Star Wars Anthology shit talk (Rogue One, Young Solo, TBD)

I guess my question is, knowing what this movie is about and knowing what Star Wars movies are generally like, what were you expecting this movie to be like? To me, this was pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be; a relatively surface space opera about a motley band thrown together largely by circumstance standing up to overwhelming oppression and sacrificing themselves so that others could have a chance to continue fighting. I wasn't looking for deep characterization, I wasn't looking for airtight plotting, I wasn't looking for something that would change my outlook or make me introspective; I was looking for a movie set in the Star Wars universe about stealing the plans for the Death Star, I got one, I enjoyed it.

Admittedly, my expectations weren't the highest (my husband is the SW fan; I was there mostly for him), but I was at least hoping for a sort-of good time, and this movie was really dreary and morose.

ah okay, that makes more sense

I agree with "morose"; this was one of the things I really liked about it.

For sure. Given the nature of the heist, everything kinda went down the way one might expect, but given that this was a Star Wars movie, I was legitimately surprised that EVERYONE died. I thought for sure there would be some uplifting, last-minute rescue of at least Jyn and Cassian but nope. I really dig that lack of compromise in genre fiction when it isn't in the service of facile grim n' gritty nihilism.

I mean, but yeah, suicide missions are usually kinda morose affairs, I would guess.

You might say that unlike some other productions of the past year, this film had a real suicide squad

Clearly unintentional given the production schedule but this felt like a very strong anti-Trump call to arms to me. But then pretty much everything feels like that to me these days.

am I the only one surprised that the Empire would voluntarily obliterate all its own technical research??

Does it expressly say this is the only datebase site they have?

lol, DATAbase.

Yeah, that seemed odd. The fact that the rebels had to go to that one specific planet to get the plans would presumably suggest an absence of backups.

it was just a way to cover up their colossal fuck up of allowing a small group of rebels to infiltrate and steal the plans.

Clearly unintentional given the production schedule but this felt like a very strong anti-Trump call to arms to me. But then pretty much everything feels like that to me these days.

This review convincingly reads it as such.

I was totally down for a morose, everybdoy-dies suicide mission heist set n the Star Wars universe - just thought this was a mediocre version of that. JB on the F This Movie podcast (reliably their most enjoyable guest - he should have his own show!) brought up other people's comparisons to Guns of Navarone and, I think rightly, dismissed them - a Guns of Navarone type movie would be GREAT but this really doesn't work in the way that (or Dirty Dozen, or Great Escape, or...) does. There's an art and a craft to this kind of ''determined band on a mission'' movie.

Not to say that it has to be a formula! Just felt like the weakest parts of this (and the ones that seemed the most bolted-on by Disney/reshoots) were those that took it off course from that kind of Mission Movie, eating up screen time that could have gone to buildin investment in the characters, and turning the mission into miscellaneous video game obstacles announced at the last second.

I would have cut out the entire space battle (save the demolition derby stunt for Oscar Isaac in the next 'main' film), the ''rebel council'' crap, the ''your favorite characters'' coda, all the Tarkin stuff, and found a way to fold the frst-act Saw Guerrera stuff more coherently into the plot/character arcs. Use that time to have our heroes working out their plan, casing the joint, figuring out that they change the guards at a certain time of day etc etc. Give Jyn a real arc, give Saw something distinct to do. He should obviously be ON the team, but moreover there's potential there to really develop all the hinted father-figure themes and make this movie have something unique to contribute to the Star Wars trope of father figures and troubled children...

Like maybe, in the *course of the story*, through Jyn going through situations wth these two guys (rather than through isolated interactions with holograms and dying men), she comes to accept that - I'm in heavy rewrite territory here - both the father she put on a pedestal and the one she'd written off as a monster were, in the end, flawed but earnest men, who loved her and who tried in their seemingly opposite ways to redeem their lives and contribute to the greater good. That's just a sketch but I think the major pieces of the plot are there for it, and it'd give depth to a universe previously reliant on sort of abstract ideas like ''there is still good in him, I know it,'' and none of it would keep you from doing the awesome doomed-team heist movie.

it was just a way to cover up their colossal fuck up of allowing a small group of rebels to infiltrate and steal the plans.

this is how I read it, too

Doctor Casino, that sounds like a really interesting movie but if they had done that, half the posters here would be all "omg noooo why did they Nolanize Star Wars"

I'm still thinking about the lesson of not being the guy who is trying to get all the credit in the universe for the death star when your main role was that you figured out who to round up to get the giant laser to work.

there was a strong theme of "middle-management is the devil"

It's the "stand alone" movie - I think people would like it MORE if it had a stronger sense of its own "feel" - plus we just had TFA, no one had to fear that X-wings are gone forever and nothing will ever again feel like "classic Star Wars." Anyway I'm not proposing some dense brooding character study, just saying an adventure movie can also have themes and develop them clearly. Like, I dunno, Last Crusade might be a starting reference point. Darker than that, but you can wear your "child and father" story really blatantly and still work as an awesome popcorn movie. YMMV tho!

