Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Post-release)

Think back to the pain and horror we felt when Luke arrived at his homestead, to find his murdered Aunt and Uncle. It was as if we were there with him in the speeder, getting closer and closer, as we watched the grisly scene come into focus. Forty-one years later, and I get goosebumps and a sick feeling in my stomach each time I watch it, or even just hear the music from the scene.

Well, we'd actually spent about twenty minutes getting to know Luke and his home life and relationship with his guardians and thwarted dreams and such. Apart from a couple intercuts to the Death Star, we don't even leave Tatooine until almost an hour into the movie. See my persistent rant about overly-compressed story from even Empire on, steadily getting more drastic.

I'm not suggesting R1 should've devoted as much time to Jyn and her parents as George did with Luke interacting with his loving, if stern, guardians. But *something* of Galen and his daughter before his kidnapping would've gone a long way to make me care about her.

This is actually why I don't see her as the main character. Any attempt I made to give her more depth skewed things too far away from the story being told. She and Galen parted so many years before the current events, a third of the movie would have needed to be a flashback to establish the same dimensionality. Meanwhile, by co-opting the Cassian & K-2SO one-shot comic it makes a good first act for a Cassian-centric story, with Jyn working fine in a role with about as much development as Leia in ANH.

His arc also better follows the Hero's Journey scaffold. Empire cost him his birth family, found a surrogate in the Rebellion... His "Call to Adventure" is the niggling feeling he's being tasked to do things that make him no better than those Imperials who killed his parents. His "Call Refused" is his denial of that sneaking feeling and continuing to do his job. His crisis point comes when he chooses to save Jyn's dad rather than execute him as ordered. After that I'd be fine with him survivng or not, as long as either way it's organic to the story and authentic to who he's become.
 
Remember when Rogue One was one of the most beloved SW movies on the RPF?
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Well, we'd actually spent about twenty minutes getting to know Luke and his home life and relationship with his guardians and thwarted dreams and such. Apart from a couple intercuts to the Death Star, we don't even leave Tatooine until almost an hour into the movie. See my persistent rant about overly-compressed story from even Empire on, steadily getting more drastic.

This is actually why I don't see her as the main character. Any attempt I made to give her more depth skewed things too far away from the story being told. She and Galen parted so many years before the current events, a third of the movie would have needed to be a flashback to establish the same dimensionality. Meanwhile, by co-opting the Cassian & K-2SO one-shot comic it makes a good first act for a Cassian-centric story, with Jyn working fine in a role with about as much development as Leia in ANH.

His arc also better follows the Hero's Journey scaffold. Empire cost him his birth family, found a surrogate in the Rebellion... His "Call to Adventure" is the niggling feeling he's being tasked to do things that make him no better than those Imperials who killed his parents. His "Call Refused" is his denial of that sneaking feeling and continuing to do his job. His crisis point comes when he chooses to save Jyn's dad rather than execute him as ordered. After that I'd be fine with him survivng or not, as long as either way it's organic to the story and authentic to who he's become.

Except she is the main character. And he is lame--I couldn't understand half of what came out of his mouth. I never had that trouble with Luke and Han.
 
You know it's absolutely hysterical that Star Wars fans after all of these years never questioned the science in the Star Wars galaxy until Rogue One came out. People asked about Rogue One, "Why didn't Vader get blown out into space while he was watching the Tantive IV escape?" or "Why didn't Vader just nab the Death Star plans out of the hand of that Rebel Fleet Trooper?" when they could've been asking questions like that about Star Wars all along. Remember folks that the original Star Wars movie was NOT praised for it's great characters or story when that one first came out.
 
You know it's absolutely hysterical that Star Wars fans after all of these years never questioned the science in the Star Wars galaxy until Rogue One came out. People asked about Rogue One, "Why didn't Vader get blown out into space while he was watching the Tantive IV escape?" or "Why didn't Vader just nab the Death Star plans out of the hand of that Rebel Fleet Trooper?" when they could've been asking questions like that about Star Wars all along. Remember folks that the original Star Wars movie was NOT praised for it's great characters or story when that one first came out.

I don't recall those as being common or serious criticisms of the movie. It's plagued by sooooo much else.
 
