite for a mission to steal the Death Star plans and bring a new hope to the galaxy.
70 positive22 negative10 mixed54 neutralfrom 156 commenters
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174 comments on Hacker News
Indeed. There's a Star Wars movie out right now - the first for seven years - and quite rightly, no one cares. Only Andor and Rogue one were good since the Disney purchase and the reign of Katherine Kennedy, which is a below-random success rate.
The Mandalorian and Andor shows are the best of the SW universe. As for movies, Rogue One also stands above the others.
I'd love to see a serious live-action show based on the idea of the Bad Batch (not copying the same story as the animated series, of course).
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
In Star Trek, Data in the Next Generation series was well liked because he was a good character, whereas SAM in Starfleet Academy is panned because she's not a good character. Audiences don't dislike shows and movies with holograms and androids and other AI characters because computers are taking our jobs, they dislike bad shows and movies because they're bad.
The Post-Disney Star Wars movies are objectively less well received than the originals, but Alan Tudyk's K-2SO was probably the only well-liked character in Rogue One, whereas C-3PO was one of the most disliked characters in the original movie.
Unlike shows and movies, advertisements are something people avoid, not seek out. The most success an advertisement can have is for people to discuss it, for any reason. Creating annoying recurring characters or using new technology poorly works great for advertisers, and always has, but that has no bearing on what media people seek out.
Watch it. Best TV show I can think of, ever. By that I mean that the writing and acting and production values are top notch; it's entertaining throughout - some of the other greats are not (The Wire falls down here, sometimes; Keislowski's Dekalog, likewise - though its best moments are better than anything else); and Andor nails its cultural moment, by being directly about, well, all of the Important Stuff we're talking about in this thread. Also, it's a tragedy; it's about sacrifice and loss, and the human consequences of following your convictions - regardless of the side you choose. (That last note's a personal taste, but I'd stand by the former points as being reasonably objective.)
I sat through it going, "how the hell did they manage to make a work of art out of a Star Wars series?", which even makes it better. You don't have to care about Star Wars AT ALL to appreciate Andor, but if you do, watching Andor -> Rogue One -> Originals back to back makes the earlier stuff better.
You'll think I'm over-selling it. Please watch it, then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.
It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.
Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.
Some anecdata:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911383
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488958
The main storyline looks negligible compared to the work Andor has done for it.
The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.
It's much, much more collaborative than that. The role of a producer can be limited to managing the financial side of the production. Or they can be involved with coordinating the production itself. The director has the most say over what is shot, how it's edited, what the score should be like. A good producer can help make a film excellent, but if you have a bad director, or the "wrong" director, then nothing the producer does will fix that issue.
Of course there are also Executive producers who are far far up the financial food chain of a movie, and sometimes these titles are also just vanity plates for the production.
As an example of the value of a good/great producer, look at Gary Kurtz. He was essential for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but wasn't part of the team for Return of the Jedi. In my opinion, that's one of the reasons that ROTJ is the worst of the three films. Lucas didn't have someone pushing back against his worse tendencies.
For an example of the wrong director, look no further than Rogue One. While it's very difficult to sus out what was wrong with Gareth Edwards directing, Tony Gilroy was brought in to fix the film. Both are appropriately quiet about what the changes were, what was re-shot (simple professional courtesy), but the result is a film that (while I love it) is just slightly off.
I didn't really think Rogue One was anything special and thought sequel movies were trash, but I still watched every Andor episode as it came out, it is really good.
it can only be a prequel unless they want to make a season out of Rogue One movie
> hey already cut the original plans from 5 seasons to 2; it's simply too expensive and costs too much time to do it this well.
From some of the interviews I saw it seemed like the time aspect was the big driver. One in particular Diego Luna was talking about a conversation he had with Gilroy and Gilroy was like "God it'd take us 10 years to make this". I get that logistically that can be a tough thing to do with actors, and also it'd be a bit odd to have Diego Luna be very noticeably older in Season 5 than he is in Rogue One.
Rogue One was the first standalone movie in the Star Wars universe. There was a lot of uncertainty about how it would be received. I don't blame them for ham-fistedly shoving in there some extra linkage to the main canon... and even with that, it made much less than the "regular" sequel trilogy.
I watched Andor having not watched much other Star Wars, and with vague memories of A New Hope.
I absolutely loved it. So much that I'm now watching the entirety of Star Wars film and TV in chronological order (I'm in the Clone Wars series now, before the timeline overlaps Revenge of the Sith, and I went out of sequence to watch Rogue One to see the conclusion of the cast from Andor). The full chronology can be found here[1], though I used a bit of JS to extract just the films, tv shows, and video specials as a markdown table to put in Obsidian
So as someone who can say I pretty much didn't have the context you claim is necessary to appreciate Andor, I can tell you that it 100% stands out as a masterpiece to people who are unfamiliar with the rest of the Star Wars lore.
[1]: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_canon_media
The only thing I can say against Andor is that it made Rogue One seem a little bit inadequate as a capstone film.
Everyone gushing over Rogue One... but it was at best barely competent.
10-20 minutes of static talking heads, 5 minutes of mediocre action. Repeat until the end. Meaningless side-quests. The final is a thousand cliches one after another culminating in a "main computer at the end of a rickety walkway" and "a kiss at the sunset".
The only reason it's hailed as the greatest movie ever is because so much of the Star Wars is just objectively shit.
Its like being raised from earliest age with some religion (any, really, they are all equal in good and bad ways) vs somebody who wasn't. The thickness of rose-tinted glasses is something that's hard to argue about rationally.
I wasn't in both cases, communists considered it a capitalist propaganda about US might and banned it (maybe just heard about Star wars being US space program, took just first result on soviet gugel so to speak, but fight for freedom at all costs is generally not something you want to encourage in dictatorship).
They are an interesting flick (original trilogy), but nothing really magical for me in them. As mentioned by others they feel like 80s pop sci fi movie, nothing more, characters and acting are... mediocre and it all feels aimed at kids/teens. A lot of creativity with sets, but that's not primary reason for me to watch a movie.
Since I refuse (can't even) to be swayed emotionally of some good ol' memories from growing up, prequels felt even more childish (maybe apart from ep3), and this trend continued with last 3 movies. Rogue one was by far the best experience in whole SW universe, so if this goes even further happy to experience it.
It is one of the reasons I love Andor so much. Rogue One was so good that it elevated a A New Hope and Andor in turn (especially after S2) elevates Rogue One in similar fashion. The movie/show on their own are some of the greatest, but they don't limit their achievements to themselves and like a rising tide lift whoever they connect to. It is really really hard to pull that off, and people in Andor somehow managed that twice.
They did a really good job tying Andor into Rogue One, but yeah Andor is just far better in terms of pacing, etc. And because they have to rush the plot in R1 (meet Jyn, she doesn't care about the rebellion, oops never mind now she's leading the rebellion) it ends up seeming much shallower emotionally. They also seemed to have to have a bit of fan service.
Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.
While you can't dismiss New Hope as it was just breathtaking at the time of its release, Empire Strikes Back was arguably peak, and you needed to wrap it up with the third movie, there's a good argument that Rogue One was the second best film after Empire. And probably Andor as a series after that. Unlike a lot of people I don't mind series wrapping up after a season or two. Even in the best cases I'm starting to lose interest by season five in a lot of cases.
(I think the prequels were worse than the sequels but they're collectively pretty unmemorable.)
I agree. Especially in the originals, everything just sort of “works out” for the protagonist(s). The bad guys don’t aim well, fly well or really do anything great. And that’s fine because that is era of cinema Star Wars came from. In Andor the empire is smart, calculated, deadly and just plain scary—nearly to a visceral degree, if you allow yourself to be absorbed into the story.
And despite how good Andor (and Rogue One fits here as well) was, I think there’s some merit to wanting to go see a film that makes you feel good. There are certain films and books I won’t put myself through (especially fiction) more than once because I don’t want something ultimately meaningless adding stress to my life. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable escape. So Andor/Rogue One come pretty close to that point for me.
Andor + Rogue one are my favourites from the franchise. It tells a story that the 50 year olds that grew up with SW can appreciate for its depth and intrigue as well as connection to the original films, but leaving the hallowed originals mostly alone.
I wish the crew behind it would be allowed to continue the story until the fall of the emperor, so we could get the whole "rise and fall of the empire" story told with the same quality, depth and overall "tone" for lack of a better word.
Three more seasons taking place during the same time as the original trilogy would be nice, but of course keeping the Skywalker and Jedi stuff mostly in the background.
A similar show as Andor with storylines taking place on Alderaan and the construction site of the death star, say.
> they're making a final movie.
They're not making a movie; the entire series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One.
> Just professionals doing their jobs
This is one of the reasons I love Rogue One. There is a desperation that permeates the film that culminates into the titanic final scene
I do not agree w/ this in relation to the Dark Crystal series. But I see parallels in the Star Wars series Andor. Many will skip it because 'it's star wars', but it's a great series in star wars costume. The three people I've pressed into watching it came away with very favorable reviews.
There are some kinda deep cut star wars references that non-fans will miss. Mon Mothma the political head of the rebellion is seen only sparingly in the original trilogy and in rogue one (scenes were shot for her in the prequels setting her up as politically aligned with Padme and Bail, but they were cut) is a main character here. Other characters like Saw Gererra only appear in the clone wars series and Rogue One (a film for which this series is a prequel). However this didn't seem to effect my friends much only one of whom had even seen rogue one and the prequels, the other two only having seen the original series.
I'm so glad that it got a second season and am very excited to see it play out.
I see a lot of shade thrown at Kathleen Kennedy these days. Sure, some of the Star Wars movies under Disney haven't been great, but look at this resume. It's incredible. I'll save you the click and put some things she's been the executive producer of here: Poltergeist, E.T., IJ & Temple of Doom, Goonies, Back to the Future(I,II,III), Young Sherlock Holmes, The Money Pit, Empire of the Sun, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (jumping ahead to more recent stuff), Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian, Ashoka, Skeleton Crew....
So yes, not everything has been a winner, but to say that having her name attached to something means it won't be good means that either A)you might not be informed about her resume or B)you have another reason you don't like her involvement with a project.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005086/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_0_nm_8_in_0_q_kathleen%2520kenedy
For me the nadir was the prequel series although I also think The Phantom Menace poisoned the well for the other two which weren't terrible. The more recent films have been a mixed bag with them generally being better the further they are from the original story arc.
For me at least, there's also a certain fatigue factor. While I like The Mandalorian and Rogue One, I'm pretty much done with the franchise. See also Star Trek and MCU. That said, I know that there are a lot of fans who will take pretty much anything you throw out even if they like to belly-ache about it.
A not insignificant part of human history is retelling the same stories. Stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad were oral traditions refined, refined, and refined, until taken down by a master. Every time Dracula and derivatives get made, something new gets added, changed, improved.
The problem with Disney's remakes is that they are trying to be the original story, reshot, but LESS Disney. The Little Mermaid is a prime example of something that should have been brighter, more colorful, more energetic, more beautiful, and IMPROVED, but instead they chose a least common denominator impersonation.
The concept of going back and retelling a prequel can work. It worked for Rogue One (despite production challenges), it worked for Wicked. What isn't working for the Disney Live Action movies is letting the machine output reduced facsimiles, instead of giving the projects to experimental storytellers, or master storytellers to do their thing.
Id love to see a remake of Bambi that amplified the music/animation connection, using modern technology to sync the movement of elements in the frame to parts of the musical composition, much like a visualizer. Breathing, fluttering, raindrops falling on the beats, quivering with the strings. Imagine a modern Little April Showers by Atticus Ross that looks like Spiderm-Man into the Spiderverse or Puss in Boots 3 or Wild Robot or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Bambi should be a music video like Fantasia. Instead Disney will try and tell a story about a Deer, and forget the rest of what made Bambi so revolutionary.
