Rogue One (with SPOILERS)

Finally got to see it. I thought it was better than TFA, despite the slow start. Digital Peter Cushing had my family fooled, but you don't have to look at him in every scene. How many years before CG actors crawl all the way out of Uncanny Valley? I'm betting 5. You'll be watching CG Humphrey Bogart movies in your self-driving car.

My guess - not in our lifetime.
I kinda watched Polar Express shortly before RO, and the CGI actors produced the same feeling of wanting to retire them. I am positive we will never have completely integrated human CGI characters and there won't be such thing as human-like androids, either. Or alien impersonators. I think it has to do more with movement/gesticulation than with appearance.

Polar Express is pretty rough, but it's 10 years old - I remember watching it with my little girl at the time (she's 17 now), and it was painful to watch. I think the 5 years is going to be what it will take to get that movement/gesticulation thing down. This is the scientific estimate of RobertB, who knows exactly jack shit about the field.

What I meant to say is that -I think- I was bothered by the same type of uncanniness in PE as in RO. Like, that specific thing that has to do with movement hasn't evolved in 10 years, which makes me believe it won't get better anytime soon. But, now that I think of it, I am not bothered at all by it in games, like The Last of Us. Maybe because the brain accepts that it is not real from the start.

jason10mm wrote:

Black Barney wrote: , but the Y-Wings actually make bombing runs and use their ion cannons.!

You know, I think they say "fire ion TORPEDOES". Is that a new weapon? Maybe it was a script error (though the fx seem to show them firing blue torpedo looking things). Seems WAY too easy to disable a Star Destroyer, be interesting to see if this weapon is modelled in Armada.

Yup, that's what they say, but like Barney says, the Y-Wings are supposed to have an ion cannon turret on top, while they fire PROTON torpedoes. But then again the physics/chemistry of this far away galaxy seem all out of whack anyways, so who really knows?

vegasrobb wrote: It's a shame that in this day that any close relationship between two guys is picked out as being gay. Two guys can't be loyal to each other without homo-erotic undertones. Fewer and fewer people have close male friends these days?

My uncle and I went to see Rogue One yesterday and went to an Italian restaurant for dinner afterwards. He's the youngest of my mom's several siblings, and I'm the oldest of the next generation in the family, so he is only eight years older than me. Now that my grandparents have passed on, he is the main person holding that side of the family together by staying in touch with everyone and organizing the occasional reunions. Anyway, though she didn't say anything, I suspect that our grinning, cute, blonde waitress thought that we were a gay couple.

I've thought that this entire time.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I enjoyed Rogue One. I definitely appreciated it more than The Force Awakened, which was more like New Hope Recycled. But I'm not a normal Star Wars fan. As a kid, I loved the original Star Wars and enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back, but Lucas lost me completely with the Ewoks. I still haven't seen the prequel trilogy and it's very low on my list of things to do.

I waited a little too long to see Rogue One, as the ending was spoiled for me by an overheard conversation including an elderly boomer who was unfamiliar with the concept of a spoiler. Still want to punch that dumbass in the face. And yet, even before the early trailers, I understood there was a chance that all of the heroes would be expendable since they weren't in the original trilogy. But I was holding out the possibility that maybe one or more of the Rogue One characters would show up in the next Star Wars installment, whatever they will call Episode 8.

Rogue One was a refreshing experience compared to other Star Wars movies, as it was more of a war movie than an adventure. Somehow the stakes felt higher despite the heroes being less impressive. The tempo was somewhat slow early on, but my only regret is that we didn't get more Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen, or Jimmy Smits. It's funny how Star Wars movies keep delivering exactly one strong female character, and keep failing the Bechdel Test. The new girl was obviously meant to remind us of a young Princess Leia in appearance, though clearly she was a very different character in background. The long, final conflict of the movie was reasonably exciting and definitely reminiscent of certain World War II movies. I apparently lack the ability to detect that valley effect with CGI, as I found the various scenes with Tarkin to work just fine.

There were other elements that seemed familiar. The early scene with Mads and his family reminded me of early scenes from both Black Book and Inglorious Basterds. The scenes of planetary destruction by the Death Star reminded me of a similar scene from The Chronicles of Riddick. But despite many visual easter egg references to past Star Wars movies, Rogue One felt very much like its own movie, and not a blatant rip-off like The Force Awakens.

I like the idea of Rogue One more than I liked watching it. The scenes before the final heist seemed perfunctory after all the plot machinations that lead up to it and there just wasn't enough characterization all around. For instance, Saw Gerrera was a huge wasted opportunity. He needed a scene or two to show how extreme he'd become instead of characters telling us. The two most realized characters are the blind monk and the droid, which is a problem for your movie when they're not the two leads. The final space battle was amazing but I'm still not convinced it was worth the trip to get there.

Derivative or not, after watching it I thought about and enjoyed The Force Awakens a lot more than Rogue One and it has less to do with blind nostalgia and it's more about decent writing and basic questions of craft.