Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 2016, gareth edwards, rogue one: a star wars story
Director: Gareth Edwards
Rogue One continues a disturbing Hollywood trend in which incompetent screenplays are overlooked by audiences due to the fact that the film’s inconsistencies are promised to be returned to in a later film. Case in point: Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has alluded to the fact that Forrest Whittaker’s Saw Gerrera is likely to appear in future Star Wars films. Perhaps it will be explained why Gerrera has an “extremist” reputation, or why exactly he chooses to make a certain pivotal decision that he does in Rogue One. Without this additional context, however, the character is incompetently written—his backstory is left vague, his motivations are unclear, and the relationship he has with the woman he was a surrogate father for is left unexplored. Nearly every character in Rogue One similarly falls apart in examination—Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) introduction characterizes him with traits that are barely alluded to again in the film. If the creation of filmic universes offers the movie industry a chance to challenge the suggestion that television shows offer richer characters, the continued obsession with fan service comes at the expense of creating convincing dramatic stakes. Rogue One, much like Ghostbusters, Suicide Squad, and Captain America: Civil War, is nearly incomprehensible on its own—the acclaimed “Darth Vader scene”, for example, contradicts the climax, taking away from a heroic sacrifice in order to glorify the opposition. If The Force Awakens was largely a successful reimagining of A New Hope, watching Rogue One is like slogging through the footnotes.
Director: Gareth Edwards
That Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures entrusted a globally successful franchise to a relatively untested director in Gareth Edwards showed incredible promise. Monsters, Edwards’ 2010 break-through, was a treat that foregrounded its philosophy and politics while keeping things honest to genre fans with a few impressive giant alien sequences. His Godzilla largely follows that film’s structure–viewers are relentlessly teased for much of the picture until the villainous monsters rear their ugly heads half-way through, and that merely comes as foreplay to the lovable marquee star. But gone are the compelling sociopolitical stakes (Monsters used American hostility towards illegal immigrants from Mexico as a starting point) and the innovative creature design. Gone is most of what made Monsters interesting–instead, Godzilla is simply content to be a middle-of-the-road blockbuster, hitting the expected notes with an incredible proficiency but notable laziness. Captain America: The Winter Soldier showed that Hollywood could make action films with a real bite to them, and just last year Pacific Rim arrived with a fully-realized fantasy setting and a distinct aesthetic. This blockbuster, on the other hand, looks and feels like many of the blockbusters that have come before it. Worse than the paint-by-numbers approach, the uniformly overqualified cast is wasted with lame dialogue and thin characterizations. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s meathead vanilla hero is never appealing, even as the script tries to earn the viewer’s admiration by throwing charming children in need of saving in his direction. 1998’s Godzilla was such a notable disaster that people still talk about it today. While this newest reboot is certainly truer to the roots of the beloved franchise, it is bittersweet that few but the most diehard kaiju fans will remember it come the end of this blockbuster season.
For Reel 