And yet, Disney still does make things like Soul, which really was innovative in its animation style by how restrained it was. It's simple complexity of its dream world was its strength. Animation can be done well without the hyper speed over indulgences I cited above as good examples.
The Crow
The Machine (if you like Ex Machina, try it)
Alien
Prometheus
Fight Club
Secretary
Casablanca
Kill Bill
The Emperor's New Groove
Star Wars Episode IV - The original goodness, not the CGI horror-show.
Star Wars: Rogue One
American Beauty
Dredd.
Hellboy (directors).
Blade Runner (theatrical).
Chocolat.
Noise (Australian film, 2007. Love that one).
I try not to watch films too many times in quick succession. The repetition dulls the experience for me.
This is fun to read and also a valuable contribution to preserving the historical details of how it was achieved. I especially appreciate his tone in approaching what had become a somewhat contentious subject:
> Hi, I was the animation supervisor on Rogue One, and as such I was intimately involved with the creation of Tarkin.
> I’ve decided to chime in for one purpose only, to clarify the process we used. I have no interest in trying to convince anyone to like the results more than they do, or to argue with anyone about how “real” our work looked in the film.
I'm one of those who enjoyed RO but also immediately noticed the CGI Tarkin being "off", despite the fact I'd not heard about it and didn't go in looking for it (I had heard something about CGI Leia though). It's helpful that the OP mentioned in the intro that many people never noticed it. Although CGI Tarkin clearly stood out to me, I'm a pretty serious SW fan (having seen the original when I was 12 and the entire opening trilogy many times since). So I'm unusually familiar with Peter Cushing's appearance and mannerisms on-screen in the SW universe.
Perhaps more significantly, I've also had a multi-decade career deeply involved in the creation and evolution of digital production tools and CGI as well as being a sometime professional (and, more often, hobbyist) film-maker. To be fair, once you start counting NAB and Siggraph trade shows you've attended by the dozen, it's reasonable to assume you probably can't see films or CGI the way most people do - and so I concede it's entirely possible CGI Tarkin was adequately executed for the majority of the intended audience.
However, I think that may miss the more important point that, whether CGI Tarkin in RO was "good enough" or not, doesn't much matter in the long run. We've always known creating perfectly photo-realistic CGI humans is extremely difficult, especially substituting CGI for a particular well-known human in a well-known live action context. It's pretty much the hardest CGI thing there is. Like most things in CGI, I'm pretty sure we'll eventually master it but at the time CGI Tarkin was done - it was wildly ambitious and, IMHO, very likely to fail. So the fact CGI Tarkin didn't abjectly fail and was, at worst, mildly distracting to critical eyes, is something the team that did it should be proud of and those of us with those critical eyes should, at the least, be tolerant of and, preferably, celebrate as a worthy historical milestone on the long path toward perfection.
It's a question of cost, knowledge and time. Avatar was in 2009 and the motion capture there was well beyond what was on display in Rogue One.
My take on it is that ILM had their own in house animation process and rather than admit that it was costly, slow and gave abysmal results, they doubled down and tried to push it through.
Again, there might be some excuses that can be made for Rogue One, but none for Mandolorian and the later Star Wars movies. The Luke Skywalker scene was deepfaked days after the episode aired [0] and, again, the DeepFake version is much better but still horrible because of the animation.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
If there is a disagreement between the director and the studio, they will negotiate with each other about which changes to make. But the director is never cut completely out of the process.
There are a lot of directors who would disagree with you on that...
Disney is notorious for this; off the top of my head, Ant Man, Rogue One, Solo, and Brave changed directors because of disagreements with the studio in post-production. With the Marvels, it is widely known that the director did not have final cut of the film. Bryan Singer and Steven Soderbergh have been replaced on movies due to disagreements with studios after filming had started (and in both cases, the films at issue went on to be multiple-Oscar nominees). Cary Joji Fukunaga was replaced on It due to disagreements with the studio (but retained writing credit) right before filming started; and he replaced Danny Boyle on No Time to Die after Boyle was let go due to disagreements with the studio.
If the studio tries to take creative control completely away from the director, the director can petition the DGA to have his or her name removed from the film.
The director always is consulted during the edit, and in most cases works very closely with the editor. The studio may or may not insist on changes later, but there is just no universe where the editor makes changes alone with no input from the director at all. The DGA would have a fit if that happened.
This is just incorrect. Indeed, what you suggest is at odds with over a 100 years of film history...
The DGA does not have a fit over stuff like this because a director is not entitled to "complete creative control" or to "final cut" unless they negotiate for it, get themselves hired as editor on the film they direct (which would also involve them being a producer), or work with a studio that embraces the auteur school of filmmaking (in which the released film represents the director's vision of the film).
It's one thing to support the auteur school since it usually results in better films (counterpoint: most Netflix films), but it is objectively not the way most films are made.
I loved that rogue one was was self contained. It's a great single mission movie expanding on a throw away line in a previous movie. Solo on the other hand was either way too long for a kid who stole someone's ship and did a joy ride and turned it into an outlandish tale or way too short for a 3 year career. Should have been either a side plot in a movie or a 3 episode arc. Per the movie he's been soloing for like 45 minutes or 63 parsecs total.
> I enjoyed Rogue One...
So did I: I love it that it ends just where episode IV start and I like it too, spoiler alert, that the likeable protagonist do not make it (which we knew from episode IV but still).
This. Loved every minute of Rogue One, it worked great as a self contained story, then the finale blended so gracefully with the beginning of Ep IV. That is how a prequel should be made.
Newer SW movies aren't that good, but at least they also aren't as bad as Ep. I, II and III, while it seems they're going on the right direction with most of the series.
I didn't even notice that Tarkin was a CG rendition until this post. I thought they did a wonderful job.
I remember Rogue One as one of the better Star Wars movies, especially with how they patched up certain holes in other movies while remaining mostly self-contained. If Star Wars were software, Rogue One might be more of a "bug fix release" as opposed to a "feature update", and bug fix releases are the best releases.
I enjoyed Rogue One, they took a unexplored slice of the story after the legends thing and created this self contained, well written journey of a group that is only mentioned in the 4th episode.
Takin may have felt a bit off (uncanny valley), but I think it was a good choice to have him included in the story nonetheless. I like the cold, unhinged personality of this character; I've grown used to Peter Cushing's acting and facial features.
I feel like, there should be more exploration of Star Wars in the aspect of "mundane" life, like it's done in Andor. There's a big universe already established. Andor really helped me understand 2 things of SW universe: the oppression which built up the motivation for Cassian to join the Rebels, and, effectiveness of the Empire, specifically the ISB. God, the exchange between Daedra Meero and Blevin, with an added mediation of the cunning Major Partagaz was excellent. Reminded me of the discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics.
8 is at least the 4th-best Star Wars movie. Rogue one is distantly at 5th. All the rest are quite bad.
[edit] though 8’s quality is kinda useless, being in the middle of a trilogy. It’s hard to recommend.
I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.
The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind.
(Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.)
The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.)
My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".
Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney "Star Wars" movies, and the only one that fits with the Lucas movies. Highly recommend it.
VFX supervisor, exec producer, and story by, but not director of Rogue One: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3748528/reference/
John Knoll was the FX lead for the Star Wars prequels, and went on to direct Rogue One.
The behind the scenes documentaries for the prequels have aged well: https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo?si=5y5gHUMxztwVzMny
I am not a Star Wars superfan, but have enjoyed some of the films, particularly the original Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Rogue One.
When I first saw Lucas' revisionist scenes in Mos Eisley back in the 90s or early 2000s, such as the CGI creatures outside the cantina and the Greedo/Han Solo incident inside, it was disillusioning.
Lucas didn't fix flaws in the original film. He jazzed up some scenes that didn't need it. He neutered one of the great flawed heroes of science fiction film. It would be akin to Francis Ford Coppola remaking the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone coldly shuts the door on his wife by adding an audio or video edit in which the wife spits on Michael, thereby "justifying" the cold treatment.
Kudos to the teams restoring the original 35mm films, although I fear this article may trigger a heavy-handed response from Disney's legal thugs.
I agree with most you have to say, personally I think the only movie that really holds weight since Disney took over is rogue One. andor is a good watch too. the mandalorian is great as well.
Are China, North America, and Europe the only places in the world?
I live in Vietnam. Population 100 million. More than any country in Europe. It is not popular here. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia -- population 660 million -- from what I can tell.
I mean, it is popular in the way any big budget, CGI spectacular is popular. But it's not this big cultural thing it is in the US or Europe. Nobody cares in the slightest what the next Star Wars movie will be about or how the IP is doing. They think of Rogue One in the same way they think of Train to Busan. A fun enough foreign movie they watched that one time a few years ago.
The vast majority of my friends and family have never seen any of the original trilogy or even most of the prequels. They definitely aren't watching any of the Disney+ series, since it says "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region".
Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.
Just some more detail about this.
Reid Southen has been testing out Midjourney V6. He quickly found out that you could easily generate images of Thanos that are direct copies of images from the Avengers films. https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1738286342390374882
In response to his and more discoveries like his, Midjourney updated their ToS to place the blame on users for infringing copyright. https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1739155446726791470
Reid Southen had all his content erased without permission for his grievous transgression of showing just how easily it is to make copyright infringing material using Midjourney V6. This is after they update their ToS to persecute him and people like him, who are posting this kind of imagery on X. https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1738408490543054949
He (and others) moved on and made more examples, using the film Joker: https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1739331983992406508 And the film Dune: https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1739003201221718466 And Star Wars Rogue One: https://twitter.com/KatieConradKS/status/1739765791996711034
A new account has also showed up that's collecting examples of this called Ai Piracy https://twitter.com/ai_piracy
Ed Newton Rex, a former Stability AI employee, has chimed in here https://twitter.com/ednewtonrex/status/1738141349172453785
Hooo boy that makes the fans ANGRY! :D
Some people get _so_ into a movie that they literally memorise every trailer. Then they actively try to find the scenes from the trailer while watching the movie.
And if those don't match, they'll shout at the Internet.
Case in point: Rogue One had shots in the trailer that never made it to the final movie (charging through the beaches and the Tie-fighter rising to meet Jyn in the tower). People went berserk.
But I 100% agree with you, they should shoot the trailer scenes separately and not have any of them actually in the movie just to keep it interesting.
I strongly agree on all counts. Overall, the bad outweighed the good for me; but at least it tried and I give it points for that. The other two sequels were just lazy.
The best modern Star Wars movie by far was Rogue One. In some ways Rogue One had an easier job because it was explicitly an exercise in elaborating on the original movies, rather than trying to expand in a brand new direction. But it did its job tremendously well. (And the TV show Andor is taking things in cool new directions.)
I don't remember if it was Rogue One or another of the SW franchise, but they actually backed their way into the plot but first picking scenes from other movies and then stitching them together.
Yeah I don't disagree that if the AI can get it spot on which I think it will be able to do eventually it will take over. It will take over even if it's not spot on, because the bottom line is all that matters to the major studios now.
> Why would they? Very few people can notice and appreciate the level of detail you are describing
People might not consciously appreciate the detail but I think almost everyone subconsciously appreciates the overall vibe. Everyone can watch that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly clip and see there's something special about that location.
The reason I feel like the execs should be able to see it is that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face. If you watch a movie and come out seeing like you've seen something breathtaking, you're going to tell your friends and ticket sales are going to go up, not just for that movie, but for future movies as well. Whereas if film after film after film is a dud, which seems to be more common for me than not nowadays, you stop watching films and spending your money on films. For me this has already happened - when I was younger I used to go to the cinema once every week or two. The state of cinema is so bad now I might only go once a quarter.
