Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Jan 1st 2017. Rogue One. First film of the new year. This was great fun but very morbid. Shakespeare would have been happy with the litany of corpses thrown up here. It made me think of this from Hamlet:

O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast, struck?

Yeah, OK, fair enough - I looked it up on t'internet but I think it applies. 

The new band of 'misfits' was excellent casting, especially Riz Ahmed and Donnie Yen (below, channeling Zatoichi). Forest Whitaker had a slight whiff of ham about him, though. The oddest 'performances' were from the CGI characters, Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia. The VFX tech isn't quite out of the Uncanny Valley yet. The droid, K-2S0, had all the best lines, many apparently ad-libbed by the man under the suit, Alan Tudyk (him outa Firefly).

The writers nicely sidestepped most links to the main Star Wars series, even going so far as to cut a line off from the aforementioned wit-bot: "I've got a bad feeling abou....." "Quiet!" But they did need some nod-backs and it was nice to see Vader, especially at the end doing some high level Vadering with sabre and force magic shit.

I read somewhere that Jyn Erso's character arc is pretty unbelievable. When asked if she can live with Imperial flags flying across the galaxy, she says, "It's not a problem if you don't look up." Admittedly, it doesn't take much to change her from this Solo-esque bystander (Finn in The Force Awakens flirts with this ethos too) into a wannabe martyr. I didn't have a problem with the mood swing - I think Mads Mikkelsen as her father plays a vital part in her transformation. Incidentally, I'm not sure if her arc was a battle cry for the anti-Drumpf, anti-Brexit, anti-any shit-stain right-winger scummage (Murdoch, Abbot, Dutton, Hanson, Bolt, Jones, etc) that has floated to society's surface, but I kind of hope it was. 

Back to the film. The build up to the destruction of Jedha (above) was one of the best first acts of recent years, in any kind of film. And the final sortie at Scarif was very well-juggled and brisk, though ultimately bleak. Kudos to the writers/director for pulling it off. I'll end with Gareth Edwards explaining the process to Empire magazine:

I think there was an early version [where they didn’t die] in the screenplay. And it was just assumed by us that we couldn't do that, they're not going to let us [kill everyone], so let's try and figure out how this ends where that doesn't happen. And then everyone read that and there was just this feeling of, “they've got to die, right? Can we?” And Kathy (Kennedy) and everyone at Disney were like, “yeah, it makes sense. I guess they have to, because they're not in A New Hope”. And so from that point on, we had the license. And I kept waiting for someone to go, “you know what, could we just film an extra scene where we see Jyn and Cassian, they're okay and they're on another planet”, and la la la. And [it] never ever came, no one ever gave us that note, and so we got to do it.