#what fucking Disney property is doing it like Andor!!

[severalowls]

Watching man delorean season 3, halfway through and...... ok

So far this seems like 100x more of a random side story than book of boba. Which wasn't a side story at all because it literally progressed the plot more than 90% of these first few episodes of pissing about with the mandogang.

There's been about one episode's worth of compelling plot and a bunch of mr. lorian doing sidequests

The prequel flashbacks got me dreading the moment this ties in neatly with the fucking obi wan show because fuck me

Is this all elaborate juggling for 5+ years to explain Somehow, Palpatine Returned. Since we've finally brough back the clone research sub...plot which was the plot plot of season 1. Remember plot....

I know its because it Literally Is at this point because baby yoda wholesome meme phenomenon but this feels increasingly like a PG-13 Disney Property. (bc it is)

Every moment they try to do straight faced like... training moments with baby yoda is terrible. Because its all just the 'furrow eyebrows and lift rocks' shit from like season 1, repeated. And they're treating this 30+ year old baby like a 5 year old child but he's still dubbed with the sound effects of a real human 6 month old who is burbling because he's really focused on taking a dunp

Why is star war

Andor was pretty good though. The b plot in one ep about werner herzog's decorative lawn scientist was neat. But still lending credence to 'book of boba was the scripts for like half a season of mandle combined with the scripts for what was supposed to be an actual, shorter fettshow' theory because the stuff that isn't mandle sidequesting feel like the other half of that season.

And all this echos of studio fuckery is years before the writers strike so good fucking lord how bad are they going to do with their apparent plans to go ahead produce more of these shows without having the writers on set or available for revisions.

Why is star war

[gaykarstaagforever]

Disney...come on...

Is this all we're doing with Star Wars now? Hours of flat, pointless lore shit only the worst people on the Internet care about (because they're mad that you got it wrong), with a tiny random cameo by part of Yoda at the very end?

You paid like $4 billion for this property. And you made one mediocre trilogy that was itself mostly confused references to the old movies, two good seasons of one TV show (The Mandalorian), then a whole bunch more TV and movie crap that amounts to pointing at the logo and going "See? SEE?!"

I didn't see Andor and I absolutely do not care about more stupid Space Conflict lore garbage, but people seem to like that. But people also seemed to like Rogue One, and, besides Donny Yen, I fucking hated that movie. But I also actually liked the Solo movie, so apparently I live in a pocket dimension that consists of exactly me and no one else.

My point is, you need to goddamn figure out what it is that is worthwhile about this IP, and focus on that. And the answer is "the three genuinely good movies from 50 years ago."

Those movies were a fluke, in that they were way better than they had any right to be, entirely because they were written and produced by boring Hollywood professionals who were just doing a job they were probably sick of. That's how that happened. The rest is Baby George Lucas bouncing around, screaming about how he likes Flash Gordon and DUNE and Triumph of the Will. And we know that second thing is not enough to make good movies, because that's what the Prequel Trilogy was, and aside from the podracing, those were also mid to awful.

...People also seem to hate the podracing. I guess that's another me in the pocket dimension thing.

Whatever. Stop making Yoda bonus DLC at the end of crap. Stop making weird CG versions of old and / or dead people bonus DLC at the end of crap. Just hire boring Hollywood people to do more stuff with the 70s characters, recast with young sexy actors, because that is all anyone likes and is coming here for. The rest of this is just wasted time and money.

"YEAH BUT THAT WAS BACK WHEN STAR WARS WAS 100% WHITE AND STRAIGHT, YOU TROLL!"

It's not my fault Disney keeps putting brown lesbians in bad movies and TV shows. One could argue they are only doing that because they KNOW this stuff is shit otherwise, and hope to hide behind their virtue-signaling. Which makes the brown lesbians look bad. And that's not good for anyone, especially the brown lesbians.

If you need Disney Stellar Struggle to provide you with queer media representation, you need to stop being a small child in Kudzu Country. They're not qualified to do that, and they do it terribly. Go elsewhere for that. Stop rewarding their shit version of that. Speaking as a big fat homo, I'd prefer Disney shut up and go back to the one thing they're good at, which is paying skinny teens to over-dance to remixed pop versions of cartoon movie songs from the 40s and 50s in overpriced theme parks. That's also lame, but in a fun way. Bad queer representation in crap scifi media isn't even the fun kind of lame. It's just embarrassing and gross.

Hire boring Hollywood people and let them make a good movie about good characters that people care about, that weren't specifically engineered solely to deflect criticism with pastiche liberal bullshit. Stop letting executive vice presidents of analytics stop the entire production and order rewrites because a computer told them people in Eastern Canada need less shots of fingernails. You can't make art nor product like this. As proven by the last 15 years of forgettable pointless Disney shit.

