Continuing with Part 3:
Once everyone escapes Jedha, Jyn and Cassian and K2SO go to some rainy planet in search of Jyn’s father, who is the primary engineer in charge of constructing the Death Star. I like this storyline between father and daughter, and wish it would have been much more fleshed out in the script. I mentioned all of this before–the idea that Galen intentionally designed a vulnerability in the Death Star is an interesting one, and I think that reveal and his demise would have been better saved for the climax in the last act.
What I did not like about this important scene was first a small thing: being called back to Luke crashing his X-wing on Dagobah, which is all I could think of when their ship landed in the rain. Stuff like this may be nitpicking, I agree, but I just hate the ripoffs like this and the Droid/odds dialogue that takes me out of the movie. Let things like the very nice looking Yavin 4 base, the very well cast Mon Mothma, and the reappearance of Bail Organa, provide all of the nostalgia we are looking for. Don’t shoehorn cameos and ripoffs into the film and take me completely out of the experience please.
What I didn’t like even more was one glaring plot hole and the inconsistency of Cassian’s character. First of all, why are the Rebels still interested in killing Galen Erso? The Death Star has been built and is operational. All of those engineers have already done their job. What good will it do to risk all of these lives in an attempt to kill any of them? Second, why does Cassian not pull the trigger? We watched on in boredom as the name of some trading post was importantly superimposed on the screen at the beginning of the movie, then saw Cassian kill some random innocent in an act that was supposed to make his character ruthless and morally ambiguous. Now he has orders to kill Galen Erso, has him in his sights, and just decides to walk away? What in the world…!!! Just terrible.
But what I really wanted to talk about during this part of the film was something I noticed that caused me to be unable to watch the movie in the same light again: the number of cuts in this movie. There are so many cuts in this film and in this scene in particular that it may actually set a record in all of filmmaking. I’m not even joking. Here is how the editing in this film goes:
Shot…2 seconds, cut…1 second, quick cut…2 seconds, cut…3 seconds cut…1 second, cut…1 second, cut again…2 seconds, cut, cut, etc.
I don’t know how long exactly Galen’s death scene was, but there were literally 15 cuts in a 30 second span where someone was dying and the film was supposed to be slowing down. After that, it took me sometime to recover because all I was paying attention to was the editing. Cut. Two seconds–cut. One second, cut. Shot, reverse shot. Whenever someone speaks the camera is always on the them, then a reaction shot. Then one second later, cut. And two seconds later, cut again.
In some cases this could be considered a stylistic choice, and indeed at certain points in the film where the pacing needs to be fast, it’s even preferred. But the entire movie is edited this way! Even the slow death scenes! Are you kidding me? I had to go back and watch Yoda’s death scene today and admire how both Luke and Yoda are in the frame and the number of cuts are so few and far between. At this point in Rogue One, I started paying closer attention to the camera work and the cinematography too. There was actually one scene earlier where the gang are being held in a jail cell on Jedha, and only at the very end of the scene is there a camera shot that shows a perspective from behind bars. Does anyone remember the scene between Tom Hagen and Frank Pantengeli in The Godfather Part II? When Tom Hagen goes to visit him at the prison, the entire scene is filmed with the barbed wire in between the camera and the actors. When you watch The Empire Strikes Back, watch the framing and panning in the Wampa cave. Think about Vader’s mask emerging out of the smoke during the Carbon freezing scene.
I could go on and on, but this movie has almost nothing like that. Where is the actual filmmaking? Over and over again we get something in the foreground, and then refocus onto some character in the background. We see some character in the background, and then the camera refocuses onto something in the foreground. Cut, cut, then another quick cut. Too many times the actors are too close to the camera or the camera is not even focused on anything in particular at all. Save for one sequence in the last act, I thought the composition in this film was extraordinarily poor.
Sorry for the length of these posts, but I’ll resume in Part 4.