Rogue One is a tragedy, because you know the unavoidable fate of the characters, yet you know they can do nothing about it.
I don’t know if tragedy is quite right. This isn’t just an unfortunate fate that has struck these characters, these are sacrifices they’re making proactively.
Seen it three times by now, and I just keep liking it more and more. The Rebel Alliance feels like an actual military organisation. And we get to see that both Rebels and Empire have their internal political struggles, be it Tarkin/Krennic or Saw/Mon Mothma. It doesn’t feel monolithic anymore.
Well, the Empire had its own internal struggles dating back to the Death Star briefing room scene, which in some ways accomplishes as much in the one scene as all the Empire scenes in RO do. The internal Rebellion conflict is a nice addition, but just like with Krennic it doesn’t go anywhere.
It’s a film that has the maturity the OT had, where characters understand each others with just eye contact and they don’t need to say everything, tho in the end yes, what ends up being key is the story and not the characters. I can’t see how that’s not the case in most of movies anyway.
People keep saying this stuff about story being more important than characters, which is sort of missing the point. Story is, of course, ultimately the most important thing. But story and plot are two different things. An extremely simplified equation would be story = plot + characters. A story is the sum of these things and if the characters don’t resolve in a satisfying way than neither does the story, even if the plot does. This is what people are getting at. Now obviously if it’s not necessarily a character film that’s not the end of the world but then the story has to be resolved in other meaningful ways (thematically, for example). A story is a sum of its parts and whether it works for people depends on how well those parts come together. For some people the movie didn’t totally work so they’re blaming it on the characters when that’s actually only a piece of it.
And I don’t like the fact that this movie is getting so much trashing on the web,
Welcome to the web.
mainly because I really liked it and hope all the spinoffs take this approach and level, and not to have “character driven” spinoffs such as “origins of han solo”, “origin of boba fett”, “Vader”.
Personally as long as they steer clear of overly contrived origins (this is when Han installed chess on the Falcon! and this is how he got the red lines on his pants!) I don’t think it’s a bad idea to see how someone like Han Solo became who he is, provided it’s handled well. Boba Fett meanwhile seems like kind of the perfect spin-off character, considering his popularity, coolness (well, in ESB at least) and the fact that we’ve barely seen him do a damn thing on the big screen. A Vader film would be unwise, if for no other reason than we’ve already seen so much of him.
Honestly cinema today, and actors are generally so crappy I’d rather have a CGI Alec Guinness or Peter Cushing all day.
Jokes aside, the actual work of those performances would actually fall on actors today so you’d just be getting the same “crap” but just with a different face.