Rogue One The Official "List Your Complaints about Rogue One" Discussion Thread

This unfortunately might be my least favorite SW movie. I didn't care about any of the characters and was bored throughout.

 

Eh, the problem for me was that the characters didn't talk a whole lot and when they did it wasn't especially good dialogue.

 

I've watched the movie maybe 5 times now. I want to like it so badly. I think the story concept is good, but there's enough I don't like to really weigh it down.

I love the concept and the action sequences, but little else.

I think the movie should have began with Galen being taken and Jyn hiding in the bunker and then either jumped directly to her being rescued from the Imperial transport.

The introductions of Bodhi and Cassian I thought were unnecessary and contributed to the story jumping around way too much in the beginning.

I feel like Cassian shouldn't have been introduced until Jyn meets him on Yavin IV, and Bodhi shouldn't have been introduced until they meet him in the cell.

Bodhi's introduction in particular was pointless, IMO, in that the bit with Bor Gullet and Bodhi subsequently "loosing his mind" had no long term affect. It painted Saw as being excessively paranoid, but that didn't matter since he meets with Jyn anyway without issue, and Bodhi snaps out of his mental fog in about two seconds.

There's no payoff to that scene.

They could have gone straight to Jyn being freed. Meeting Cassian. Being told that they had word of a defector pilot being held by Saw with a message from Galen and gone from there.

Chirrut's presence annoyed me because he made it all about the Force again. Rather than it being about soldiers with boots on the ground fighting an impossible enemy, you have this character that's a constant reminder that this supernatural power is on their side, making the impossible possible.

It distracts from the human experience of the characters.

Saw I felt came and went too quickly. He finds Jyn left in her bunker then it skips ahead to her resenting him and being sent on a mission to get information from him. His eccentric and paranoid personality aren't much of a hurdle for her as they hash out their differences in a minute of talking and he gives her the message before deciding he's going to stay behind and die just because.

By the time they get to Scarif, the movie picks up and I have few complaints. I feel like Jyn showed more hatred towards Saw than she did Krennic. I felt like the antagonism between the two of them was sorely lacking and that the movie could have benefitted by giving those characters more screen time together.

CG Tarkin I thought was distracting. I didn't hate him. I thought he was essential to the movie, but I don't think CG humans are quite there yet. Gollum, Jar Jar, dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, etc are all things I can buy into because they only exist as CG. People however tend to stick out as a sore thumb.

I don't have any moral issue with Tarkin being CG, and in my list of complaints, Tarkin is probably the least bothersome. But I do think they could have shuffled things around to make him less distracting.

For instance have the first conversation with Tarkin be entirely with Tarkin looking out the window, only seeing his face in the reflection, or having an over the shoulder view from behind so that we only ever see him from behind when he's
facing Krennic.

Have another officer inform Krennic of the leak from Galen and have Vader inform Krennic that Tarkin is being given control after his failures, etc.




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Both of the leads are miscast, Felicity Jones is not believable as an action hero and Diego Luna is a block of wood. They also have zero chemistry together.

 

Well then I suppose blocks of wood are great actors.

 

"I've been in this fight since I was 6 years old!" I honestly thought that line by Cassian had more emotion in it than almost any other scene in the franchise. I respect your opinion but disagree - I thought he did a great job! Another guy I thought could have played the part well was The Red Viper from GOT

 

Miscast for me is harder to understand than just disliking the general tone of the film and its approach to characterisation. I think they were clearly well cast to pull off the roles in the fashion Edwards wanted but yes I can certainly see why this might not be to everyone's taste. Its not as if for example the film is crammed full of comic one liners that they fail to sell.

 

Unfortunately, we don't get any specifics here. Why is Felicity Jones not believable as an action hero? She trained very hard with a first class martial artist for her action scenes. Is it perhaps because of her diminutive stature? There are lots of real world examples of small people who are capable of deadly work: the Ghurkas, for example.

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/arme...aved-a-girl-from-being-gang-raped-247639.html

The average height of a Ghurka is 5'2".

 

This is a complaints thread, so we should let people complain. IMO, Rogue One features the best actors and best performances across all the Star Wars films. Luna, Jones, Mikkelsen, Mendelsohn. These are some of the best living actors around. But if you prefer the over-the-top, broad characterization in most modern genre films (particularly in the Marvel-verse), you're not likely to appreciate the more subtle approach Rogue One took. Fair enough. We each have our preferences. As long as you don't offer your opinion as an objective assessment, it's just, like, your opinion man.

 

Maybe I've just completely forgotten her action scenes (I have), but I don't even consider Jyn Erso an action hero role, so whether or not Felicity Jones is believable as an action hero or not doesn't have any relevance to me.

 

TaradosGon

I agree with your observations, except for this one:

Chirrut's presence annoyed me because he made it all about the Force again. Rather than it being about soldiers with boots on the ground fighting an impossible enemy, you have this character that's a constant reminder that this supernatural power is on their side, making the impossible possible.

Well, it's not like he was Superman and could do all kinds of impossible things. He was the "spiritual" leader (or in this particular case side-kick) who - like Obi-Wan and Yoda before him - made accurate observations in a variety of moments. And it had been somewhat established in ANH and ROTJ ("May the Force Be With you", "May the Force Be with Us" in contrast to Leia's mundane "Good Luck" in ESB) that you've got to have some faith to be ultimately successful, regardless whether it's faith in the Force, yourself or a combination of the two.
I would not have like the film without him, he was and is one of my favorite RO characters.

The part I love and hate at the same time was Jyn's speech on Yavin IV.