You know it's absolutely hysterical that Star Wars fans after all of these years never questioned the science in the Star Wars galaxy until Rogue One came out. People asked about Rogue One, "Why didn't Vader get blown out into space while he was watching the Tantive IV escape?" or "Why didn't Vader just nab the Death Star plans out of the hand of that Rebel Fleet Trooper?" when they could've been asking questions like that about Star Wars all along. Remember folks that the original Star Wars movie was NOT praised for it's great characters or story when that one first came out.
Here’s the thing I din’t get. You love using the phrase “Star Wars fans say this or that” about R1. That to me implies that you consider yourself a Star Wars fan and have issues with people criticizing R1 calling themselves SW fans (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So how come that every time there’s a criticism against R1 you never try to back up the movie on its own merits but try to redirect criticism to the old movies? It’s almost like by throwing dirt on those would make your favourite movie look better. What kind of Star Wars fandom is that? Everything is susceptible to criticism, yes, the OT is no exclusion. But so is R1 then.
And for the record I don’t think anyone said “boy R1 would have been good but Vader wasn’t sucked into space in the hangar so it actually blows”. Open hangars were present since ANH.
 
Here’s the thing I din’t get. You love using the phrase “Star Wars fans say this or that” about R1. That to me implies that you consider yourself a Star Wars fan and have issues with people criticizing R1 calling themselves SW fans (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So how come that every time there’s a criticism against R1 you never try to back up the movie on its own merits but try to redirect criticism to the old movies? It’s almost like by throwing dirt on those would make your favourite movie look better. What kind of Star Wars fandom is that? Everything is susceptible to criticism, yes, the OT is no exclusion. But so is R1 then.
And for the record I don’t think anyone said “boy R1 would have been good but Vader wasn’t sucked into space in the hangar so it actually blows”. Open hangars were present since ANH.


I HAVE backed up Rogue One! I believe I've said before that Rogue One unlike A New Hope actually has a very realistic Rebellion where people like Capt. Andor has to resort to less than heroic exploits in order to get the job done. It's the most realistic and war-like film in this entire series about war in the stars. Whether or not you like or relate to characters in ANY movie is a very subjective thing indeed. I enjoyed the characters in Rogue One, the look and feel of the movie is by far the best in the series. I've been reading reviews of the original Star Wars back when it came out in 1977 and there was a lot of critics that said that the characters were flat out boring or bland or other words to that effect proving my previous point about characters being subjective in a movie. On a funny side note Gene Siskel actually said of Darth Vader that he looks like a frog coated in black vinyl.
 
Except she is the main character.

It's nice to say so, but just saying so doesn't make it so. Recognizing that in the writing stage is key. It takes the burden of a forced arc off the arc-less character. Jyn is at the end as she was in the beginning. There might have been more growth had she not gotten blowed up real good, but in the run-time she had, it was a very shallow arc with too much contrivance. She can still be the purpose of the plot. Leia was an important character in Star Wars. She had things to do. The main character adopted her mission by taking on the burden of delivering the plans. That got skewed when their destination was gone and they found she was on the same station.

A similar recent example of this is the Captain America movies. Notice they're not about Steve? He's largely one-note throughout. He stays steadfast in his convictions and earnest goodness from 90-pound weakling all the way up to Infinity War's "Nomad". Bucky is the main character of those movies. He's the one with the arc. It's a fascinating story mechanic to witness. I love Cap, but if it was just movies about him being Cap, it'd get real boring real quick.

If Jyn was more fundamentally likable, I could argue Rogue One echoes that model, with the arc falling to Cassian. But she's not and the forced arc-beats of her part of the story are the most painful parts of that movie for me (up there with the bor gullet and the bad video game level ending on Scarif).

And he is lame--I couldn't understand half of what came out of his mouth. I never had that trouble with Luke and Han.

That's nothing to do with the character, though. Mostly direction, some sound editing (I only had one line I had trouble with on first viewing, and that was an unfortunate combination of his accent with excessive background sound effect and, I think, music cue muddying things). Chop out the flashback that starts the film and give that time to letting us get to know Cassian, the Good Rebel Soldier, and his arc fits nicely.

But for him to have the arc and her not, either he needs to be the main character and her a strong supporting character, or she needs to be a more likable character to hold the focus while he has the character-growth arc in a secondary role. Hence why I feel this film, like every Star Wars film since (and, to a degree, including) Empire, has a lot of potential, a lot of raw material, a lot of good moments... but ultimately fails to be what it so clearly could have been. I enjoy them, and I love the universe. I just have to cock my head, close one eye, squint with the other, and hum real loud to come close to just accepting them as-is.

You know it's absolutely hysterical that Star Wars fans after all of these years never questioned the science in the Star Wars galaxy until Rogue One came out. People asked about Rogue One, "Why didn't Vader get blown out into space while he was watching the Tantive IV escape?" or "Why didn't Vader just nab the Death Star plans out of the hand of that Rebel Fleet Trooper?" when they could've been asking questions like that about Star Wars all along. Remember folks that the original Star Wars movie was NOT praised for it's great characters or story when that one first came out.