They aren't going to actually make a true stand-alone SW movie, are they.

My biggest disappointment is that it looked like the extremists had a wampa among their ranks but we never actually saw more than a few seconds of it so I don't know if it was actually a wampa but I'm just going to assume it was a wampa and wonder why the hell we didn't see more wampa-on-Imperial action.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moroff

^ I didn't know this off hand I just felt like looking it up

He is badass. I wished there had been more of him too.

They aren't going to actually make a true stand-alone SW movie, are they.

http://resizing.flixster.com/6Q57-F-KYT5rbGR_W_DarHETivM=/800x1200/v1.bTsxMTIxNTAyMjtqOzE3MzA2OzIwNDg7MTAwMDsxNTAw

I remember looking at the ads for this as an 11-year-old and thinking "wow this looks unwatchable"

I definitely saw it before I ever saw Empire, and possibly even before I saw the other two of the OT as well. Can't remember a thing about it anymore, though.

+
looked good
no desert planet
tropical imperial library
xwing crashing into closed forcefield gate
wry droid was a good idea
that bad guy's outfit
lol at all the villains being white men
there were a lot of people with good faces
that creepy tentacle beast that forest whitaker loved

-
the characters & the total lack of any sense of their interior lives & concomitant lack of humour or charisma
the lack of new stuff & the crowbarring in of old stuff (cgi peter cushing & carrie fisher being the most gratuitous) - when they do this it makes the world seem smaller, as if the original films didn't hint at a vast universe so much as delineate the borders of a small one
v grey/'adult'/unmagical sense of despair & pointlessness which the terrible inspirational speeches and dialogue only strengthened

I think I was at just the right age when Caravan of Courage was aired such that it felt qualitatively comparable to the original trilogy. I was way into it. But even as an eight-year-old I knew that the second one was a total piece of shit.

the lack of new stuff & the crowbarring in of old stuff (cgi peter cushing & carrie fisher being the most gratuitous) - when they do this it makes the world seem smaller, as if the original films didn't hint at a vast universe so much as delineate the borders of a small one

my biggest problem with the prequels

My biggest problems with the prequels were the racism and fart jokes, but it is a long list.

My biggest problem was the sand. I hate sand.

And younglings.

Use that time to have our heroes working out their plan, casing the joint, figuring out that they change the guards at a certain time of day etc etc. Give Jyn a real arc, give Saw something distinct to do. He should obviously be ON the team, but moreover there's potential there to really develop all the hinted father-figure themes and make this movie have something unique to contribute to the Star Wars trope of father figures and troubled children...

Yes. This would have been a way better movie that aged well completely aside from being Star Wars canon. I wouldn't have had the feeling I got from TFA--I watched the whole thing and at the end I was still waiting for a story to happen, a story with characters you could care about instead of just watching disembodied events take place.

Rogue One was significantly better but I still agree w the Doc that it had more potential. I enjoyed the Dubai-esque Imperial archive planet and the planetary forcefield, watching Rebel pilots try to get in before it closed but not knowing if they would make it or not, just gunning it because those were their orders. Overall I thought RO brought a lot of gravitas to the glossy, superhero-fairy-tale-ish ness of the Luke and Leia story, in which everything just opened up for them because of who they were, innately. Rogue One was the flip side--the gritty, flawed, morally questionable people who die to advance causes. The way the Rebels had been basically carrying a campaign of guerilla warfare/terrorism with their own citizens as collateral damage. More of a movie for adults, not a fairy tale for children. (Of course it's still a fairy tale for adults but ykwim....)

These are children's films, and my problem with this new one, I suppose, is that I don't want them to be anything other than children's films. The question should be whether they are fun, entertaining children's films (like the OT) or stupid, condescending children's films (like Phantom Menace).

been thinking that the darth vader scene at the end was good to juxtapose against yoda's first appearance in battle in the prequels - like they knew how corny/lame that was and wanted to give vader something appropriately badass

idk how I would feel about some of the suggestions above - Star Wars has never been about 'process' - we always were told a 'rebel spy ship stole the plans' offscreen or 'we acquired this information' offscreen in past Star Wars movies. it generally doesn't like to show us how the sausage was made and the moment we did get that in this movie (the whole comms tower thing), fans are p split on whether they liked!

unfortunately it raises the continuity issue of why his fight with obi wan was so slow and bad. my theory - he can only do the badass thing once after each bacta bath, then his joints get creaky and he has to take his arthritis pills.

Given the nature of the heist, everything kinda went down the way one might expect, but given that this was a Star Wars movie, I was legitimately surprised that EVERYONE died.