Now, the Hero's Journey according to Joseph Campbell -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey - (which inspired George Lucas) ultimately ends with "the hero coming back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man", which can also take the form of confronting people petrified in dogma and/or their old ways and in a effort to adopt a new perspective how to deal with certain things.

The realistic part in Rogue One was to showcase all the uncertainty and concerns of the Alliance leaders, petrified in their dogma, in a manner of speaking, that required someone to speak up and remind them what it is they fight for.

But the Rogue One character who should have done that, IMHO - because he had been fighting all his life for the Alliance (!) - should have been Cassian Andor.

Unlike many of the armchair leaders we saw assembled there, he was the one who had been fighting the Empire in the streets for "their" cause and did all the dirty work. He would have been entitled to ask everybody assembled "so you tell me I wasted my life and endured all that suffering for nothing because you are having second thoughts"?

That could have been a great and fantastic scene. Instead you have a character that had been admittedly opportunistic all her life and until a few hours or days ago to deliver a flamboyant but ultimately hard to believe speech, given her background.

 

In those days, Jyn found out her father was not an Imperial callaborator, witnessed the Death Star's destruction of an entire city, watched her long-time guardian Saw be killed by the same blast, and then had her father die in her arms while telling her to help destroy the Death Star. She found purpose in those few days because of those extraordinary events. Her previous apathy was rooted in the idea that her father was a traitor and her guardian abandoned her. She learns the truth of those things and then witnesses the full destructive, evil power of the Empire. In that context, her speech on Yavin IV is 100% believable. And it's not flambuoyant at all. It's overly earnest, it's a little awkward, and she unnecessarily seems to be calling some of the people there cowards. And the speech doesn't work. It flows well with her character at that stage in her journey, IMO.

 

My main complaint is that I feel zero emotional connection to the characters. My second complaint would be that this tries to be a war movie but lacks any real grit that would make you feel like this is an actual war. They tried to show the dirtiness of war through Cassian and succeeded somewhat, but it was undone by the cartoonish-ness of Krennic and to a lesser extent Saw Gerrera. Tarkin would probably have been a better villain.

But at the end of the day this is not a movie I loathe, it just leaves my cold. Good war movies I watched either created an emotional response or stimulated me on an intellectual level. This did neither.

 

Yeah, I think this comes down to a difference in taste. Some people need a director to squeeze big emotions out of their actors, while others prefer a director who acts more as a dispassionate observer. Edwards is the latter kind of director. And that aligns with my tastes. Simple as that.

 

I feel the same way. I consider Jyn to be a strong, complex female character. I think some of her action is impressive, but that's tertiary to me when I consider her motivations and choices.

 

Honesty Monk I would tend to say the opposite, I think if you want to successfully make a film with more subtle performances then I think there's more not less onus on the director. A more subtle expression needs to be made more obvious to the audience via highlighting the actors performance(closeups, shallow focus, lighting) and I think theres also more of a natural feed though from the mood of the environments you create.

You look at a scene like the interrogation/mission briefing on Yavin early in the film and whilst Jones has some dialog this is deliberately guarded where as the characters actual feelings are gotten across more via reasonable subtle facial reactions to being told about Galen and Saw. For some people that's probably not what they want from a blockbuster and perhaps something there not used to in cinema generally? That said though I think if you look back to ESB that film despite having a few more one liners is actually full of similar kinds of moments as well.

 

I can't say I agree. There are many comically exaggerated characters in Rogue like Chirrut, K2-SO, Saw und Krennic. It is exactly the over-the-top broad characterization style that you say other movies have. The only ones who are more "down to earth" are Cassian and Jyn.

And I don't mind comical exaggeration as long as it is well done and fits the material. I don't really have a preference one way or the other. What I absolutely can't say is that Rogue is "subtle".

 

Jyn and Cassian are the main protagonists, so them being "down to earth" makes a huge difference. In contrast, Luke/Han/Leia, Obi-Wan/Anakin and Rey/ Finn are much broader, and far less subtle characters. I love them, but they exist in a different storytelling mode than Jyn and Cassian.

Also, supporting characters in an ensemble being broader is par for the course. We should not expect (or want) each supporting character to have a full, nuanced arc. That would make for an overstuffed and overly bust 2-hour film.

 

Yeah, they are less broad strokes though that doesn't make them better or more well-written characters than classic SW characters. Like I said there's room for both types of characters depending on the type of story. While Jyn and Cassian were more down to earth they didn't engage me like the great characters in for example "Das Boot". There are quite a few great war films featuring very human characters and their subtleties.

I don't know what "we" should expect. I think that whoever goes to watch a Space Wars movie has their own expectations. I don't know if anyone can make the call what "we" should expect.

 

How does Threepio and Artoo get aboard Tantive IV if Raddus has already left to fight and Tantive IV is docked in the Profundity? Probably one of only a few niggles I have with RO every time I watch it, that and the scenes cut of Jyn, Cassian and Krennic on the beach.

 

^^ Because it's the Tantive VI docked in the Profundity with Leia's Tantive IV arriving later at the edge of the Scarif battlezone to receive the transmission from the ill-fated Tantive VI.

 

That... could work. I'll take that.

One of my only RO complaints is that I would have rather just seen the droids walking in a Tantive hallway, not seen them at the base or heard C-3PO's line to R2.

 

Isn't there a line saying Tantive IV was docked in the Profundity undergoing repairs?

I'd guess that when the message came through to Yavin when Mothma and Draven learnt of it they'd contact Raddus. He may have arranged to rendezvous with the rest of the Fleet before a final jump to Scarif. The time it would've took to shuttle the droids to the Profundity and then for them to get to Scarif seems improbable they'd be able to do that in the time frame of the film....and the door on Tantive IV was jammed so they'd be stuck with Raddus.