Apart from sound in space, which we all accept as a convenience to the audience, the only thing in Star Wars not yet able to be at least theoretically explained is the gravitational artifacts -- artificial gravity, including localized and directed gravity fields; tractor beams; and repulsorlifts. And that's because we still don't really know what gravity even is yet. But even then we accept it as plausible, because we hope and expect we'll figure that out at some point. Everything else, though? Blasters, lightsabers, hyperdrive, the Force? No problem.
 
It's nice to say so, but just saying so doesn't make it so. Recognizing that in the writing stage is key. It takes the burden of a forced arc off the arc-less character. Jyn is at the end as she was in the beginning. There might have been more growth had she not gotten blowed up real good, but in the run-time she had, it was a very shallow arc with too much contrivance. She can still be the purpose of the plot. Leia was an important character in Star Wars. She had things to do. The main character adopted her mission by taking on the burden of delivering the plans. That got skewed when their destination was gone and they found she was on the same station.

A similar recent example of this is the Captain America movies. Notice they're not about Steve? He's largely one-note throughout. He stays steadfast in his convictions and earnest goodness from 90-pound weakling all the way up to Infinity War's "Nomad". Bucky is the main character of those movies. He's the one with the arc. It's a fascinating story mechanic to witness. I love Cap, but if it was just movies about him being Cap, it'd get real boring real quick.

If Jyn was more fundamentally likable, I could argue Rogue One echoes that model, with the arc falling to Cassian. But she's not and the forced arc-beats of her part of the story are the most painful parts of that movie for me (up there with the bor gullet and the bad video game level ending on Scarif).



That's nothing to do with the character, though. Mostly direction, some sound editing (I only had one line I had trouble with on first viewing, and that was an unfortunate combination of his accent with excessive background sound effect and, I think, music cue muddying things). Chop out the flashback that starts the film and give that time to letting us get to know Cassian, the Good Rebel Soldier, and his arc fits nicely.

But for him to have the arc and her not, either he needs to be the main character and her a strong supporting character, or she needs to be a more likable character to hold the focus while he has the character-growth arc in a secondary role. Hence why I feel this film, like every Star Wars film since (and, to a degree, including) Empire, has a lot of potential, a lot of raw material, a lot of good moments... but ultimately fails to be what it so clearly could have been. I enjoy them, and I love the universe. I just have to cock my head, close one eye, squint with the other, and hum real loud to come close to just accepting them as-is.



Apart from sound in space, which we all accept as a convenience to the audience, the only thing in Star Wars not yet able to be at least theoretically explained is the gravitational artifacts -- artificial gravity, including localized and directed gravity fields; tractor beams; and repulsorlifts. And that's because we still don't really know what gravity even is yet. But even then we accept it as plausible, because we hope and expect we'll figure that out at some point. Everything else, though? Blasters, lightsabers, hyperdrive, the Force? No problem.


"Jyn is at the end as she was in the beginning." WTF does that even mean?! You're thinking of rey. There's a very good video on YouTube entitled, Why Jyn Erso is a better Rey than Rey is. Everyone who hates Rogue One should watch that video.
 
"Jyn is at the end as she was in the beginning." WTF does that even mean?! You're thinking of rey. There's a very good video on YouTube entitled, Why Jyn Erso is a better Rey than Rey is. Everyone who hates Rogue One should watch that video.

One major argument against that she's the same throughout is that, well, she's kinda dead at the end of the movie.
 
One major argument against that she's the same throughout is that, well, she's kinda dead at the end of the movie.


Not too mention that she has grown from a scared little girl, to a reckless adolescent to a woman who gets recruited by the Rebellion and finally finds her inner strength not to mention a selflessness and carries out a daring mission that basically ends up saving the galaxy from further destruction. Does anyone here care to take on the critics that said back in 1977 that the characters in the original Star Wars are boring and bland?
 
Does anyone here care to take on the critics that said back in 1977 that the characters in the original Star Wars are boring and bland?
Well, those critics just don't understand SW! They have low SW-IQ and the characters are clearly perfect as they are! And any attempts to deepen the characters, like making the bad guy their father or giving them human emotions like fear or anger would only be character assassination! #NotMyVader #VaderNotFather #DarthJake
 
Does anyone here care to take on the critics that said back in 1977 that the characters in the original Star Wars are boring and bland?

Ummm, they were wrong. And most of those critics admitted as much later.

