Frank your Majesty said:
moviefreakedmind said:
Frank your Majesty said:
moviefreakedmind said:
Frank your Majesty said:
If R1 didn’t even attempt it, why blame it for not being character-driven? Or does every movie need to be character driven?
“At least The Phantom Menace tried to make a step-in-the-poop joke that isn’t completely tasteless, they horribly failed, but at least they tried. I can’t say the same of Citizen Kane.”
R1 barely attempted to have characters at all. If the Death Star and other iconic Star Wars imagery weren’t in it, then nothing about the film would be even remotely memorable.
And your analogy is not worth addressing.
You still didn’t answer if every movie needs to be character-driven.
Of course not, but it is important when the main plot isn’t compelling or interesting, especially since we know exactly how it’s going to turn out. We know they’ll get the plans, so it would seem logical to have it be character driven since the main plot is straightforward and already spoiled.
R1 was advertised as a war movie in the Star Wars universe and I think the comparison is quite fitting. It focuses on a small part of the whole, it isn’t really about character development and the outcome is known by practically everyone.
One of the most important elements of an effective war movie is a sense of empathy for the characters. Whether they’re motivated by duty and patriotism or they’re conflicted or just caught in the middle of a violent situation, their struggle is often what makes the story compelling. A war movie that kind of compares to R1 is Black Hawk Down since that had a lot of characters with very little development, but at least with BHD each one had a clear and unique personality and we got a sense with most of them that they had lives and aspirations beyond the firefights in Mogadishu (the centralized location also helped in BHD, R1 is all over the place). All the characters in Rogue One seem pretty professional and for all I know none of them have any real purpose outside of this mission.
For me, it’s perfectly fine that R1 didn’t attempt to be more than that, so it shouldn’t be judged by a standard that it didn’t even intend to reach.
Why shouldn’t it be? A Haunted House wasn’t intending to reach any standard, so should we not judge it? I do get what you’re saying, I think. I agree that we shouldn’t try to harp on about how R1 wasn’t “fun” enough or something like that since obviously that wasn’t its tone. I’m not trying to criticize it that way, I’m trying to articulate where I think R1 failed as a film, war movie or otherwise.
It was always meant to tell a straight-forward story, that we already know. The main selling point is to show how it happend.
It doesn’t tell a straight-forward story. I think TFA was a lot more straightforward than R1. It tries at times to incorporate characterization with Jyn and the lead guy talking about trust, and feels out-of-place given that they’re just two people on assignment together. Forrest Whitaker is very convoluted and questionable. Why he decides to sacrifice himself is a complete mystery; he basically commits suicide when there’s no reason for him to do so. The Chinese monks have no real relevance to much of anything as far as the story goes. The film also very clearly expects emotional responses towards the characters, or at least it seems that way given the execution of their death scenes.
I think that almost every movie should have you caring about the characters one way or the other. Having boring characters is generally a sign of bad film-making. But not every movie needs to advance primarily by characters going through a phase of big changes, which is what I would understand by character-driven.
My phrasing was a bit off, but R1 didn’t seem to make much effort to have compelling characters. Most were without personality and the ones that were interesting got little focus.
That’s a different issue, then. And all I can say is, well, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Which characters do you think are compelling. And why?
