| Rogue One: A Star Wars Story |
[Dec. 20th, 2016|09:49 pm]
Nick Mamatas
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is an awful movie receiving good reviews and kudos from fans because it is much like fan-fiction or a role-playing game in the visually spectacular setting of the series. Fans are most of all always fans of themselves. It is a marginally better film than the awful The Force Awakens but only because of how it ends.
And how does it end?
Oh, everyone dies.
So! The crux of this film is that the bizarre design flaw in the Death Star, so ably exploited by Luke Skywalker in the 1970s, was actually an act of sabotage by an unwilling weapons designer. He, some fifteen years after being snatched up by the empire to build the damn thing, slips a message to a pilot who is keen to leave the Empire and help the Rebellion. The idea is to send the message to a radical splinter group led by some asthmatic guy who lives on a desert planet (presumably to help his asthma?). But that the message got out—though not the content of the message—is also known to the mainline rebellion, so they bust the designer's grownish sexy daughter out of sexy prison so she can talk to the radical rebel and maybe get to hear the message, and anyway, this takes a whole lot of time and visits to four or five different planets or space stations and the message is basically, "Stick a banana in the tail pipe. For more information on the tail pipe, check out the big library on Well-Known Popular Library World. PS: you don't have a library card."
The problems are obvious. Why is the information not in the message in the first place? As Well-Known Popular Library World is well-known, why didn't the rebel alliance get spies in there—they have spies and even reprogrammed Empire robots—years ago, in case the Empire was working on something interesting, like, say, a Death Star? And of course, my old favorite, why—if spaceships can communicate to planets instantly and even while in hyperspace—is everyone using space-bike messengers to send hard copies of stuff across the galaxy?
Anyway, it gets worse. Chickie-poo and Rebel Spy gather a bunch of helpers to go to Well-Known Popular Library World. They find a blind guy who is not quite a Jedi, but who is very much every fortune cookie cliche; another guy who carries a big jar of laser juice on his back; a reprogrammed Imperial robot who is constantly under suspicion by the rebels thanks to his design and colors and constantly being asked to provide his bona fides by Empire stooges thanks to him being out of place (someone who raises a red flag with everyone he encounters—definitely the droid you want on a mission of infiltration); the upset pilot; and a bunch of others. There's some nutty business where most of these guys have a big fight against scrubs and then get arrested and put into the sort of prison where nobody is searched for lock picks and you can definitely stick your whole arm between the bars and mess around with stuff because nobody is watching either. But since even the official sexy prison Chickie-poo was in allowed for mascara pencils and collagen lip treatments, there's probably some implied plot point being made.
Oh, and papa gets killed off, thanks to a bizarre imperial HR protocol where people have meetings outside in the rain. In fact, one of the major themes of Rogue One is that imperial human resources is a total mess. The heavy in this film is basically a middle-management type who really really wants to secure a promotion, but he can't, because he's a dick who has hit the limits of his competence. He gets to meet Darth Vader at his house, and interrupts him during his daily hot tub session, so it doesn't go well. (Vader is a lot more sarcastic here than he is in the original trilogy.) It's like someone skimmed the Wikipedia article for Eichmann in Jerusalem and was like, "Bam! That's a character now!"
The radical asthmatic guy is no help because for no particular reason he decides that he's tired of running and/or fighting so he just stands there as his city gets Death Starred to...well, not rubble, as it already was rubble. And not sand, because it already was sand. But anyway, he dies because I presume the film only booked Forest Whitaker for five days and so all his scenes take place in the same room.
If all of this sounds nonsensical, it is. And it's worse than it sounds as there is exactly ONE type of beat in this film. One or more of the goodies are cornered and menaced somehow and then suddenly the menacing baddie is attacked by someone right off screen-left. This happens at least a dozen times in the film. It'll be part of a drinking game with the Blu-ray comes out, I guarantee.
So then the movie picks up a bit as it goes from random index cards filled with ideas for scenes (and some that just read "Character Development Here? Maybe???") to...
But this isn't just ANY poorly organized library. See, there needs to be a switch thrown, and also another switch thrown, and a door opened, and then closed, and a ladder climbed, and a pair of waldoes to be manually operated, and as luck would have it, the particular book is named for Chickie-poo's childhood nickname, "Stardust." As in what the Death Star turns planets into. That's nice. Thanks, papa.
So, Chickie-poo. Interesting thing: doesn't need to be in the film. Doesn't really do anything—the message from her father wasn't sent to her, but to someone else. The Spy guy does most of the work of building the team, and her own speech to the rebellion makes little sense—she was never a part of the rebellion, and has no political reputation. (There's also no reason for the rebellion not to invade Library World before it's too late, so no need for a speech.) The pilot does most of the piloting and most of the moral hand-wringing, and even utters the titular line. This film has a titular line!
Chickie-poo doesn't even shoot Mr. Banality of Evil at the end. The Rebel Spy does it instead.
There's a lot of space battling and explosions and whatnot, and a lot of stunt work, and even the sort of obstacles that were mocked in Galaxy Quest nearly twenty years ago. The big battles are all understood as a distraction to allow the book with the plans to be checked out of the library without a library card. And the battles are a distraction, but for the audience—there is no third act. The action and the stakes do no rise toward a climax. Rogue One is Freytag's Trapezoid.
And then everyone starts to die. Kung Fu dies after throwing a switch. His friend dies after getting sad, and not even in the obvious fun way—shoot him in his barrel of laser juice! (Did I mention that his laser rifle is also pump action?) The robot gets blown to hell while guarding a locked door that doesn't even matter because the bad guy just takes an elevator to get to the Important Place anyway. The pilot dies after fucking around a bit.
Oh, then the Empire decides to blow up its own library, which given the events of the film we must believe contains originals of all sorts of important documents of which there are zero other copies. But it's vitally important because Chickie-Poo and Rebel Spy need to die too.
Darth Vader shows up and kills a bunch of scrubs who are passing along the compressed file of the book like it's a track and field baton. He just misses it and certainly expends zero effort afterwards on either trying to find out what was in the book or what the widely known and fairly closely explained flaw in the Death Star actually is. And he certainly doesn't just go apeshit with the Death Star to blow up as many rebel planets as possible before the plans are widely distributed. (In this film, the Death Star can zip into hyperspace like any other ship.)
There's been a lot of talk online about whether there are romantic feelings between the Chickie-poo and Rebel Spy. The evidence is primarily that they are a man, and a woman, both fuckable-looking, and in a film. They make it out to the beach, and the sky is bright and yellow, as if the sun is beginning to set. In another sort of film, they'd head off into the sunset. In this one, the sunset heads into them as it's the big blast from the Death Star.
Why did people like this movie? For the same reason they liked various bad iterations of Star Trek, and the tie-in novels of any number of science fiction "properties", and other junk. It's a military story with lots of spectacle, and some pretend profundity because everyone died, even the *sniff sniff* protagonists. It's what comic book companies sell to tweens by stamping "Mature Content" on the covers of their magazines. It's full of phony sacrifices made in order to carry out easily made decisions, and with the "cool" sort of characters they can whip up in twenty minutes with a handful of dice. Greasy kid stuff, but in 3D! |
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