I finally did it! I finally saw “Star Wars Rogue One”. Or “Star Wars Episode 3.9” as I’d call it! As a huge fan of the original triology I was definitely looking forward to seeing it but for one reason or another (one being my son’s refusal to see a movie he wasn’t allowed by the authorities to see!) it never happened when it was playing in the cinemas. And I certainly didn’t want to see a low quality “grabbed from the internet” version of the movie.
First off – spoiler warning! There are some spoilers below so don’t go there unless you’ve already seen the movie or don’t care about having it spoilt!
All in all – I was positively surprised at how good it was! I don’t know why but my expectations weren’t that great, probably because Episode VII was such a disappointment. But this one was really, really good.
And if you know me well enough you know one thing I love is continuity! Screwing up, or even ignoring continuity, can get me to dislike an otherwise good movie or TV show. Or in the case of Babylon 5 absolutely love a TV show that really isn’t that great once you remove the 5 story arc. And in this case most continuity I felt was acceptable, as expected there were tons of great references to Episode IV – one of the smaller ones being Bail Organa saying he’s going back to Alderaan and I spontaneously scream “don’t do it!!”. The other thing being the lengths they went to to have Tarkin and Leia in this movie when neither was actually in it! (there were ofcourse other characters that were “brought back” from the original triology, like Mon Mothma)
But another pitfall of trying to adhere to continuity is you can’t create characters or major plots without.. well, killing them before the end of the movie. And I’m sorry if this spoils it for the people that haven’t seen it but when they have a rebel meeting about wether to extract the Death Stars plan you can just go around the table and you know, based on who’s in Episode IV, who’s going to make it back alive! So in that way you kind of knew how the ending was going to be. And to my surprise they did the un-Hollywoodian (is that even a word!) thing and stuck with it!
And regarding Tarkin and Leia who were both computer generated faces superimposed on other actors.. I don’t know why the brain is so god damn good at it but you definitely saw that there some something “off” about their faces. Most notably Leia, even though it was just a few seconds and one line you saw that it wasn’t quite right. Great that they tried but it seems like an impossible task because the brain is just too good at face recognition for it to work.
Now – Darth Vader… well what can you say about Darth Vader… the problem with this movie is that the “original trilogy Darth Vader” was tall, imposing but not one for the front lines and certainly not a killing machine. That would have been more a Darth Vader from Episode 3.2 or something. But this movie ends a few days, maybe even hours, ahead of the first scene in Episode IV. But the original Darth Vader sent in his troops and never went in first himself, both the boarding in Episode IV and invasion of Hoth showed that. So ending it with a Darth Vader killing machine, even though it was cool as hell, didn’t really line up with the first scene of Episode IV. And it felt just .. misplaced somehow. But even though I’m a sucker for continuity I have to say that it was so damn cool that I’m gonna forgive that because sometimes rule of cool wins 🙂
stoff
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