So the execs take these cost cutting measures, but they have the overall effect of losing them money in the long term. The film may end up pulling in 200% over production compared to 100% if they'd have used practical effects. But that "missing profit" isn't missing - they're instead spending it on raising their overall brand value and reputation by offering up a higher quality product.
Like the last film I watched at the cinema was Gareth Edwards The Creator. He'd built up a little bit of brand value with the original Monsters and Rogue One, but The Creator was so monumentally, insultingly bad I don't think I will ever go watch a film he's made again.
I think the main difference is these robots aren’t individuals like us. They don’t and won’t have unique experience.
They are essentially one “organism”. They are effectively the same height, same weight, same battery life, same way of processing information, same capabilities.
There is zero uniqueness. Like a single machine with a thousand eyes and arms.
If they develop uniqueness it would get wild, like the movie rogue one…
If a robot is damaged it would be interesting though. Would it adapt ? If it adapts would it be part of the same fleet? Could it receive the same “updates”, or would it be an individual? It would the able to do certain things others bots of the same model could do…
Rogue One has immense promise, but only partly delivers.
It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)
We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.
Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.
A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.
It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.
Interesting, everybody I ever talked to about this, Rogue one is considered to be by far the best movie of them all. Mature, dark stuff, no cheesy stupid stuff for small children, dicey characters, and of course epic hopeless battles.
I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.
FWIW I was a Star Wars nerd and read all the books and played the games (even the obscure ones—Yoda Stories rocked) and my Windows cursor was a lightsaber and 70% of my Christmas toys were Star Wars (the rest were Lego, and those two things didn’t yet have any overlap) and all that, until the prequels put me off it (and thank god, as really I’d had quite enough of that in my life)
So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).
You have to take into account that Star Wars is not an attempt to simulate realistic space battle strategy and tactics, it's pew-pew space battles and laser swords and pulp adventure. It was never realistic. The Death Star is a patently ridiculous, extremely inefficient weapon, since there's no need to entirely explode a planet to destroy it, as is it needing to wait until the moon of Yavin is out of the way when it could easily destroy Yavin from any axis, as is the trench run, which only exists at all because George Lucas ripped off a World War 2 movie, scene for scene, as is the plot twist of the exhaust port. Yes, it's been retconned (like the parsecs thing) but it's still goofy as hell that two torpedos could cause a chain reaction big enough to blow up an entire moon-sized ship even if it hit the reactor dead on. People accept it because it's the OT and they have nostalgia glasses on but it really is kind of bullshit.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
Rogue one was excellent movie wise. Mandalorian was ok, at least season 1 was downright good.
But yeah, it's no longer a guaranteed good time. But was it ever? It seems to me half of the first 6 movies stand up on their own. Then probably 1 out of the next 3 involving Ray.
The side plots are now better.
Any good animated entries?
It pains me to say this, especially since I saw Star Wars in the theater over 10 times when it first came out, but you have a point.
When I was a kid, I saw Star Wars over 10 times in the theater, and I LOVED it. For the time, it was revolutionary science fiction film. But I remember after the first time I saw it with my dad and I excitedly asked him "what did you think?" He said it was over rated. I remember being crushed by that comment, but now.. I dunno. The plot is pretty weak and predictable.
But I think that's why a lot of fans are so disappointed by the new Disney star wars material. Rogue One seemed like such an elevation of Star Wars - Star Wars for grown ups. And the hope, at least of me, was that Disney+ would run with that. But after Boba Fett, I just walked. It was atrocious.
The Force left Lucasfilm with RotJ. It all sucked decades before Kennedy came in. The only decent movie was Rogue One, and she produced that.
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
Rogue One, and Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian are the only Post George Lucas Stars Wars worth watching
Hi!
So, it's been a while, but I'll try to add clarification from the best of my memory.
So, in this sequence, I think it is the case that K2-SO was only rendered from behind.
IIRC, the reasons for not using it on more shots, and specifically the front shots in the sequence were two-fold, Primarily, we only had one TD/Lighting Artist trained in our pipeline using Unreal, which was still a little clunky to fit into our pipeline, so we were time limited. Now, K2-SO was not rendered from the front in a close-up due to problems with complexities with his eyes. (Some details from Naty later in the talk) Specifically, K2's eyes require fully lit transparencies with the full lighting model, at-least at the time Unreal only supports their full lighting feature set in their deferred renderer, and their forward renderer, used for transparencies was a vastly simplified lighting model which isn't able to fully capture the effect of K2's eyes. We were building a capable Forward renderer inside of Unreal internally, but this was not finished in time for Rogue One.
As an aside, we had a parallel internal renderer we were building for use on Rogue One, that even at the time had advantages, but Unreal was chosen for what I saw as political reasons.
I do not know of more recent examples, but I'm not involved in this project anymore, I know they used Unreal for Season 1 of the Mandalorian, but moved to their internal real-time renderer for Season 2. The internal renderer has a few advantages, not having to deal with the complexity of merging significant changes with Epic's engine for example with the forward renderer was one major advantage, but my understanding is that the major win, is just being able to build a renderer that integrates much better in their existing pipeline. Unreal's renderer is pretty strongly integrated into the rest of their engine, and the engine itself is very opinionated regarding how content is managed. And as you can imagine, ILM has their own opinions going back to about 30+ years of history.
I agree with your dispute of the broad characterization, but thought the counter-example would be illustrative.
BTW, I'm starting a new project investigating real-time rendering for film, and always interested to new perspectives, hit me up if you want to chat real-time rendering sometime.
The K-2S0 droid character in Rogue One (voiced by Alan Tudyk) was, in fact, rendered in real-time using Unreal, then composited into shots afterwards.
John Knoll from ILM gave a talk at GDC 2017 about it.
The catch, though, is that ILM took the Unreal Engine source code and modified it extensively in order to be able to render K-2S0 as he appeared in the film. It's not like they just downloaded it from the Epic Store and ran with it.
Maybe you're just totally misguided on what a producer does, which may be the joke you're trying to make that nobody knows what a producer does. The producer would be closer to the president of the board while the director would be the CEO.
This is false. It seems you don't know what you're talking about. OTOH, I have worked with multiple studios including Fox (now 20th Century), Searchlight, Vendome, Canal+, and Lightstorm.
The executive producer is similar to the CEO or other executive; hence the "executive" in their title. They are in charge of the overall production, but not the creative aspects of the film or episode, and usually are not involved in the day-to-day operations. A regular "producer" can be anyone involved with the day-to-day operations of this production, and this title was once given out like candy. (Look at the credits for Top Gun: Maverick, for example: David Ellison is credited with a "producer" title despite having no actual involvement with the movie beyond being the CEO of one of the studios funding the production.)
The director is not involved with hiring crew, unless they also act as a producer (aka, the "auteur" school). These days, many directors also executive produce their own films (e.g., Nolan, Cameron, etc.), but many don't (e.g., almost all Disney movies). The director gets to provide input as to who gets hired, but quite frequently the main crew and cast will already be attached to the film. Notably, directors can and do leave films all the time (e.g., Rogue One, Justice League).
Who the creator/founder equivalent is really differs between projects. Sometimes, the producer has the idea and staffs around it. Sometimes, the director has the idea and also acts as a producer or just staffs the producer out to someone. Sometimes, it's the studio's idea and staffs everything out.
This is true for a few films, but the vast majority of films start with a screenplay that has come across the producer's desk. Auteur directors might produce their own ideas (e.g., Lucas, Shamalayan, Nolan, Cameron), but even they will usually start with an idea they acquired from someone else (Shamalayan: Old and Cabin at the End of the World, Gunn: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nolan: Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Spielberg: almost all of his films, etc. Look at IMDB to see the production credits they have far exceed the films they actually direct).
.. and D&D got dropped from Star Wars. At least we have that.
See, at least the prequel trilogy of star wars had good ideas. It was just terribly executed.
The finishing episodes of GoT don't even have good ideas, in addition to being awfully written, lacking continuity, and poorly acted.
One of my favorite things was fans of the book series pointing out how Tyrion went from being the poignant observer of the universe through GRRM's eyes to simply being a sideshow dwarf that constantly said "my cock" and little else as soon as D&D ran out of book material for him. The "head vampire" trope for the NK basically meant I didn't watch the final episodes.
And Rogue One wasn't really that good, it was just "Battle Beyond The Stars", itself a cheap cash-in on the Star Wars craze, dusted off for Star Wars with some bad kung-fu movie tropes thrown in.
Thanks for that recommendation. It sounds like Andor should be worth watching.
I was totally sceptical about new Star Wars shows when Rogue One came out and had no interest in going to see it. However, I ended up watching it while I was tired (but not able to sleep) on a long-haul flight. To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a solid adventure film and I watched it again a year or two later on Disney+.
How long until what is currently photography is either full length video or 3d navigable worlds?
These Star Wars galleries are just phenomenal. I can't imagine it is long until you can apply filters to movies, for example taking Rogue One and applying a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick filter.
Or akin to Cars being a remake of Doc Hollywood with anthropomorphized Cars, being able to say something like "I want to see a remake of the 2013 movie Rush, in the world of Zootopia, with 15% styling from Speed Racker, set in the 70's, with flying animals, and the main two rival protagonists being flying squirrels, one of which has a birth defect and a prosthetic wing."
https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_permalinks=457335126558057
https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_permalinks=456534189971484
For example, in star wars, instead of doing something interesting or different
While I agree with everything you said as such, the Andor TV show (and Rogue One to lesser extent) indicates that they are at least capable of doing interesting things in the Star Wars universe, beyond Good space wizard vs Evil space wizard. I fear however that most fans don't actually want that and that Andor will be an aberration.
I have a particular distaste for rogue one, because it took a story that didn't need to be officially told, and gave it an official movie that was stupidly boring, uninteresting characters, no real value in the grand scheme of things, and generic as all hell.
"A bunch of bothans died to bring us this intel" is literally a more compelling story than rogue one.
I thought this at first, but it's arguably that Rogue One and Andor are the only Disney properties that deeply tie in to the universe. They really set up the events for the original trilogy and make them feel more filled out and real. The tone is one of sacrifice and hope, and intentionally plays as a counterpoint to the powerful space wizards in the films. It feels like the creators respect the narrative.
Or they simply watched everything they were interested in watching on the first service so there was no point in keeping the subscription active. It's not like it takes any effort to cancel. They will come back to it later (it's easy at most to reactivate a dormant subscription) when it has accumulated enough new stuff.
That's what I've been doing for the streaming services that aren't bundled with something else I have for reasons other than video streaming (Prime Video because I have Amazon Prime, Hulu because I have Spotify, Peacock Premium because I have XFinity as my ISP, and Paramount+ because I have Walmart+).
For example a couple months before "Avengers: Endgame" was released I realized that I had to see it in theaters. My previous approach for Marvel movies of waiting until they showed up on some non-premium cable channel like FXX meant I was a couple years behind, and I realized there was no way I'd be able to avoid major spoilers while waiting to see Endgame that way. So I got a month of Netflix (they had all the Marvel movies back then) and caught up on Marvel, and a few other things, then cancelled.
Later I got Disney+ for a week (free trial) and caught up on Disney and Pixar animated movies (Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Onward), watched Captain Marvel, rewatched Endgame to see what I'd missed on my bathroom break when I saw it in theaters, and watched the Star Wars trilogy that starts with The Force Awakens, watched Rogue One, and cancelled.
Right now, a couple years later, I'm back on Disney+, because they sent me on offer for a month for $1.99. I've caught up again on Pixar (Soul, Luca, Turning Red), Disney animation (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto), Marvel (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, the Loki series), some Simpsons shorts, and am trying to decide if there is any new Star Wars that interests me. When the month is up I will rewatch Luca once or twice, and then cancel.
I'll be back on Netflix for a month probably next year to watch Lucifer.
I'll also probably at some point do a month of HBO Max for South Park.
