Carry on up the Kyber crystals

[nineveh_uk]

In preparation for Christmas viewing, the past two weekends I have watched the last two Star Wars films on DVD, courtesy of the library.

The Force Awakens

This remains a good solid space adventure that did an excellent job of relaunching the cinema franchise after the second trilogy turned out to be pants. It ditches the cod-philosophising in favour of the Force we all know - the Light Side, the Dark Side, they should be in balance, some people can use the Force to for telekinesis and coercion, enough said. The acting is good, with Ridley, Boyega, and Driver engaging as the leads, and Harrison Ford not phoning it in. There is undoubtedly an element by which it is fanfic of the original, but it carries it off with enough of the familiar to breed affection, and enough difference in the details to keep it interesting. That said, I'm not sure it's a trick that can be repeated, so I'm interested in reports that The Last Jedi, which I won't get to see until next weekend, does it differently.

Rogue One

A reasonably entertaining evening, but from the reviews I recall, an over-rated film. It's essentially a Star Wars heist movie and it's at least half an hour too long (do we care about that battle? No, we do not.) This is kind of fanfic that slips in lots and lots of missing scenes with references to the original, but does it so much that its own story doesn't have room to stretch. The ideas that it has that could make it different - what does it mean to be an unwilling collaborator, what does it mean to be part of a violent resistance movement - are merely lip-service to the concept of a more character-driven plot that doesn't exist here.

Unfortunately CGI Peter Cushing is a bit weird and CGI young Carrie Fisher is really, really weird. Both of them, along with - I am sorry to say - James Earl Jones should have been recast. There are some 80-something men who have the voice of their prime years, but alas Jones isn't one of them and Vader isn't powerful enough as a result. I was amused that the Empire puts its archive on a tropical island planet. With those kind of resources, why not give your Imperial librarians some sun, sea, and sand? Watched straight after TFA it is also very striking how much the latter has done in terms of putting women into minor parts that in the original trilogy and thus Rogue One* were routinely played by men. Still, they re-launched a mega-franchise with two films in which the leads were played by women. That is some progress.

That said, one part of the original Star Wars sensibility that I was delighted to see was that just as TFA retains the Leni Riefenstahl aesthetic for the First Order, Rogue One let the John Martin inspiration off the leash. I spent the sequence in which a planet is destroyed going "This was definitely inspired by The Great Day of His Wrath, which I've since confirmed was the case.

* I felt that Rogue One might have ignored that a bit and stuck in some more. OK, characters who appear in both need to be more or less the same person, but there's no reason that more of the random fighters/pilots who don't couldn't be female when you've just done better in another film, and there were several characters who might have been gender-swapped and played by an older actress.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

I thought they got away with CGI Peter Cushing, apart from the fact I knew he was dead and therefore it had to be an effect, which was distracting. CGI Young Carrie Fisher was, alas, just bad.

[tree_and_leaf]

The monks in Rogue One were the first time since Alec Guiness (who I'm convinced was incorporating his observation of his parish priest into his performance) that I believed that there's a mystic element to the Force at all. The Prequel Jedi didn't feel like religious people at all, which made the business about them being vowed to celibacy seem even more like a creaky plot device than it did already.

[nineveh_uk]

I felt they worked quite well, possibly because they didn't bother trying to explain it. They're Mystic Monks, that's enough. The prequels - as far as I remember them - seemed to fall victim to that urge to explain that just makes things boring.

[nineveh_uk]

CGI Cushing was definitely less bad than CGI Carrie Fisher. I felt that had it just been one short scene it would have been fine, but multiple ones pushed it too much. The face was OK, but the whole package wasn't.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, that's probably fair!

[lilliburlero]

I felt that The Last Jedi didn’t really put a new spin on the fanficcy qualities of TFA: it was entertaining enough, but even more so than TFA, seemed like reconstituted blocks of Star Wars Product. (And given that the original trilogy is so tropey to begin with...) I feel it also suffers a bit from a lack of menace on the part of the villains, both on an individual level (there’s the banality of evil, and then there’s Adam Driver suffering from what appears to be roid rage—naturally a fairly lean and sinewy type, he bulks up in a really peculiar, puffy way) and in terms of a Villain Plan. But I’ll be interested to know what you think...

I heard Kylo Ren has an 8-pack

[nineveh_uk]

I shall report back. I'm hoping to get to it this weekend, but it depends on a number of factors, like the timing of my sister's Ikea delivery.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I read that Rogue One had a ton of rewrites and reshoots and you can definitely see it in how the movie ended up -- still a lot of fun to watch, though I maintain that Jyn's mother must have had a lot more to do originally because her presence at the beginning isn't just pointless, it's actively counterproductive. ("I'm so loyal to my husband that I'll get myself killed in a hopeless last stand against twenty-odd soldiers! I'm sure my six-year-old will be just fine after we're both gone.") A tropical island would be a lovely location for a library in terms of the librarians but probably not great for the actual resources; paper will get moldy, electronic systems will need a ton of power to keep cool. I guess the cost of upkeep was high enough that they couldn't afford to keep copies of any of those records anywhere else; very fortunate for the Rebellion :).

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

A lot of rewrites and reshoots would definitely explain it. There's an episodic quality whereby the episodes don't quite tie together. Jyn's mother is just ridiculous. After all, it would be a lot more plausible that Jyn wasn't there if her Mum wasn't either. But they want the happy family -> orphan girl, so presumably they want her there at the start and had to get rid of her.

I get the impression that practicality is not top of the list of the Empire's (or the First Order's) specifications. At least they didn't keep the library on the lava planet.