(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Rogue One

I haven't posted because I haven't really had much to say. I enjoyed it, but ranked it somewhere in the middle where it comes to Star Wars movies. I might go ANH/TESB/TFA/R1/TPM/ROTJ/ROTS/AOTC, with a considerable jump between TESB and TFA, and considerable uncertainty in the ranking of TFA/R1/TPM/ROTJ.

Rogue One had a great set of characters, a fun story that generally kept moving well, but its commitment to not being a Saga movie threw me out of it periodically. The lack of title crawl, the ending, the color palette, the sometimes boring locations... They were going for a much more mundane version of the Star Wars universe, and they succeeded. And in some senses that's a really cool thing. I like ghost_lingering's post about how ambiguous the 'right choices' were and skygiants's post about how central the nitty gritty details of archiving was to the plot. But it's also... not the reason I fell in love with A New Hope. Star Wars is a universe where there is a Dark Side and a Light Side and those things are kept cosmically in balance by a unifying Force. In that sense the Star Wars movies are generally profoundly conservative, in the best sense of the term. The Force is a presence in this film, but a more uncertain one- the film captures a moment when the Force is out of balance, and balance will not be restored until the end of the film this one is a prequel to, so I think there is a sense of structural incompleteness. I have not yet had a chance to watch Rogue One and A New Hope back to back, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that transition works.

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

I'm really looking forward to Rogue One being released for home entertainment so I can watch it and then A New Hope immediately afterwards. That said, despite the obvious connection to ANH, my reaction to this film actually has significantly less to do with what I liked/didn't like about the original trilogy and more to do with what I wanted/didn't want/got/didn't get from the prequels and The Force Awakens. Rogue One is an antidote for my frustration at the prequels, especially the world-building in the prequels. It even has something to do with how I enjoyed TFA while watching it, but found it fairly forgettable — it didn't challenge me or keep my attention after the credits rolled. Rogue One is purposefully doing something different with the universe and it does it well, which is a completely different experience than the prequels (which did what they did poorly, imo) or TFA (which competently retread old ground). (It's also an antidote to various feelings I have about the Harry Potter books & muggles and Chosen One narratives.) All this to say: I really wonder how I would have reacted if Rogue One had come out before the prequels/TFA. I think I would have found it more jarring and less enjoyable if the original trilogy was all there was.