Luke Skywalker and R2 can hang out exclusively with brown lesbians. No one would care if it was written better.

...Okay. Obviously Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and Shad Brooks would still care. But they are easily shouted down.

The writing (and production in general) are the problem, here. Probably because of this virus of "design by executive committee" shit, that is also murdering the MCU.

Disney has a LOOONG history of being bad at live action stuff. See the late 60s through the mid 90s. And always for the same reason: executive demands, based on mythical market "research". That has been demonstrably wrong and useless for 60+ years now.

Yoda isn't a cool extra. This is supposed to BE ABOUT Yoda. Stop using him as icing on your flavorless virtue-signaling cellulose cake.

[hauntedfalcon]

they passed. so many boots

[casualarsonist]

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story review

When Rogue One was released around this time last year, I wasn’t going to be caught dead watching it at a midnight premiere as I had for The Force Awakens. A deep disdain for TFA had settled in during the previous year, and news of reshoots and studio meddling during Rogue One’s production sent the message loud and clear that Disney had finally collated their data following Episode VII’s release and were now using its formula as a template for all further releases; aiming for what I believe to be a lowest common denominator approach had been a massive financial success, so why, as a business, would they want to change that approach? I know that in releasing a stand-alone film, Disney were indeed doing something out-of-the-box, so I can’t reasonably shit on them for EVERY decision they made, but it seemed that even then, my greatest fear was coming to bear - not that they would make shitty Star Wars films, but that they would make middling Star Wars films. And sure enough, the reviews largely bore out my premonitions, describing Rogue One positively but calling it disjointed, unnecessary, and lacking in significance in the same way that Episode VII did (although I would argue that the only thing of significance in TFA’s plot was when it disposed of a pivotal character).

But remember in the last review when I mentioned that hope? That terrible hope drew me back in. For no matter how simpering or weak a live-action Star Wars may be and no matter how hard I resist the pull, my curiosity always gets the better of me in the end. I wasn’t excited for Rogue One - Disney had managed to kill that for me - but I decided to see it none-the-less. And as I walked into the cinema I had this weird sinking feeling in my stomach (Christ I really am a fanboy, aren’t I?) as visions of half-finished plotlines, inconsequential Macguffin superweapons, and so. many. fucking. gags swam in my head. I mean really, the idea for Rogue One is about as safe as one could get given the supposed new ground that was being tread - it’s essentially a recreation/retconning of a backstory that has already been long established, and of which the entirety of the audience knows the end result (my treatise on why prequels are a universally garbage idea is for another article). And as I said, I wasn’t afraid that it would be shit, only that it would be boring and predictable, for again I find myself playing a role I never thought I would play in siding with the George Lucas prequels by asking the question ‘who could have known what any of them were going to be like before they were actually released?’ No-one. 

Who could possibly have seen this coming?

So I sucked it up and went to see Rogue One in a cheap cinema that only charged me six pounds for the pleasure. And after all the build-up and the let down and stupid melodrama regarding an intellectual property that hadn’t released a good film in forty years...I was surprised. A bit. 

I was a bit surprised. 

I was surprised by Riz Ahmed’s genuinely affecting character arc. I was surprised by Darth Vader’s really actually terrifying display of power in a penultimate scene. I was surprised by the narrative stakes established in the latter half of the film. I was surprised by the risk the filmmakers took in deciding the fates of the central characters. And of course it had a lot of problems, and some of the things I liked may be just as easily disliked by others, but when I left the cinema having actually felt real feelings because of the things I’d seen on screen - more than once - I was surprised that Rogue One had actually managed to exceed my expectations. I’ll expand more on this in a second, but first, a snarky plot synopsis:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (ugh) is the immediate prequel to A New Hope. It opens on an isolated planet on which engineer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) lives with his wife, and daughter Jyn. Galen is a reknowned polymath and committed pacifist, although you will learn almost nothing of this unless you read the wiki: Rogue One is a Disney Star Wars film, so of course large chunks of important character-building are omitted (because who needs to understand the people in the movie when there’s a blind guy hitting stormtroopers with a stick). Ben Mendelsohn phones in the beta-villain character of Orson Krennic, and kills Jyn’s mother in order to coerce Galen into working on what will be the Empire’s greatest weapon - the Death Star (ugh). Cut to a decade later and Jyn (Felicity Jones) is a stroppy young woman with all the charisma of moist denim. She is reluctantly required to care about the fate of the galaxy, but apparently this is a big problem for her because IGN says she ‘put up walls’. She’s freed from an Imperial labour camp by the dashing and committed rebel Cassian Andor, and brought to Saw Gerrera - a veteran of the clone wars, a close friend of her father’s, and the man who raised her after her Galen was taken. Saw is a character from the Clone Wars animated television series, which every person the audience of this film will definitely have seen, so therefore his backstory is all but omitted as well. Saw is holding captive an Imperial defector who brings word that Galen has left a weakness in the design of the Death Star. The rapidly expanding group of misfits are then tasked with venturing deep into the better half of the film to procure the plans to this superweapon. 