The characters weren't boring or bland. Sure, they fit into well-know archetypes: the cocksure teenager leaving his humble home on an adventure, the even more cocksure scoundrel who leads the adventure and takes orders from no one, the feisty princess who's not afraid to get her hands dirty and takes no crap from the men, and the wise, old, avuncular wizard. But they were anything but boring or bland. Interesting and colorful, is more like it.

The Wook
 
Please, they're ripoffs of the characters from King Arthur. Right down the the Black Knight and Merlin. Heck, if you were to take some versions of the Arthurian Legends and combine them with other versions, you'd get Medieval Star Wars, right down to the wizard who leads Arthur with a sacred sword that makes him special, and the eponymous black knight who kidnaps Guinevere and Lancelot (and let's not forget the tales here where Guinevere leaves Arthur for Lancelot, sound familiar yet?) and won't release them without a duel first from Arthur. A duel that Arthur first loses to the black knight.

These characters are no more original to the classic hero's journey than Gandalf or Ron Weasley.
 
Please, they're ripoffs of the characters from King Arthur. Right down the the Black Knight and Merlin. Heck, if you were to take some versions of the Arthurian Legends and combine them with other versions, you'd get Medieval Star Wars, right down to the wizard who leads Arthur with a sacred sword that makes him special, and the eponymous black knight who kidnaps Guinevere and Lancelot (and let's not forget the tales here where Guinevere leaves Arthur for Lancelot, sound familiar yet?) and won't release them without a duel first from Arthur. A duel that Arthur first loses to the black knight.

These characters are no more original to the classic hero's journey than Gandalf or Ron Weasley.

That's what I said: "well-known archetypes".

I'm not sure who you're arguing with.
 
"Jyn is at the end as she was in the beginning." WTF does that even mean?! [...] She has grown from a scared little girl, to a reckless adolescent to a woman who gets recruited by the Rebellion and finally finds her inner strength not to mention a selflessness and carries out a daring mission that basically ends up saving the galaxy from further destruction.

The flashbacks are as irrelevant to who she is at the time of the movie as if we had flashback of Luke's early life tacked into ANH. So she couldn't sleep while her parents had a dinner party going on. Okay...? So she was scared when the bad man her parents had warned her about for years showed up, killed her mom, for all she knew her dad, and she had to bug out the way they'd taught her. Okay...? Yeah, she ran with Saw for years before leaving on her own. Okay...? We are only told about that last bit. We don't see any of it or how it shaped her into who we meet now. About all we really get is her parents were what mattered to her most. Assuming non-abusive families to be the baseline norm, that's not a shocker.

When we meet her now, she's in an Imperial prison for basically being a petty crook. It is very quickly established that she's used to talking her way out of what she can, fighting her way out when that doesn't work, and when neither of those are options biding her time until one is. When the Rebels bust her out, she immediately tries to escape. When that doesn't work, she goes along with it until she gets an opportunity to try again. When she finds out her dad's still alive, that becomes her focus. She'll go along with their mission because it serves her ends. She finds out about the superweapon and he charges her with seeing that it's destroyed. The Rebellion doesn't back her up. She is fully ready to go alone, but some people who agree with her tag along, and she welcomes their help. Everything is for herself and her dad. She is happy to use the Rebellion, but she sure doesn't join it. All that's missing from the moment the transmission goes out is her saying, "I did it, dad..."

None of this is bad. It's just very linear. She does have a couple moments, she does see a bigger picture outside of herself. But I do wonder if it had been the Rebellion's plan and not hers/her dad's, whether she would have gone to Scarif and fought so hard to get the plans out... She's a strong character and a flawed individual, but no Hero. Part of why I would have hoped they'd let her live and go off to have her own adventures past this would be to see how this experience affects her longer-term and how she might grow from there.
 
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I HAVE backed up Rogue One! I believe I've said before that Rogue One unlike A New Hope actually has a very realistic Rebellion where people like Capt. Andor has to resort to less than heroic exploits in order to get the job done. It's the most realistic and war-like film in this entire series about war in the stars. Whether or not you like or relate to characters in ANY movie is a very subjective thing indeed. I enjoyed the characters in Rogue One, the look and feel of the movie is by far the best in the series. I've been reading reviews of the original Star Wars back when it came out in 1977 and there was a lot of critics that said that the characters were flat out boring or bland or other words to that effect proving my previous point about characters being subjective in a movie. On a funny side note Gene Siskel actually said of Darth Vader that he looks like a frog coated in black vinyl.
You kinda dodged my original question regarding how does trying to redirect criticism to the old movies would invalidate criticism to R1 and how does that relate to being "a Star Wars fan" but nevermind.
What people need to understand when bringing up contemporary criticism to those movies is context. Here's a list of a few critically acclaimed movies that came out the same year or a few years back:
-The Conversation
-Godfather 2
-Rocky
-Taxi Driver
-Carrie
-Marathon Man
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
-Chinatown
-The Bridge Too Far