This type of development is unfortunately par for the course with modern Hollywood remakes of older media and probably will only get worse over time. I am not familiar at all with the LoTR stuff that's going on, but it seems somewhat similar to what they've done with Star Trek. Discovery and (especially) Picard make a mockery of Old Trek in terms of vision and values. I saw a recent parody video that described the TNG Federation as "Vegetarian Space Socialists" that everyone finds annoying but it seems like the writers of Picard have taken it literally. I won't argue that Old Trek is the epitome of subtlety, but the basic premise was that the Federation represents a utopian society that has mostly put aside material concerns in order to promote peace and prosperity in the galaxy. Star Trek was a series of stories about what would happen when you take people from this utopian society and put them in uncomfortable and challenging situations. This worked amazingly well.
Picard and Discovery throws this out the window. It seems like the rough outline of the show was to shoehorn as much heavy handed modern political controversy in between the big budget space battles. The characters seem to be raring to fight at every juncture which is pretty much the opposite of the Federation's MO.
This has also happened with Star Wars but I feel less bad. I think Star Wars was always a bit less "high brow" than some of the other media being discussed here, but Disney seems to have scoured the entire script of the original trilogy for any lines they could stretch out into scenes for a spinoff film ("Kessel Run" for Solo, "Many Bothans Died" for Rogue One). To me this stuff is straight up cringe - at the same level as bad fan fiction.
Ultimately I have started to regard most of these films as products in the same sense as breakfast cereal at the grocery store. When they put out a new neon green version of lucky charms I don't get mad - I don't pay attention at all. Luckily, it seems like there are some filmmakers who are making interesting films even post-COVID (Robert Eggers, David Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) so I have some hope for the future. But these mega-budget reboots? I do my best to ignore their existence at this point.
Strongly agree with that assessment. I swore off watching any more after the astonishingly-bad garbage that was Episode II, but got lured back by reports from other fans that "no, really, they finally made a good one" with III. No. Wrong. Those people tricked me. Admittedly, it didn't help that I hadn't kept up with outside-the-films media so had no idea WTF was going on.
Episode I is the best of the prequels by a long shot, even though it's not very good. II's definitely the worst of them, though (maybe the worst overall? I dunno, Ep. IX might be even more broken on a technical level than II is, but it managed to fall into a "so bad it's... not good, but entertaining" sweet spot for me where at least I could laugh at it, while II is both badly-made and painfully boring), so at least I didn't get tricked back into the theater for another failure of quite that level.
Episodes I and VII are the two I'd put in their own special category, recommendation-wise. Like, if you've watched IV, V, VI, VIII (maybe skip it I guess since it's the middle of a trilogy? That one's hard to recommend just because of that, especially with IX being so very bad) and Rogue One, and are truly desperate for some more Star Wars, consider those. One's fairly bad and the other's a typical irritatingly-lazily-written Abrams script (do let him cast, direct, and punch up dialog, he's excellent at all of those, masterful at times, even—do not let him touch plotting), but they're by far the best of the lesser set of the films in the franchise IMO.
Disney has done everything they could to kill this franchise.
All of the new movies are absolutely horrible except for Episode 8 and Rogue One.
Visions was okay, but that's such a bad sign. They basically had to give some anime studios a Star Wars license to make decent stories.
Episode 8 is the closest to capturing the original magic, the entire point was it doesn't matter who you are or where you came from. From everyone can be a hero. Broom boy was a fantastic reminder of this. By the time we get to episode 9, the story changes, no, only two families matter.
Instead of it being obvious, palpatine had a wife or something, in the extended universe. They drew some nonsense about one of his clones having a son or something.
It felt like someone who's never seen a Star Wars movie got a vague outline of what existing characters were there and got 4 hours to write a script.
At the same time, I am very happy with all the newer niche Sci-Fi stuff coming out
It's the Disney produced star wars films that moved (Rogue One, etc.)
The article frames the issue in way that's too black-and-white. Providing a backstory isn't necessarily bad storytelling it's just very difficult to get right so that most prequels, backstories, and flashbacks do not turn out well. It is absolutely a fair criticism to say that Hollywood uses prequels to milk existing IP and there are endless examples of cases where a vague or mysterious backstory was preferable to the one some studio decided to canonize. That's not always the case though.
Rogue One worked because it provided plausible explanations for points about the original film that didn't seem to make any sense. It seemed impossible that the Death Star could be destroyed so easily or that the rebels could find that flaw so quickly. Now we see why. Solo fell flat because nothing about Solo's past, as depicted in the film, significantly changed how we see his character.
I suppose Joker worked for some people because every version of the Joker is different so you could look at Joaquin Phoenix's Joker as a stand-alone character driven to insanity through various things in his life. It surely didn't work for anyone who expected an origin story for a version of the character that would eventually turn out anything like Heath Ledger's Joker. It's just not possible to draw a line from one to the other.
There are some objective-ish criteria we can apply: plot structure, themes, language and dialog complexity etc.
There are also more subjective criteria which can nonetheless employed like character development and character complexity in general, plot lines and plot wholes, number of literary and narrative devices employed etc.
Mandalorian is a simple linear narrative with an episodic structure with a rather thin plot, little to no character development, and the only "arc" serving as the single motivation for the plot to advance.
This especially evident in Season 2 Episode 7, where they tried to cram a series worth of a character's redemption arc and world building into a single episode.
This doesn't make Mandalorian bad. It's a very enjoyable well executed show with surprisingly few really weak points. This also doesn't make Mandalorian great, or amazing.
In 14 episodes Firefly had more character development, better dialog, working jokes and better acting than 16 episodes of Mandalorian.
As to boring drivel, that's my view of Rogue One: thin plot full of plot holes. The only narrative structure in the entire film is "15 minutes of static talking heads followed by rather uninspired and badly edited CGI action"
The real secret sauce: Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, and his team including the top-tier casting director Sarah Halley Finn.
Kevin Feige prevented Marvel movies from getting stale by completely switching the genre every single movie: eg, Winter Soldier (political thriller), Ant-Man (heist movie), Spider-Man Homecoming (high-school drama movie), Thor Ragnarok (Australia/New Zealand comedy), Shang-Chi (mythical Chinese martial arts movie).
Feige has said if a character is ever successful enough to have a third movie, they will always take a very different approach from the prior two movies. Thor Ragnarok is the best example of this: a soft reboot of the personality of a previously dull Shakespearean character into a fan favorite. The success of that soft reboot was enough to give that C-level character his fourth solo movie -- something Marvel has not done before.
None of Marvel's competitors have any producer of Kevin Feige's caliber. Not Warner Bros (DC comics), not Sony (Spiderman-villains universe) and not even Disney's LucasFilm (Star Wars).
Kevin Feige is 48 years old and it's not clear whether he'll retire after the X-Men and Fantastic Four are integrated in the MCU.
His magic touch and keen understanding of the characters have been a key part of the Marvel Studio's success, and it's not at all clear whether it will survive when he leaves.
Marvel Studios could become like LucasFilm after George Lucas sold it. It's a shell of its former self that can barely produce anything passable: Mandalorian and Rogue One just make the cut as being acceptable Star Wars, but very little else.
> I mean the stakes were incredibly high, billions in revenue for the foreseeable future.
That's exactly why the first sequel movie (EpVII: TFA) was so timid; I'm sure it was the most de-risked thing the writers and execs could think of—just a re-skin of the original.
> cheapening the force and the ability to wield it… It's telling that the secondary things - Rogue One, Mandalorian - are fan favorites instead.
Star Wars suffers from power and stakes creep: Death Star I is a planet-killer; DS2 kills planets and ships: Starkiller Base is a multi-planet killer; every ship in the Exegol fleet is a planet-killer. Force abilities are another example.
The Force co-opts any story it touches into one about destiny. And sometimes that's not appropriate, as in tales about rebel troopers or backwater mercenaries. As much as I adored The Child and was excited about Luke's cameo, I'm really glad those two things exited the show, hopefully resetting the stakes at a lower level.
I'm in your camp too on the Skywalker saga, though I really like Rogue One; definitely worth a rewatch. It's a bit scattered (perhaps a result of the massive pre-release re-edit to which it was apparently subjected) but it has its moments, including possibly the best Star Wars space battle set to film, as well as a visceral depiction of Vader's terrifying power.
It takes away from the other films as well by cheapening the force and the ability to wield it. Luke barely manages to lift some rocks after a lot of training montage, Rei lifts heaps of rocks without formal training. I don't think there's many people that liked the sequels. I can't believe they went in with those gung-ho, without the story fleshed out already. I mean the stakes were incredibly high, billions in revenue for the foreseeable future.
It's telling that the secondary things - Rogue One, Mandalorian - are fan favorites instead.
Star Wars has lost me. I loved 4,5,6, and I found 1,2,3 at least exciting to see the story arc closed up. But what came afterwards was pretty much unwatchable. I went to the cinema for Rogue One even, but dont remember a single plot-line. Thats pretty unusual for me, since I uslally remember storylines from movies I watched many years ago. But this stuff just didnt leave any impression at all.
I'm in the same boat. Every now and then I'll dip into an episode or two of an old series I liked whether on DVD or streaming. But I don't watch a lot of video generally and really can't imagine sitting back through the 100+ hours of video that made up a typical network drama series.
And I get tired of universes too. I've enjoyed some of the newer Star Wars material (esp. Rogue One and the Mandalorian) but, for the most part, I'm pretty done with it even if individual stories are interesting. You can only be so fresh within an existing universe.
That said, I understand if not fully appreciate that some/many people are perfectly happy to rewatch familiar settings and characters whether literally or in new plots.
I watched the first episode or two and wasn't that impressed. It just felt like a pretty generic action/adventure storyline with Star Wars... stuff, plastered over it in a fairly superficial way.
Which is how I feel about most big franchise movies these days; they all just feel like cookie-cutter action flicks with some IP draped over top to promote the theme park and/or Fortnite tie-in. Nothing interesting or surprising ever happens. Nothing worth mentioning in terms of emotional spectrum. Even the set design - which is always very handsomely executed - is just ruthlessly on-brand. It looks precisely like "Star Wars stuff" or "Marvel stuff" or whatever, without exception, to a point where it all just becomes branded noise. Not a single thing is new or out of place. It constantly calls back and feeds into itself; nothing new under the sun.
I agree that Rogue One was a little bit of an exception, at least in terms of plot/emotions. I would also put Episode 8 in that category.
Maybe I'm just watching the wrong kinds of movies.
The thing that makes me sad is that IMO the best Star Wars film that came out since the Disney acquisition was Rogue One (even though it trampled all over the expanded universe novel Rebel Dawn, which I loved). Likely Disney views that movie as their second-worst Star Wars outing (after Solo), while I enjoyed it far more than episodes 7, 8, or 9.
On the optimistic side, I absolutely love The Mandalorian (which I didn't expect, and resisted watching until after season 2 was complete), and I'm looking forward to The Book of Boba Fett as well.
But I absolutely agree with you on the failure of "corporate written-by-committee". I think The Mandalorian is so great in no small part because it's run by a small number of people who really love Star Wars and have been fortunate enough to be granted near-complete creative control.
I found Rogue One to be very interesting, but the newer episodes or Solo couldn't keep me interested.
The article totally fails to mention Rogue One, which is in my opinion the best prequel ever made, better than the 3 prequels and better than all following sequels, and demonstrates they can make a great Star Wars movie today using new characters. If they want.
Mando? I sorta liked it, although it still doesn't click. To me it lacks the big breath that has been a signature of the Star Wars Universe since like forever; there are glimpses of it here and there, but it seems it still needs more time to develop into bigger stories. As for now it seems to me sort of a "Firefly with jetpacks", which is not bad per se, but hey, it's Star Wars! Let's give it some more time and see where it goes.