My girlfriend was as well. I kinda figured El Tomboto was right with thinking nearly everyone would get it but then they went ahead and that was that -- and I was mildly surprised, I guess, but by that point in the movie I wasn't shocked.

More of a movie for adults, not a fairy tale for children. (Of course it's still a fairy tale for adults but ykwim....)

Trace Beaulieu (ex-MST3K etc) said on The Mads Are Back that he felt it was for 'people who had grown up with Star Wars who are grown up.' Pithy but as a basic summary of intended audience, hard to beat (which is why I'm kinda interested in hearing from younger viewers -- my cousin's son, 11 or so, has been a massive SW fan for some years now, and I'll be interested in his reaction when we chat next).

A bit of a clever move I've (obviously over)thought about: following TFA with an ultimately downer/serious standalone is a good way to acknowledge gravitas via the mass market, and there's always been that wing of active Star Wars fandom. If you're in it for the thrill ride and fun times more than anything else, though, having the next standalone be young Han Solo (and Lando) couldn't be better. Again, overthinking here, but 'expanded universes' however defined -- Trek, Who, et al all count here kinda but let's use SW as the baseline for this take -- tend to operate on the principle that the core stuff is strictly the down-the-line cinematic productions while anything producing more of an overt political or serious or (alternately) a completely insanely goofy and totally light-hearted etc. bent is written about in novels (and fanfic etc.), or more latterly potentially put into homemade productions or official video games or the like. Filoni's work cracked the door open a bit if only to a degree but R1 and Young Han Solo in combination as top of the line cinema productions could really obliterate the line, potentially.

It's not obliterating the line as much as drawing it between The Star Wars Films (gets a number) and Star Wars Stories.

Yes and no, I think. Essentially Disney etc. is going "Okay mass world audience, you have to understand this -- there are two strains of film here and they're not only both legit and all ultimately interrelated, they're all big event films, and you gotta pay attention." Which, of course, is exactly what the shareholders want to happen etc. etc. It's not some impossible task, but it is a new next level.

imo the costuming, crowds of aliens, and a lot of the background details in this were top notch and made Force Awakens look suspiciously uncluttered, although you could explain that away with the types of cities/bases shown

I'm also envious of the fact the Star Wars world has standardized on one type of computer interface to the extent people have little pockets on their clothes with their code key/storage devices tucked in, and it's the same sort of port droids use to connect to computers -- and other droids!

ok, two of them if you count the hard drive/tape type of things that they got from the storage room that fit into the transmitter tower

Of interest:

https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/rogue-ones-editors-reveal-scenes-added-in-the-star-wars-standalone-reshoots-exclusive-110124381.html

Gotta say, I didn't really expect this, but I'm not surprised, if you will:

Colin Goudie: I’d worked with Gareth Edwards previously. I cut his movie ‘Monsters’ so we’d already got a relationship and I’d actually done a couple of projects with him before that as well. So he got me on board in September of 2014 and asked me to do a story reel for ‘Rogue One’.

There was no screenplay, there was just a story breakdown at that point, scene by scene. He got me to rip hundreds of movies and basically make ‘Rogue One’ using other films so that they could work out how much dialogue they actually needed in the film.

It’s very simple to have a line (in the script) that reads “Krennic’s shuttle descends to the planet”, now that takes maybe 2-3 minutes in other films, but if you look at any other ‘Star Wars’ film you realise that only takes 45 seconds or a minute of screen time. So by making the whole film that way – I used a lot of the ‘Star Wars’ films – but also hundreds of other films too, it gave us a good idea of the timing.

For example the sequence of them breaking into the vault I was ripping the big door closing in ‘Wargames’ to work out how long does a vault door take to close.

So that’s what I did and that was three months work to do that and that had captions at the bottom which explained the action that was going to be taking place, and two thirds of the screen was filled with the concept art that had already been done and one quarter, the bottom corner, was the little movie clip to give you how long that scene would actually take.

Then I used dialogue from other movies to give you a sense of how long it would take in other films for someone to be interrogated. So for instance, when Jyn gets interrogated at the beginning of the film by the Rebel council, I used the scene where Ripley gets interrogated in ‘Aliens’.

So you get an idea of what movies usually do.

man, Luna and Ahmed's characters must have been serious non-entities in the original cut

Wow that mockup process. Jesus. So not only do they temp track the whole film score these days, they temp track the film itself!

Yeah, wow, how typical is that? It sounds like such an insane way to begin making a movie.

Most highly processed snack foods begin existence in a huge vat, as a slurry, which is then extruded into the desired shape and subjected to a brief, mechanized heating process before being parceled into packages and crated up for delivery across the sales region.

Lucas temped the Death Star attack in ANH with footage from The Dam Busters and other movies, right?

He did.