Saturday, December 31, 2016

Rogue One and Star Wars

Not very impressed.  I don't see many movies, so perhaps there are more intricate and interesting battle sequences, but it was by far the best that I have seen.  However it is attached to a plot that doesn't excite me much. The moral ambiguity is played up rather intentionally.  We skip from locale to locale, character to character, in the first part of the movie, and I pretty much root only for the little girl, and then again for her later when she has grown.  It is cool when Inigo Montoya falls in love with her.  The droid has a personality we haven't seen before, that's nice.  The blind oriental Jedi and his sidekick were over-the-top but more refreshing than not.

We went to my son's afterward and his daughter Emily wanted to watch Episode IV immediately to connect the pieces.  I am surprised at how little I like any of it now, given how taken I was with the originals as they came out. Perhaps the Hero's Journey had been neutered too much in the 1970's, goodness only appearing tongue-in-cheek or in antihero form, so Luke and Leia seemed more inspiring than they do now.  The weak effects and fake scientism are more obvious now.  The original movies may have relied more on the novelty of the effects than I realised at the time. Luke whines. Too many plot inconsistencies and inexplicable actions.

I watched IV-VI avidly.  I disliked Episode I, and understand that it is eliminated altogether in the watching of the series in the Machete Order IV, V, II, III, VI. But I'll have none of it anymore.


2 comments:

james said...

I'd not heard of Machete Order before, but the justification makes excellent sense. However, I also am extremely unlikely to watch any of them again. Maybe as a group thing where everybody else wants to...

There are other movies that I am happy to have seen once, but am not going to spend the time to watch again: Chariots of Fire, for example. Plenty of others sounded fascinating at the time, but I never got around to them, and I no longer expect anything interesting from their premises.

FWIW, I saw Force Awakens tonight--and the way it used technical jargon had me tearing my hair, likewise the crashing through trees without smashing the spaceship to bits, or the running on snow-covered rocks without slipping. Otherwise, competent.

Sam L. said...

I just saw Rogue One. I like shoot-em-ups. 1-III I didn't like.