Wreck-it-Ralph kind of cheated, but... how many different styles of 3D animation did you see in that film alone? (Wreck-it-Ralph is sort of the "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" of this generation, so it makes sense. No one will say that Betty Boop has a similar drawing style to Woody Woodpecker, even if both are characters in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit")
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Thanos (Avengers: Endgame), Shrek, Davy Jones (Pirates of the Caribbean), the Na'vi (Avatar), Spiderman (Into the Spiderverse), and the recreation of Princess Leia (Rogue One) are all 3d animation. Would you argue that they're the same style?
Well they have a lot to live up to ... i really liked Rogue One and of course The Mandalorian.
Overall and personally am happy they are making new Star Wars content yet they probably should continue making films and shows that are outside of the beloved characters and use those characters sparely in other films and shows.
There's an interesting story about how the CIA got wind that the Soviet Union was trying to steal the US's space shuttle plans in the late 70's/early 80s. So, they mixed in some fake formulas for the heat shield tiles, among other defects, which Russia copied and built. Their "Buran" shuttle made 1 flight and mostly burned up on reentry due to the faulty heat tiles. If you ever see any pictures of the Buran's, they look identical to the US's shuttles, because they were using stolen designs. My aunt was actually directly involved in uncovering this. It would actually make a great movie.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogue-one-how-the-soviets-stole-nasas-shuttle-plans
Edit: Here's a really cool video some guys made when they broke into the facility in Kazakhstan where the Burans currently sit, slowly falling apart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM
Hmm, how do you figure this narrative is fiction? I'm not exactly sure one can be objective about this sort of thing, as obviously the success of a film is hugely multivariate. But I think a good place to start is box office from the new trilogy and subsequent films.
SW VII (2015) – $2,068,223,624
SW VIII (2017) – $1,332,539,889 <-- loud complaints by "YouTubers"
SW IX (2019) – $1,074,144,248
The downward trend is honestly pretty extreme. Of course you can blame this on fatigue, yet if you do the same analysis with the Marvel Avengers films (which have not had the same "too PC" criticism directed at them), you will see the opposite trend towards the story's climax.
You can also look at the Star Wars films that are not part of the new trilogy: Rogue One and Solo.
Rogue One came out in 2016, after VII and before VIII. VIII was widely considered (especially by the YouTubers you refer to) to be the most egregious re-writing of Star Wars lore, establishing (as the argument goes) the main character as a clear "Mary Sue" (ridiculously over-powered character with no flaws) and otherwise shitting all over established canon in the name of "subverting expectations" (in the director's own words). Meanwhile, Solo came out after Episode VIII, and focused on (I would say) the male-favorite character in all of Star Wars, devilish rogue Han Solo. So I think the reasonable expectation before the release of either film was that Solo would be the more likely to succeed. But again, Solo came out fresh off the heels of Episode VIII, the main film that received most of the backlash you claim is "fake". I will let their respective Box Office numbers speak for themselves.
Rogue One (2016): $1,056,057,273
Solo (2018): $393,151,347
The only good Star Wars movie of the last umpteen years was Rogue One, where they weren’t trying to sell toys to children.
> I'd rather see a passion project set in the Star Wars IP than any of the recent multi-million dollar films.
I generally agree, though I thought Rogue One was pretty good.
George Lucas post 1976 is a mediocre director, and a worse writer. Even before 1976 he wasn't that great either - American Graffiti is a forgetable coming of age movie. If it wasn't made by Lucas of later 'Star Wars' fame nobody would remember it today.
What he is actually known for is being great at worldbuilding once, with Star Wars (beginner's luck?). Middle age took that ability away though after the eighties, like a punk band trying to be relevant in their 40s: only for hardcore fans.
And I say it regretably. I'd too wanted a great Star Wars 1, 2, and 3. That said, most modern S.W. movies are also crap. The J.A. ones were so much a blatant copy of the original story plots as to be useless, whereas Han Solo bordered on camp. Rogue One was somewhat decent though, and I hear good things about the Mandalorean...
Spielberg on the other hand is a true master...
My favorite scene in all three original trilogy is the opening when luke does the somersault flip as r2d2 launches the light saber at him...
That said, as an adult, after being let down immensely by eps 1-3, and finding mediocre/nostalgic entertainment in 7-9, rogue one actually feels better to me than all other movies.
I can't really compare it with Mandalorian though, except that they compliment each other nicely. I like RO because of it's dark, everybody dies in the end, that is totally NOT something you'd expect from ANY disney movie.
Rogue One is worth watching if you haven't already. Miles ahead of anything else SW related Disney has put out.
I don't disagree exactly, but:
One: SW has always had a hefty focus on merchandising, and porgs are at least better than Ewoks. (Also, I kind of love the porgs, and may in fact own a porg plushie. And have a porg desktop wallpaper. And some porg vinyl figures on my desk.)
Two: I think a release cycle of a movie every year could have been sustained with better movies. I, for one, would be thrilled if another Rogue One type movie was coming out this year. And the MCU (which I have to assume was their model here) has been doing okay with 2-3 movies per year. The fans didn't get fatigued by the quantity of movies but the quality IMO.
I think their execution was absolutely terrible and the result was quite bad, but the strategy was fine.
I watched the original trilogy in the theaters when they were released. (Admittedly I was a bit young for the first one.)
I've seen all the follow-ups/addons/sequels/rewrites that exist. Rogue One is the movie that I waited 30 years to see another story in the SW universe. It wasn't perfect but it was damn good enough.
The Mandalorian gives me hope that 'Grownups' are in charge and can create something worth looking at.
I am holding out hope that a story and plot will emerge. I really hate "baby yoda", but if that's what it takes to move a real story along I am willing to tolerate it.
#1 It looks incredible. Must win Emmy for best cinematography! #2 It feels real. It feels right.
I'm sorry you didn't like Rogue One.
$1.333 Billion for the Last Jedi was below expectations and $2.08 billion was “below expectations”?
They made two non trilogy movies. Rogue One was highly rated by both critics and the audience - Solo not so much.
The new movies are hit or miss.
Rogue one was good, Episode 7 was okayish as a introduction to new arc and characters, Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.
We don't talk about Solo. That move does not exist.
> I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better.
For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).
Atrocious is a pretty strong word. Saw it at the cinema with the wife and teenagers and we all enjoyed it. Rogue One was pretty spiffy.
Huh. I’d call TLJ the first interesting SW film since Empire. TFA was typical Abrams—ok in the moment but brain dead beyond forgiveness as you start to think about it as the lights come up. Lazy writing even by his standards, and I don’t just mean the “copying ANH” thing. Solo was straight up awful. Rogue One had great potential and didn’t live up to it, but was OK. Gave me Star Wars Feels a couple times, which is more than I can say for any of the others but TLJ (only one to achieve the thing where they make you care a ton about several rebel pilots, and characterize them, by giving you about 3 seconds with each, since Empire, and the best of that since ANH).
All content everywhere is hit or miss. With Disney, I didn't care for Solo or Star Wars Resistance. I enjoyed Star Wars Rebels and Rogue One. The Last Jedi had mixed reviews at best. I haven't been interested in a Pixar movie in several vears. It's not like Disney content is amazing all the time. It has winners and losers like everyone else.
Netflix has some of the best shows I've seen in a long time. It also has some is the worst. Just like Disney.
Rogue One was quite strongly tied to A New Hope, I'd say.
Personally I love both anthologies, and I love them a lot more than the new trilogy (I love Luke's role, but I have doubts about where the trilogy as a whole is going). I know Solo bombed, but for me it was the movie I'd been waiting 30 years for, and I wasn't disappointed.
Logan not even Marvel Studios it's 20th Century Fox so that makes it 0 in 10 :P For me, it went from I want to see every Marvel movie in the cinema to stream it from Netflix to I won't pay any extra if it's not on Netflix.
I really like the Star Wars universe, but the only good new movie was Rogue One. It worked because it was a completely separate story only loosely tied to the original films.
Rogue One was the only recent franchise blockbuster that came close to having a soul.
All the others seem to be a formulaic blend of running, shouting, shooting, CGI explodium, cartoon villains of astounding power and limited emotional depth, wisecracks™, on-the-nose moralising, and fresh-out-of-the-can sentiment.
But these movies sell. More thoughtful slower movies don't. It's a feedback loop. The studios pander to teen/young adult audiences, older audiences stay away, and the movies become younger, teenier, and less and less distinctive.
Where do Disney's TV channels fit into this? Besides the obvious Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior, they also own the FX channels and Freeform.
Their movies currently eventually make it to those, and that is mostly where I've watched them. Sure, they take some time to get there. They are currently just up to 2016, with Moana, Finding Dory, Rogue One, and Doctor Strange being where they are up to in Disney animation, Pixar animation, Star Wars, and Marvel, respectively. But none of their franchises are ones that I need to keep current with anymore [1], so I don't mind.
[1] I did subscribe to Netflix for a month a few months ago specifically to get up to date on Marvel, so I could see Endgame in theaters. That was a special case because I decided it would be too hard to avoid major spoilers in the two or three years it would take to show up on cable.
To be fair, Rogue One is a direct prequel to A New Hope, which was filmed in the 70s, so it has to maintain that aesthetic and has to contain the same anachronisms like "data tapes."
All of the Star Wars prequels (and the Star Trek series set before TOS) have the same problem, in that they have to present a "futuristic" universe that's acceptably so to modern audiences, yet maintain a sense of visual continuity as antecedents to shows or movies whose look was set in stone decades ago.
Also, you have to consider that Rogue One is an action movie, it's grand, swashbuckling Buck Rogers style space opera. You can't start with a thrilling orbital dogfight, then have close quarters urban combat, then... sitting at a terminal making database queries or something. It might be more realistic but it would also ruin the tone and pacing of the film.
I'm always struck by the giant CRTs in futuristic 80's movies. Blade runner is one example where there are scenes with CRT screens that even look very blurry/dated compared to the screen I'm watching on.
Also, this is a recent one, but in Star Wars rogue one, I felt it was odd how they had what looked like an IT nightmare. Seriously, they had to physically fly to the base and deal with a robotic arm connecting hard drives (was it tape drives?). Sure they have humanoid robots that are way beyond any tech today, but their cloud storage was basically current and even old school tech. Why don't they have some tiny crystal that stores unlimited data or DNA storage in a small cylinder or something that you would expect in the future? To be fair it is a "long time ago in a galaxy far away" but still, are we technologically ahead of those death star builders in some way?
I'm a huge Mass Effect fan. I played Mass Effect: Andromeda for about 30h at launch. For a CAD$80 game, that wasn't a good investment.
I also love System of a Down. Probably paid sub-$100 for their discography. Must have hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Isn't this a better value than ME:A?
I'm also a huge Star Wars fan. The $30 I paid for the movie ticket and the popcorn combo when I went to see Rogue One brought me much more pleasure than those 30h of ME:A, so was this a better value?
I know, that's one game, one artist, one movie, but that's just to illustrate that it's not that clear-cut.
Yes, this sort of tech is likely to make its way into CGI. Some relevant resources if you're interested:
1. This post shows how GANs were used to replicate the Princess Leia scene in Rogue One. The scene in the movie required a team of special effects artists, whereas this required access to lots of images of Carrie Fischer, a GPU, and this technology: https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-video-uses-the-power-of-deepfakes-to-re-capture-th-1828907452
2. I wrote this popular post on this topic (first page on Google for "deepfakes") that explains how it works, and where it can go for commercial applications: https://hackernoon.com/exploring-deepfakes-20c9947c22d9
3. If you prefer video, I gave a humorous talk on the same recently. It is designed for lay people, and has lots of examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wajS0XHzfpU&feature=youtu.be&t=153
Just today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.
People go to a Star Wars movie to see the hero destroy the Death Star!