All these movies are deep, often dark or pessimistic dramas with lot of attention on characters and detail. Star Wars was and is a simple fairy tale. I'm not saying it was ahead of its time and people didn't understand it, I'm saying that in that cultural cinematic atmosphere it was a total odd-one-out and compared to the above it did seem banal. And as The Wook said retrospective reviews even from the same people are of changed opinions. Sergio Leone's Dollar westerns were dismissed as trash grindhouse movies and now they're regarded as masterpieces of direction, camerawork and symbiosis of picture and music. Halloween was panned as a cheap schlock movie, now it's regarded as a masterful film of suspense, atmosphere, lighting and direction. The trick is that critics may have been dismissive of these, but audiences loved Star Wars, spaghetti westerns and Halloween.
Now what do have now 40 years down the line to compare R1 to? Of course the original movies and a bazillion other action-adventure space movies. It's a different context now. If you watch a contemporary slasher, yes it has the tropes and cliches that appear in Halloween, the difference is that Halloween was the watershed movie that set all those cliches as original ideas.


One major argument against that she's the same throughout is that, well, she's kinda dead at the end of the movie.

And that changes her character...? Slasher victims are an example of character developments cause they're dead too?

Not too mention that she has grown from a scared little girl, to a reckless adolescent to a woman who gets recruited by the Rebellion and finally finds her inner strength not to mention a selflessness and carries out a daring mission that basically ends up saving the galaxy from further destruction.
I get that that was the idea, I just don't think the movie pulled it off. I'm missing the little character moments. I don't know anything about Chirrut other than he's one with the Force and the Force is with him and that he's really good with the staff. Even less about his friend who looks like Machete. There was a little conversation between Cassian and Jynn about why Cassian fights where I was waiting for some little story or anecdote so that I can learn more of these guys but it just never came. Krennic at least had clear motivations, he wanted fame, power and vastly underestimated his expendability.

Does anyone here care to take on the critics that said back in 1977 that the characters in the original Star Wars are boring and bland?
See above and The Wook's reply. Simple and bland are not the same.

Ummm, they were wrong. And most of those critics admitted as much later.

The characters weren't boring or bland. Sure, they fit into well-know archetypes: the cocksure teenager leaving his humble home on an adventure, the even more cocksure scoundrel who leads the adventure and takes orders from no one, the feisty princess who's not afraid to get her hands dirty and takes no crap from the men, and the wise, old, avuncular wizard. But they were anything but boring or bland. Interesting and colorful, is more like it.

The Wook

This. They were not complex characters, I'm the first one to admit. Pretty simple characters, archetype is a good word. But they all had some characteristic and were relatable. The descriptions above are very fitting. That's a failure in the prequels as well. You can't really describe the characters based on their traits because they don't really have them.

The flashbacks are as irrelevant to who she is at the time of the movie as if we had flashback of Luke's early life tacked into ANH. So she couldn't sleep while her parents had a dinner party going on. Okay...? So she was scared when the bad man her parents had warned her about for years showed up, killed her mom, for all she knew her dad, and she had to bug out the way they'd taught her. Okay...? Yeah, she ran with Saw for years before leaving on her own. Okay...?
Agreed, especially the Saw bit. That could have been a good way to establish Jynn as a wild-card with her own set of principles (or lack of) set on survival. Then Saw's death as a catalyst in her turning towards the Rebellion. There's the scene in the very beginning where she saves the baby. So it's already established pretty early that she's not a heartless person and would risk herself to help others.

None of this is bad. It's just very linear. She does have a couple moments, she does see a bigger picture outside of herself. But I do wonder if it had been the Rebellion's plan and not hers/her dad's, whether she would have gone to Scarif and fought so hard to get the plans out... She's a strong character and a flawed individual, but no Hero. Part of why I would have hoped they'd let her live and go off to have her own adventures past this would be to see how this experience affects her longer-term and how she might grow from there.
That's the important bit for me. I don't consider R1 to be a horrible movie. I don't hate it or have fun poking holes in it or anything. It was okayish, saw it in the theatre, maybe will watch again on a Sunday afternoon when it's on telly or Netflix, but that's as far as it goes for me. Definitely seen worse.
 
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