Now to be clear, Rogue One is not at all consistent - certainly less consistent than The Force Awakens. But it does quite a few things that TFA failed to do: be a complete film that managed to successfully close its own story whilst remaining a worthy stepping stone to a larger narrative, for example, or have tangible stakes and a final battle that feels like a genuine struggle against insurmountable odds. It also succeeds in taking a different approach to its tone than Episode VII, not in terms of 'darkness’, but in terms of emotional realism. The characters still have their one-liners and moments of charm, but Diego Luna’s Cassian is a life-long member of the rebel alliance and has a wonderful scene in which he attacks Erso’s flippant attitude towards the work they’re doing, and it feels real. He isn’t gurning like a cartoon character, or trying to be another cooler-than-cool Han Solo - he understands the weight of their mission and that its importance stands above their own individual concerns, and when he convinces Jyn of its importance, he convinces us as well. So too does Riz Ahmed’s defecting Imperial cargo pilot exhibit the characteristic signs of being a real human, and while his background is passed by faster than it ought to be, over the course of the film he undergoes a clear transformation from someone doubting his choice to turn against the Empire out of fear for his own life, to someone who comes to embrace his convictions and find strength in the act of doing what he knows is right. 

Bruh.

Not every character is as well-realised, though. As mentioned, the film’s focal point - Jyn Erso - is as likeable as a cracked plastic toilet seat. Her endless cynical brooding is exhausting, and Jones fails to encapsulate the complex emotional broth that is supposed to be feeding her sanguine emotional state. She is joined in this limbo by Saw Gerrera whose motivations are hidden almost entirely in the animated series. I still can’t figure out why the hell Disney would waste time in reshoots fiddling with the tone of the film instead of fleshing out the characters upon which the entire first half hinges on? In any case, his words and choices carry little weight because we don’t know who the fuck he is or why he makes the decisions he makes.

‘Save the Rebellion! Save yourself!’

The rest of the motley crew also lack the collective core strength of The Force Awakens’ central characters, but that isn’t to say that they are entirely redundant. The second half is widely recognised to be superior, and I believe that’s because it successfully manages to establish a set of compelling stakes, and makes us care about at least some of the characters that are putting themselves at risk. Either that, or it’s because there’s more shooty-bang-bang.

<sexual moaning>

I found I could forgive a lot of this though, because, despite the odd bump in the road, the film ends on a high, and you can’t forget what Rogue One is required to do in its run-time either:

Introduce an ensemble cast and make the audience care about their individual and collective fates,

Simultaneously re-establish certain older characters for a new generation of viewers,

Introduce and acclimate both older and newer audiences to the backstory of this film,

Introduce and acclimate newer audiences to the backstory of the older films,

Provide a self-contained and entertaining narrative that is cohesive with the established canon and appeals to people who wish to enjoy the film on its own merits,

...all in the space of two hours. 

Now let’s look at what The Force Awakens had to achieve:

Don’t be shit. 

Have mass appeal. 

Be a self-contained story that can be enjoyed on its own merits. 

Be a meaningful continuation of the classic character’s stories. 

I’m sure there are many that would disagree with me, but I’d argue that while Rogue One is probably a less cohesive film overall, it achieves more complex goals with greater success than The Force Awakens.

But look, let’s be honest - obviously it’s not Citizen Kane - Rogue One is a film with many faults: the first half, for instance. And while I’d say that even the first half isn’t without merit, it needs to be understood just what you’re getting with this new breed of movies. At the end of the day, no matter how interesting a concept they may have, they’re always going to be tampered with by the studio; no matter the talent of the writer and/or director, they’re always going to fit a certain mandated mould. But the light in the darkness is that we will occasionally get big-budget, live-action films that fall outside the central narrative canon just like this one - films that Disney won’t obsess over quite as much because they don’t ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS IN THE FIRST EIGHT SECONDS OF THE OPENING WEEKEND - and maybe, just maybe, they’ll be alright. And Rogue One is alright. At certain points it’s really good. And it ends whilst riding a wave of energy and emotion that makes you feel like you just watched a decent fucking film, as opposed to The Force Awakens, which feels like a tv serial and you’re supposed to tune in next week to get to the good part of the story. And I think that’s something worth commending. You might disagree, but I think that makes it a good film. 

The CGI Moff Tarkin is a fucking joke, tho.

7/10

Good