I'm reminded of that scene in the Empire Strikes Back where they destroyed a Death Star. Oh wait! They didn't. Because in the middle movie of most trilogies, bad things happen to the heroes. They fail. They reach rock bottom, and the third movie is their final struggle.
You can't take any story with any characters and any plot elements and place it in the Star War Universe and magically have a Star Wars movie.
That's exactly what they did with Rogue One. Worked very well. In contrast, Solo was done in the style of the traditional SW movies and is generally acknowledged as a failure.
It's the same reason the Mad Max remake was good...You have to have some respect for the tone, themes, and plots of what came before. TLJ disrespects it's audience's desires by disrespecting the draw of the source material.
Mad Max Fury Road was completely inconsistent, tonally and other wise, with the original Mad Max, and is a direct descendant of the campiness of Beyond Thunderdome. Batman v Superman, on the other hand, ws made with the same tones, themes, and plots as the other DC Synderverse movies, and was still quite terrible. Aliens and Alien are both considered terrific, genre-defining films. Yet Aliens has very little in common with Alien other than Ripley and the xenomorph. The same can be said of Terminator and T2. Harry Potter 3 and on have little tonally in common with the first two films, yet the third is considered one of the best in the series. Etc...
Its way more complicated than that.
In the old days, artists would change the scenes to match the technology. If human skin couldn't be rendered well, you just showed off plastic and metals. Or, they'd make a "cartoony style" and hope that the audience would get used to the plastic barbie-looking skin.
Or in the case of Toy Story: you just make a story revolve around plastic toys. Plastic looks good, remember, in 90s CGI. As long as actually humans are rare, the movie will look "realistic".
But you can't just keep making movies about Toys with plastic-like skin. And improving the algorithms to have realistic skin requires harder calculations such as "subsurface scattering".
Today, artists want to show off more materials, and they also want all those materials to be more believable. Pixar is insane with their details: they spent two years on creating the "Hank the Octopus" in "Finding Dory". And it shows: good reflections off the skin highlight the wetness of the Octopus, Hank walks and moves very much like a real octopus, etc. etc.
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In short: there are some materials which don't require much processor time. You probably can get away with a toy-story like plastic look and feel with 10 samples per pixel (talking 90s era here, where things were still relatively flat and primitive).
But if you want to create a CGI Grand Moff Tarkin in an otherwise live-action movie (Star Wars: Rogue One)... you'll need to do better than that. These scenes will naturally require 100s or 10,000 even samples before the human eye is tricked.
Rogue one had lot of footage in trailer which did not ended up in actual movie
Movies have always been bad. Always. Look at how many movies are made in Hollywood each year. Hundreds and hundreds. Maybe 10 each year are worth the time to watch. Maybe 1 will end up having enduring value. The rest just disappear.
Tropes get recycled, new genres come and go, are rediscovered, and then fade. Formula has always been important in cranking out the volume of productions. The odds are stacked against any one movie being a success, either critically or financially. Who would have thought that Spielberg would follow up Jurassic Park with such a stinker?
The studio system was no ideal world; actors were stuck in their contracts and had horrible bargaining power. Censorship was the norm, writers were not given much leeway. Today's movie industry is far healthier, with more outlets, more customers, and more opportunities.
The problem today isn't on the distribution side, but on the production side. Creating a movie is just so expensive. Same problem facing the video game industry. Think you can create a movie for $4M? That's the inflation adjusted budget for American Graffiti. Or Star Wars at $47M. Not a chance. The FX alone would probably cost that. Rogue One was over $200M...
>a movie poised to become the first money-losing film in the series
Understatement of the century right there, the film is actually looking to be the biggest box office bomb in cinematic history.
> The studio ultimately may have to write off $50 million on the movie, according to B. Riley FBR Inc. analyst Barton Crockett.
Where are they getting this 50m number? For a film that hadd an original budget of $250m and 80% reshoots, and likely won't break $400m worldwide, I don't see how it's only going to be a $50m writeoff. I'd roughly estimate production budget at $350m, marketing at $100m, and global ticket take at 50%, so it's at most $200m take minus $450m, leaving $250m lost. Sure, toy sales and DVD sales might help but I can't comprehend how this is being downplayed by most outlets as "Solo isn't doing well" when it's by all accounts an utter disaster.
>there’s more evidence than ever that people are growing weary of the franchise
Anytime I see phrases like this I imagine Kevin Feige whistling innocently just out of sight.
>“Star Wars: Episode IX,” a J.J. Abrams-directed installment
Personally, JJ and to a lesser extent KK are the reasons I'm no longer excited about Star Wars. JJ is, in my opinion, a hack director, good at making 7/10 films, and KK is great at business but awful at creative input yet that's what she's doing. I only hope that Disney can get a business-savvy yet fanboy leader like Feige in charge of Star Wars.
>But toys and other merchandise is one area where “Star Wars” has been losing steam.
This shouldn't be surprising but it is because we took for granted how creative and interesting the models in pre-Disney Star Wars were; I probably won't ever watch the prequels ever again but the clone trooper design is just awesome and I've bought LEGO sets just for them.
The new stuff? Utterly derivative, boring as hell. Phasma is the only remotely interesting design which is why she was plastered literally everywhere but she's basically Fett in the OT, only without the supporting villain cast. The blasters in the ST are as uninspired as the writing. The FO blasters are just E-11s, but with white parts! And a foregrip!
God, it's like current Lucasfilm has no passion for design. Where are the Ralph McQuarries or the Ben Burtts in the new staff? Are there any intense nerds there or are they all good-enough hacks like JJ?
Glancing over Wikipedia I'm finding most of my favorite sci-fi writers/creators either endured a war (Tolkien, McQuarrie, Heinlein, Asimov) or were surrounded by people who did (Clancy, Bradbury), and I wonder just how much our comfortable lives keep us from being creative on average. I mean, none of the new Star Wars stuff really got me thinking, and that's what I live for. TLJ "answered" most/all of TFA's questions with "it's not important." Solo answered questions I can't say I ever cared about. Same with Rogue One, despite my love for it.
I realize this was a bit rambly but ugh since TLJ I just feel empty. To the article's point yeah I suppose I'm fatigued, and that's infecting my family members because they ask how I liked it and I emphatically reply it's the worst Star Wars film to date (in my opinion).
They are segmenting the universe, which is the right thing to do. The main storyline is meant to onboard kids, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future, so you can expect more of the same there.
Where the interesting stuff will happen is in the “underworld”/“legends” line that started with Rogue One and now continued with Solo. That’s where directors will be given enough freedom to write movies for grown-ups. Some will be good, some less so, exactly like the books and fanfiction that have been written over the years - riffing on an established universe can actually be harder than building a brand new one from scratch.
This is why Disney's casting of real actors for the new Solo film struck me as odd.
In Rogue One, ILM already conjured the younger forms of two actors using CG and achieved damn near photorealism in doing so. Furthermore Disney's TRON: Legacy (2010) featured a slightly uncanny but nonetheless impressive young Jeff Bridges.
A fully photorealistic and believable young Harrison Ford in about ten to fifteen years doesn't strike me as entirely beyond the pale.
"Ever since the American-Norwegian crime drama “Lilyhammer” became Netflix’s NFLX, +2.32% first original series to premiere in 2012, the company has been committed to voraciously generating new content in addition to its huge library of existing TV shows and movies."
"huge", my posterior.
U.S. context: In the last couple of years, aside from a very few new headliners (e.g. "Rogue One"), and some lingering headliners from older contracts (e.g. "West Wing", Star Trek), and ever-fewer good independent productions, I find Netflix's streaming library to be the dreggs of barely acceptable quality. (People will watch it when there's nothing better.)
Netflix streaming seems to be more popular than ever, but, "Jessica Jones", "The Crown", and a few other Netflix productions aside, Amazon Prime is bringing more engaging content into their lineup than Netflix is. (And that isn't saying too much. Most recently, on Prime, I'm enjoying re-watching the old "Kung Fu" show from the 70's -- in good if not spotless, widescreen prints -- apparently, original filming was with cinema-format cameras.)
There are still some worthwhile titles on Netflix streaming (U.S.). But after a few months, you've seen them all.
For those of you outside of the U.S., for all that your catalogs are smaller -- so I read -- you should know that, in the U.S., almost no new major films end up on Netflix. And almost all of the older ones are now gone -- contracts expired. Per what I read and hear, some do still end up or remain in other countries' NF catalogs.
The technique behind deepfakes will rapidly improve the quality of CGI actor re-skins. One of the early (safe-for-work) demonstrations was a recreation of young Princess Leia's scenes in Rogue One, which was arguably higher quality than the film studio's best efforts despite being the work of a lone hobbyist.
Completely fabricating an actor in CGI will still look weird, but using a stunt double / character actor and transferring a big-name actor's appearance onto them is rapidly becoming faster and cheaper.
From reddit, regarding the Star Wars stuff:
> Top is original footage from Rogue One with a strange CGI Carrie Fisher. Movie budget: $200m
> Bottom is a 20 minute fake that could have been done in essentially the same way with a visually similar actress. My budget: $0 and some Fleetwood Mac tunes.
Non-NSFW sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/deepfakes/comments/7sjkw5/ilm_fixed_that_for_you_edition/
> Top is original footage from Rogue One with a strange CGI Carrie Fisher. Movie budget: $200m
> Bottom is a 20 minute fake that could have been done in essentially the same way with a visually similar actress. My budget: $0 and some Fleetwood Mac tunes
I think the prequels tried to tell a good story. Apart from a few glaring mistakes(like the idea that Anakin built C-3PO) the story and plot ideas were good enough. But scene to scene, it was poorly executed, with stilted dialog, bad direction (which often shows up as bad acting and unlikable characters), and uneven pacing. There's legitimate character development. The problem is, execution of those character arcs are clumsy or forced and lack the dramatic impact they should have. Certain plotlines are tedious, but you could make an argument that better editing could have fixed those flaws.
I think the Disney movies don't even try to tell a good story. The plots barely make sense and frequently violate established rules and conventions for no apparent reason. Apart from perhaps Kylo Ren, the new characters are static and uninteresting. Rey is likeable but has no growth. Finn is likable but isn't believable as an ex-stormtrooper. The relationship between The First Order and the Resistance/Rebellion is muddled and confusing at best. Where the prequels dwelt too much on tedious political details, the sequels go the other direction fail to establish a compelling galactic context for the war. As for Rogue One, I enjoyed that in the way I enjoy a dumb, mindless action movie. The characters were bland and uninteresting and the plot was just barely good enough to keep me interested.
The original trilogy had a good well-focused story, a good plot, a simple but sufficiently compelling political context, likable characters that experienced legitimate growth and character arcs. It had exceptional editing, great pacing--albeit slower than any blockbuster you'd see today-- and amazing sound design and music. There are some flaws, and some internal inconsistencies. But it's easy to argue that the major ones, such as Vader being revealed as Luke's father, enhance the story more than detract from it. It makes Obi-Wan's character seem less virtuous, for example-- but he's a fairly minor character and a minor flaw isn't a problem anyway, it makes him seem more human.
The original Lucas trilogy wasn't perfect, but it's far superior to either the prequels or the Disney sequels.
Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.
It seems like every film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:
* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.
* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.
* Desaturate everything else.
In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:
Rogue One
Cyan and olive: http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg
Captain America: Civil War
Yellow and red: http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil-war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg
Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:
http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson-Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg
This is a daylight shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.
The Jungle Book
Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):
https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png
Deadpool
Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:
http://turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand-Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg
The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.
Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
More of the same:
http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp-content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png
It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.
Hidden Figures
https://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg
More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.
Star Trek Beyond
If the past is warm, the future must be cool:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg
Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:
http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg
La La Land
I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:
http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png
Ghostbusters
Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:
http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg
Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.
