Revisiting Rogue One
Oct. 22nd, 2017 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith the year having managed to wear along to fall, I've returned to the season I've often watched through the Star Wars movies in. ("Once a year" doesn't feel too obsessive to me; I can at least tell myself I haven't read the novels or comics extending the franchise for a long time now, and I don't even know what possibly premium channel "Rebels" airs on up in Canada; however, I am conscious I've piled up plenty of other movies I don't get around to watching at all...) This year, too, I'd been thinking ahead that things could be a bit different. For all that I let a chance to buy a cheap used copy of The Force Awakens from a discount store across the corner go by and have been letting the Netflix-offered chance to see it for just the second time in total slide by week by week, I did ask for a copy of Rogue One for my birthday, and my brother carried a Blu-Ray across the Atlantic in his luggage so he could hand it to me on the day itself. I then had to carry the disc back across the Atlantic before I could get back to a Blu-Ray player or even redeem the digital copy code in the case, but I took the digital copy home the first chance I got only for my brother to mutter he wasn't really that interested in seeing the movie again...
Having spent a fair length of time by now not watching The Force Awakens again without quite managing to articulate my feelings much beyond "the backstory felt depressing and the rest of the film just seemed sort of pinched and uninspiring", I accepted that and let months pass until the fall. I could at least remember Rogue One had seemed to offer grander vistas and the chance to claim I'm not just resentful whatever ideas George Lucas sold to Disney got locked up (although I might then be accused of resenting having worked so hard not to convince myself I wasn't offended by the previous Star Wars movies, only for the new order to charm everyone with snappy dialogue). After I'd watched the Blu-Ray for the first time and the movie for the second time in total, though, I was conscious it wasn't easy to put my fresh thoughts together.
Almost first of all, I did have the feeling the picture on screen could seem awfully dark at times. That had me supposing the final battle took place in sunnier environs, but that in turn might begin to approach "the best part of the movie was the final battle," which reminds me of how I'd once had a habit of watching just the final battle of Star Wars itself off the videotape my family had recorded off TV in the mid-1980s until it had driven my parents to distraction. The appearances of Red Leader and Gold Leader in footage filmed back in 1976 but not used until now was amusing and a bit different from the "synthespians" (which at least take a chance and push the envelope, although they do get me wondering where it might all end); however, one of the appearances managing to mention "Red Five" did have me thinking this amounted to the audience being told "So you call Luke a 'weenie,' huh--well, here's someone even more pathetic." More significant than that, it also might have kept me reflecting on how Rogue One had answered the obvious question "so where were its new characters during the original movies?" by the simple expedient of killing off all of them (the unpleasant General, whose name hasn't stuck with me yet, who gives Cassian private orders to kill Jyn's father might be the single exception), and if that might have contributed to detaching me a bit from them.
I can understand "the extras are killed off to show how threatening the bad guys are but the main characters triumph hardly scratched" has some problems to it, and yet killing off the main characters alongside the extras doesn't feel quite satisfying either; it may even point out how "from a certain point of view" Rogue One's main characters remain "extras." Too, it was a little hard to interpret it as "even the best plan sometimes demands sacrifice" when the final battle spins up from improvisation, as if Jyn had to be inspiring but not too inspiring. I then began to wonder in an uneasy sort of way if, while Chirrut, Bodhi, and Baze all sacrifice themselves to get a message to the Rebels in space to knock out the shield, the Rebels had already been trying to do that anyway. "Even an unfortunate outcome can be justified if the actions that unwittingly brought it about were sincere" just might grate up against "some things have to be stood up against." It's also possible that where every Star Wars movie from The Empire Strikes Back to Revenge of the Sith contained some form of surprise I wound up telling myself made sense in passing, the surprises in The Force Awakens and Rogue One can feel just sort of arbitrary...
Again, of course, I can suppose brush-off rejoinders along the lines of "you need to practice what you preach and learn to accept things." So long as George Lucas isn't having his calls returned, tastemakers will doubtless keep insisting we're being gifted with "competence." Still, in managing to set down just these thoughts I'm starting to look forward and not back, amused perhaps by the thought of following Rogue One's frantic and complicated space battle not just with the more austere space battle of the Star Wars Blu-Ray, but to the much more formalized movements of a "pre-Special Edition" I just happen to have on DVD...
Having spent a fair length of time by now not watching The Force Awakens again without quite managing to articulate my feelings much beyond "the backstory felt depressing and the rest of the film just seemed sort of pinched and uninspiring", I accepted that and let months pass until the fall. I could at least remember Rogue One had seemed to offer grander vistas and the chance to claim I'm not just resentful whatever ideas George Lucas sold to Disney got locked up (although I might then be accused of resenting having worked so hard not to convince myself I wasn't offended by the previous Star Wars movies, only for the new order to charm everyone with snappy dialogue). After I'd watched the Blu-Ray for the first time and the movie for the second time in total, though, I was conscious it wasn't easy to put my fresh thoughts together.
Almost first of all, I did have the feeling the picture on screen could seem awfully dark at times. That had me supposing the final battle took place in sunnier environs, but that in turn might begin to approach "the best part of the movie was the final battle," which reminds me of how I'd once had a habit of watching just the final battle of Star Wars itself off the videotape my family had recorded off TV in the mid-1980s until it had driven my parents to distraction. The appearances of Red Leader and Gold Leader in footage filmed back in 1976 but not used until now was amusing and a bit different from the "synthespians" (which at least take a chance and push the envelope, although they do get me wondering where it might all end); however, one of the appearances managing to mention "Red Five" did have me thinking this amounted to the audience being told "So you call Luke a 'weenie,' huh--well, here's someone even more pathetic." More significant than that, it also might have kept me reflecting on how Rogue One had answered the obvious question "so where were its new characters during the original movies?" by the simple expedient of killing off all of them (the unpleasant General, whose name hasn't stuck with me yet, who gives Cassian private orders to kill Jyn's father might be the single exception), and if that might have contributed to detaching me a bit from them.
I can understand "the extras are killed off to show how threatening the bad guys are but the main characters triumph hardly scratched" has some problems to it, and yet killing off the main characters alongside the extras doesn't feel quite satisfying either; it may even point out how "from a certain point of view" Rogue One's main characters remain "extras." Too, it was a little hard to interpret it as "even the best plan sometimes demands sacrifice" when the final battle spins up from improvisation, as if Jyn had to be inspiring but not too inspiring. I then began to wonder in an uneasy sort of way if, while Chirrut, Bodhi, and Baze all sacrifice themselves to get a message to the Rebels in space to knock out the shield, the Rebels had already been trying to do that anyway. "Even an unfortunate outcome can be justified if the actions that unwittingly brought it about were sincere" just might grate up against "some things have to be stood up against." It's also possible that where every Star Wars movie from The Empire Strikes Back to Revenge of the Sith contained some form of surprise I wound up telling myself made sense in passing, the surprises in The Force Awakens and Rogue One can feel just sort of arbitrary...
Again, of course, I can suppose brush-off rejoinders along the lines of "you need to practice what you preach and learn to accept things." So long as George Lucas isn't having his calls returned, tastemakers will doubtless keep insisting we're being gifted with "competence." Still, in managing to set down just these thoughts I'm starting to look forward and not back, amused perhaps by the thought of following Rogue One's frantic and complicated space battle not just with the more austere space battle of the Star Wars Blu-Ray, but to the much more formalized movements of a "pre-Special Edition" I just happen to have on DVD...