Central Intelligence
The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:
https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg
The Legend of Tarzan
http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg
Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.
...You get the idea.
Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more pleasant to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.
One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was heavily colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:
https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg
https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg
Rumor has it that he decided to take up writing as a hobby, which resulted in a movie script called "Rogue One."
You could do an anthology series of stories around but not inside the narrative of the films, taking sort of the same approach as _Rogue One_ (the only good post-first-trilogy movie) did with Star Wars.
As you say, though, an end-to-end retelling of LoTR doesn't make much sense.
I don't see the problem with that. Rotten Tomatoes is a review site where people judge the quality of a movie, not the popularity of a movie. You're probably thinking of popularity when you say that, because to me, Rogue One was kind of "meh", but that's just my opinion.
A flip side to this... is Rotten Tomatoes boosting movies that would otherwise be ignored, by virtue of excellent ratings?
I'm thinking specifically of Hidden Figures here. Who would ever have thought that we'd see a Star Wars movie (Rogue One) booted out of the #1 spot by a movie about black women doing math?
(This is in no way a criticism of either movie, btw. I loved both of them and consider them high-water marks of recent cinema.)
People forget that Disney owns a lot of must-see content:
For example, here is the list of top grossing movies of 2016 http://www.imdb.com/list/ls074920894/
Disney had the following films
1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Rogue One
3. Finding Dory
4. Zootopia
5. The Jungle Book
11. Doctor Strange
12. Moana
19. Alice Through the Looking Glass
For 2017 so far (http://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2017)
Disney has
1. Beauty and the Beast
3. Guardians of the Galaxy V2
11. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Cars 3
They own the Marvel franchise, the Star Wars, as well as some of the most loved children's movies in history. They also have a ton of children's TV programs.
If Disney really had a subscription service with all their movies and TV shows, I would choose them over Netflix.
I saw Interstellar on a beautiful IMAX screen. There were a couple of teenage boys laughing and cracking jokes behind me most of the movie. Not loud enough you'd kick them out, but still obnoxious, especially in the quiet scenes. They apologized when I said something, but then they started again after 10 minutes.
During Rogue One, the guy sitting next to me waited until the end of the opening crawl to unwrap his steaming jalapeño cheese hotdog, which he then slowly ate over the next 15 minutes, relishing every bite and every chug of soda.
Add to the fact that the acoustics in theaters are still never quite right (it's often LOUD but doesn't envelop you)...
I just don't know why I would ever enjoy the theater experience again, when it's just so damn difficult to enjoy a good film.
In theaters, with the right treatment and the right film, 3D can be totally awesome.
I haven't heard a lot of people talk about the 3D in Rogue One, but I'm very glad I saw it that way.
Just picked a movie at random (Rogue One) and the top featured message board posts are:
Krennic or Hux?
I want a Chirrut Imwe & Baze Prequel
What other genres could be transplanted to the Star Wars Universe?
Just saw the film tonight - It was OK.
To me, that's a pretty random collection of fringe topics or opinions. Are these really the top things up for discussion about the movie? How about an AMA with the moviemakers? Seems like a lot of potential here not being used.
Theaters used to be the only way to watch movies, then they became just the best way, and now they're just an experience separate from home viewing.
Theaters exist because they're the biggest consumers of movies and, because they're the biggest consumers, studios give them limited time exclusivity exists to benefit their continued existence. It's a bit of a catch 22 and change is slow.
I watched Rogue one in a regular non-3D theater and the projection was not great. The black levels were horrible. The actual 24fps (x2) frame rate bothered me. I expect to watch it again at home, streamed from Netflix, and have better viewing experience.
> Rogue One: A Star Wars Story… would be impossible to do without CGI.
It's a prequel to a movie that had exactly one computer generated element in it, which was a wireframe model that took so long to render that they couldn't re-render it when the final design changed.
They _chose_ not to make it without CGI. It wouldn't have been impossible.
edit: I'll just leave this right here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034928/
Article mentioned the CGI characters in Rogue One, but those ruined the movie for me, among other reasons. For one I think I've seen better graphics in video games and while I concede it must have been the contrast between real and fake, what really pissed me off is the realization that either they lacked the imagination to come up with a credible alternative story or that this was some sort of sinister "fan service".
The other thing that pissed me off is that in Rogue One, like in other recent movies, nobody is kissing anymore, but people dying of violent deaths is totally OK.
The primary reason for why Hollywood is having problems is because they make really shitty movies, full of CGI but with no story. I can even understand the violent deaths, after all, given the lack of story, you can't relate to those characters, so they might as well die spectacularly, before the audience dies of boredom.
Oh yes, I'm not from the US, so not sure what audience they are targeting, but it ain't me. I like some kissing to go with my action.
A pretty small percentage, obviously. The top grossing movies of 2016 were Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Jungle Book. All of these movies would be impossible to do without CGI.
Viewers want movies to be spectacles. If we're watching something in a theater, we have high expectations of the production value. Otherwise, why even waste the time and money going to a theater? We can watch the "good", low production value movies at home.
Follow-up - Rogue One sucks in 3D. It's only an annoyance, blocking the set for some stupid spaceship models that wouldn't have been impressive compared to Babylon 5.
Also, the movie is Star Wars so there's no drama whatsoever. Literally everyone in the film is killed within seconds of their mission being accomplished.
PS: And no: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rogue_one_a_star_wars_story/
It got 85% and 88% from fans and this is the #1 movie globally for 2016.
I felt like I could see this in Rogue One: different parts of the film were done by completely different production companies, results varied, and they had to go with whatever they had by the ship date.
Without the Episode you default to the release order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_films_and_television_series
"The Clone Wars", "Rogue One" are both on this list. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Star-Wars#tab=summary So 8 is "Star Wars Ep. VII: The Force Awakens" and 9 is "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"
Ignoring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Holiday_Special which was never in theaters.
> When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
A lot of missing context here. "Star Wars 8" has not been released, so if you're drawing effect of 7 on 8's performance, I'm not sure how you're doing it. Budget alone does not necessarily tell you expected gross.
Perhaps you were talking about Rogue One? There's a lot of context there that would temper any direct comparisons.
There's also time preference.
Kickstarter is huge, there is no "the" kickstarter model, but at least in physical board game and RPG dark corner of kickstarter, people get extremely unhappy if product shows up in retail before the backers get theirs delivered.
A second aspect of time preference is original OP claims there's only two services or whatever all $5, but I assure you the market is much wider and there's $2 at redbox, "free" if you watch TV and don't mind editing and commercials, "free" and commercial free if you pay your annual amazon prime membership to cheap shipping, "free" if you have a public library card... Everything ends up free at the public library eventually, but it could take years and years.
The theater portion of the industry doesn't handle this nearly as well as the distribution side. I have friends who have friends, etc, and somehow I got to see the very first public premier showing of Rogue One last December. Its a different experience seeing a new movie vs one where the spoilers are all over the internet, it was interesting. So you practically had to be in the mafia to get tickets, but aside from that financially my ticket cost exactly the same as a showing a month later. The theater, in an attempt to be "fair", is leaving a lot of money on the table. My son really wanted to see the movie and I think he would have been cool with $100 tickets because he's just so excited, not unreasonable to think the theater lost over $80 per seat that night. I'm sure 10% of the population is glad to pay 10x the cost for bragging rights or just being hyper-fans.
The local theater is slowly getting a clue... they have in theater bars and restaurants so if you want to blow $50/person at a movie you certainly can in extreme luxury and gluttonous comfort. They need to get a clue faster. Also the culture where I am is, OK with alcohol whereas I can see in some areas the local culture would just lead to obnoxiousness and police calls, so there are cultural aspects.
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Terrible analogy. Star Wars fans everywhere loved it to the tune of 2 billion dollars + and 90%+ on rotten tomatoes. As for the next one, Rogue One, earned over a billion dollars, making it the second largest opening this year. Episode VIII will do very well.
Yes, there were issues with Ep VII. No, those issues did not make it not awesome.
And this is why I end up downloading or streaming films - physical media DRM is now so hostile to the user it actively impedes the licensee from using the media in predictable and normal scenarios. I spent Christmas repeatedly explaining DRM to my mother who didn't understand why half her content wouldn't work with her new TV & Blu-Ray - I had chipped her old one so she could use discs from multiple regions as she lives on a boat.
On another note - VR has ruined 3D films for me - the scale is all wrong - watching Rogue One recently, my VR-adjusted brain struggled with the toy-scale spaceships. You get used to scale being correct quickly, and it being wrong is jarring - never mind being stuck to a single vantage point. I now prefer 2D films and my 3D really 3D.
Out of curiosity, did you end up watching 3D IMAX? There is a single IMAX cinema in my city (so I cannot do a comparison), and Rogue One was awful in it. Blurry, dark, slightly out of focus. I wonder whether this is a flaw in all 3D IMAX showings, or maybe this particular cinema had some technical problem?
My experience was that 3D IMAX is way worse than regular 3D (which I'd also rather not watch).
Doctor Strange is, but unfortunately at least in my town it's only showing in 2D at the cheap ($1) theaters now. I was blown away by the appropriate use of 3D and visuals in 3D IMAX for that movie. I saw Rogue One in 2D and then IMAX 3D and hated it in 3D.
Article about it: http://www.thisisinsider.com/doctor-strange-how-you-should-see-it-2016-10
When new movies come out, google "should I see it in 3D $moviename" type articles. Unfortunately it's January now; not many good movies coming out.
Same here.
I went to see Rogue One to the only IMAX cinema in my city. First time I went to an IMAX and I didn't like it at all. This surprised me because IMAX is supposed to be such a big deal, but the picture quality was awful: only the center of the screen was in focus, everything else was awfully blurry and dark. It really ruined the movie. Is this supposed to be a premium experience?
I can't wait for the 3D fad to die. It will probably outlast me, however.
Maybe it's different in different markets, but in my area, every movie released in 3D is also released in 2D.
They're usually released simultaneously for blockbusters, e.g., 1-2 IMAX screens showing 3D and 1-2 screens showing 2D. For others, they might start out only showing 3D on opening weekend and then transition to 2D as the movies age and move to smaller screens, e.g., Rogue One is still playing in my area but only available in 2D now.
I suspect the best path forward is simply to cast another actress. They needed CGI for Tarkin and Leia in Rogue One because those movies dovetailed right into A New Hope and the appearances of the actors were a core part of the identity of the characters, but honestly, while it was great to have Carrie Fisher reprise her role as 53-year-old Leia in Episode VII, it would have been perfectly acceptable for them to have cast another actress from the start.
This brings to mind the Harry Potter series. The first two movies had Richard Harris playing Dumbledore, but then he died, so they simply recast the role and gave it to someone else, without any in-universe explanation for the change in appearance. And personally, I think Michael Gambon was a much better Dumbledore than Richard Harris.
Per [1] it looks like there was an agreement between Mr. Cushing's estate and Industrial Light & Magic. I would be surprised if this did not involve some sort of compensation to the estate. In this day and age though, I would also not be surprised if in some franchise contracts big studios try to get preemptive agreements to use an actor's likeness in future films. Obviously that was not the case here though.
[1] http://www.slashfilm.com/grand-moff-tarkin-in-rogue-one/
Edited to add: for a long summary of likeness law, see: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-another
>I guess we need to get used to the rapid loss of famous personalities in the future.
This one seemed overly tragic to me. My wife and I were in the theater watching Rogue One, along with many thousands world-wide, the night this happened. Unlike some other stars, she remained active and interesting and made her life story public record. She became relevant again since the new Star Wars movies, and not to spoil R1, I won't say more. She was more than likely going to be in the new Star Wars movie next year as well.
That said, we're seeing a lot of early deaths of celebrities lately. Mostly via the bum luck of cancer or heart disease[1] or, most commonly, the abuse of illegal and prescription drugs. A part of me thinks a lot of these characters were high-risk for ages and the odds finally caught up. I hope drug liberalization is in our future. At the very least it would help with harm reduction. Sadly, here in the states, the president-elect and the cabinet members he's picked are about as anti-drug as practically possible. Perhaps next election we'll get a POTUS and a congress that cares about ending the drug war, instead of fueling it.
[1] Some of which is caused by cocaine abuse decades before. Sadly, even going 'clean' for a long time doesn't undo damage.
> source: the comments in that thread
... and the new Rogue One movie. If you haven't seen it -- it is worth watching.
As a counterpoint, when my wife and I saw Rogue One we were both impressed that they managed to find somebody that looks just like Tarkin from the original film. I had no idea he was CG until reading about it after the fact.
Fisher has always seemed to have a mature, nuanced take on what the role of Leia meant in her life. Both a love that she got her life transformed, coupled with the bemused resentment of people's expectations and the reality of being an aging actress. Hard to imagine she was terribly bitter about Rogue One.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-carrie-fisher-obit-20161227-story.html
When some moviegoers complained on social media about how much older she looked in “The Force Awakens” than when she had last played the character more than three decades earlier, she retorted on Twitter with her typical sharp wit, “Please stop debating about whether or not I aged well. Unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings.”...
...“It's not always fun, but it’s certainly life-changing,” she told The Times last year. “I have been Princess Leia exclusively. It’s been a part of my life for 40 years…. I’m like the diplomat to a country that I haven’t been to yet. I am that country.”
I was thinking the younger characters are probably harder to do because they can't hide the flaws anywhere. Leia was very creepy in Rogue One, but it didn't even occur to me that Peter Cushing had died 20 years ago until after I finished watching the movie. His recreation was very good.
>At least this was after the Star Wars: Rogue One movie.
huh? why would that matter?
This is sad. My condolences to her family and friends. At least this was after the Star Wars: Rogue One movie.
Edit: I think the downvotes misunderstood the intent of my comment. I'm glad she was able to enjoy the new Star Wars movie, and I'm glad her friends, fans, and family also were able to enjoy it without mourning.
I really find the opposite in Star wars (before Rogue One). Most of the villains are bad and most of the good guys are good. There are only occasional flip-flops and they are all major plot points to clearly indicate the transition. They keep the morality so easy the average 7 year old can follow it. They go so far out of their way to make it easy as to color code good and evil (what color is uniform? The lightsabre?).
Compare this something like with actual moral issues like Schindler's List. The main character navigated a huge moral gray area. He couldn't make any proper kind of stand against the industrialization of evil in WWII Germany but he did what he to save what lives he could and that meant not saving some (to reduce suspicion). It also meant lying to all the people who accepted him as peers. He was a traitor all the Germans as he ran factories that hurt the war effort, He was an enemy of the allies because he ran a munitions factory. To the families of the people he saved he still might have been viewed poorly because his employees were functionally slaves. But the choice to enslave those people in safe working conditions and keep them alive and well fed saved them and to them he was a hero.
There are tons of other movies, books and stories where the good guys are not clearly good and the bad guys not clearly bad. Consider Worm (Web serial), the heroes are jerks who sacrifice the lives of others and the villains are often just looking out for their own. Who is really good and bad?
Well, wasn't Rogue One exactly that treatment? It was a visceral and brutal experience (especially when one compares it to fable tales of SW). I left the cinema quite unsettled by how gray everything was, the sacrifices and commitment to the cause.
I'd really love SW movies to be more like that, less bland and mentally lazy (AND NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS)
The Rogue One companion novel, "Catalyst", clarifies this. These days, those new books are full-fledged canon rather than "expanded universe" material.
The Republic obtained those Death Star plans from the Separatists after the Battle of Genonosis (i.e. Episode II). The Republic started building it during the Clone Wars, they hadn't even been rechristened as "The Empire" yet.
I agreed with this at first. It felt rushed, and cramped. But then I saw it again (not really by choice, my family had already booked the tickets) and this time most of it actually made more sense to me. There's still gratuitous fan service, like bumping in to Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba or putting blue milk in the middle of the shot, but in terms of the scenery and story I think it works. It can be argued that there are too many insignificant characters being introduced and killed off before you have time to start caring, but given it's essentially a war movie that kind of makes sense to me. People largely unknown to one another rally together against a common foe, knowing full well the chance of success is slim and risk of death is great. As there's plenty of peril, characters are killed off unceremoniously all over the place – because it's war and war does that to you. Add to that the Death Star designer with a conciense, some really evil dudes like Krinnic – commenting "oh, it's beautiful" without so much as an inkling of remorse upon wiping out an entire city in an instant – and a great tie-in to ANH, and I think it works really quite well. I liked getting the backstory to why the Death Star has such a crucial flaw, and I buy it. It then also makes sense to me that the Death Star in ROTJ suffers the same fate – it's an iterative design (probably getting rid of exhaust ports) rather than a fundamental fix.
I'm hoping there's a directors cut that fixes some of the pacing and adds some more reason to care about Saw Gerrera, but even without I quite enjoyed it – the second time around. I can definitely see how it's very confusing though, for someone not very well versed in the Star Wars saga, or if it's their first movie in the series.
I recommend, if you're a fan of the series, that you see Rogue One again. It did the trick for me anyway, maybe it will for you too.
One thing that did disappoint me quite a lot is the musical score. It feels entirely different from the established themes, and not in a good way.
I'm also a Star Wars fan, and I thought VII was pretty mediocre (unoriginal to a fault, cheesy, the stakes felt low, the pacing was weird, the character interactions were forced and unrealistic, Rey way too powerful, the New Order was too incompetent, too much blatant fan service, lack of scale, etc.), whereas Rogue One is probably one of my favorite Star Wars movies (along with ESB). Funny how opinions work like that?
But calling it one of the worst blockbuster movies ever made.. can't tell if you're joking.
It's interesting, but it seems like fans are being pretty polarized by Rogue One. It seems like the ones who love it wanted another entertaining story in the Star Wars universe, and got it. Those who hate it wanted something new out of it, and got another rehash.
I fall into the first category. I wanted to see the story of the plans getting into the rebel's hands, and got what I wanted. In addition, they created some fun one-off characters, wrapped up some plot holes in "A New Hope", and threw in some nice nostalgia with the X-Wing pilots.
In short, I wanted another stand-alone episode of the Star Wars space opera, and got it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it seems obvious to me that originality makes things better. Otherwise, why make new movies instead of merely rereleasing old ones? People want to see things they've never seen before, and they enjoy some degree of unpredictability.
* spoilers * I found myself caring more for the characters in Rogue One than in most Star Wars movies. I suspect it's because they were (relatively speaking) normal people who could die at any moment, not unstoppable heroes of destiny. They were also deeply flawed and conflicted in realistic and relatable ways. This gave their risks and sacrifices far more gravity, and is why so many people found the final half hour so fresh and compelling.
Really? Being a Star Wars fan who was very impressed by VII, I was shocked to find out how astonishingly bad Rogue One was. Almost like abysmal Avengers (once again: long time Marvel fan), it tried to push in so many unsignificant and inconsequential plot details that the movie got cramped and boring at the same time. All different McGuffins, buttons and objectives of the final battle looked like a series of mindless quest objectives for a video game, while offering nothing in terms of actual character development.
IMO, it was not only the worst Star Wars movie so far, but one of the worst blockbuster movies ever made.
YMMV. For me the attempts at a serious story fall flat due to the amount of plot holes and asspulls. I've enjoyed suicide squad a lot more - it wasn't trying to be taken seriously, so the absurdity didn't clash. Same with the previous star wars - it went for a very simple story, so it was harder to mess up
Rogue One is pretty, sure. But the story is a chain of coincidences. No character, except maybe for Vader - who's mostly a cameo, actually tries to act according to its presented motivation, or tries to solve any of their presented problems. Throughout the movie character motivations are at best tertiary to firstly doing whatever is flashiest, or secondarily executing whatever morality cliche the movie is currently on.
Basically, every character in rogue one is unbelievably stupid. And then you get to the 'science fiction' setting where battles between capital ships happen at 200m (but the bad guys only start shooting after the obligatory 5 minutes of tactical discussions), shooting at a force field that just destroyed multiple ships that rammed into it is a thing that makes sense, etc. Etc.
Rogue One is still as much of a fairy tale as previous star wars moves; but it tries to pretend it's not. And that completely destroys any immersion the viewer might have.
To anyone who hasn't seen Rogue One yet... I think it's the best Star Wars movie since Empire. Worth your time. Amazing fast-paced character development and arcs (compare Star Wars to Suicide Squad if you really want to be impressed or see how badly it could have turned out), wonderful little cameos, rich visuals that show what the prequels could have been, and paramount a superbly written and acted story.
(Spoilers)
The ambiguous ethics of sending an assassin to kill Galen because The Rebellion didn't believe how he could leak truthful information (and keep this mission secret from Jyn in order to get her help locating her father) was especially well done. The concept of sides, Empire or Rebellion, being unclear to people until they join one was also woven in nicely -- normal people just want to go about their lives free from conflict.
The most hotly debated topic between me and my friends though wasn't about ethics, it was about if Donnie Yen's character was using The Force or not. (Of course he was, and in prior movies plenty of characters used The Force before becoming Jedis.)
https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2016/04/08/rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-who-is-the-staff-wielder/
Rogue One's story certainly muddies the waters a bit, but the fact Star Wars is willing to embrace more complexity and a blurring of the lines is great for the franchise and mature fan base. Someone woke up and realized that the value of the Star Wars ins't just how many lunch boxes it can sell, they can make a buck telling compelling stories as well. #NoEwoks #NoGungan
This is unacceptable. There's no reason to ruin all of these movies and shows, especially since this thread is about something else entirely. In any online community centred around works of fiction, this would be a bannable offense. I'm flagging your comment for this reason.
And no, not everyone knows about Vader. I have a friend who watched Star Wars for the first time last week just before we dragged him to Rogue One.
You can see my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13208548
The fact you implicitly accept that people will comment without watching a whole video or reading an entire article is much worse than any snark in comments.
Great moderation skills, just fantastic.
Here's my review of Rogue One: Opening previews were good but didn't have anything to do with Star Wars. I'll expect this on the front page with the top comment saying "Watch the whole movie" and others praising that commenter for offering such sage advice.
Maybe Assistant could somehow monitor what kind of things users are asking a particular app to do and use that to determine defaults for specific actions in future interactions. Imagine:
"Okay Google, get me movie tickets for Rogue One on Tuesday"
"I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that yet. Try telling me to ask another service like Fandango or MovieTickets.com."
"Ask Fandango"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Rogue One at?"
---
Later when I ask for movie tickets again...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Moana."
"I'm not sure how to do that. Would you like me to ask Fandango?"
"Sure"
"Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What theater do you want to see Moana at?"
---
Later still...
"Okay Google, get me a movie ticket for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them."
"Sure, let me ask Fandango... [Switches to Fandango.]"
---
You get the idea. And if a user ever wants to use a different service, they can always ask for it explicitly.
Pretty neat, but from a user's perspective I'm a little disappointed that the current implementation seems to require me to explicitly tell Google what app I want to interact with. I'd rather be able to just ask Google "Find me a movie ticket for Rogue One on Thursday" and have it be able to infer that I want to use the movie tickets app installed on my phone, than for me to have to explicitly say "Let me talk to Fandango" first.
That said, it looks like deeper integrations are coming:
> We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals.
Rogue One looks somewhat promising - but it is going in a little bit different direction as a stand-alone spinoff, not having to carry the weight of the franchise.
Although I still think any movie called Rogue One should be about Rogue Squadron and Wedge Antilles... But then again, I really fell in love with Star Wars reading the X-Wing novel series.