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[Egan_BW]

Hey, if every starwars movie started to be more like R1, I wouldn't be complaining.

[hector13]

Well, killing off all the characters would certainly bring an end to things very quickly.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Well, killing off all the characters would certainly bring an end to things very quickly.

Aside from one cheesy moment and characters with unrealized potential, R1 was pretty damn good.

[SalmonGod]

Well, killing off all the characters would certainly bring an end to things very quickly.

Aside from one cheesy moment and characters with unrealized potential, R1 was pretty damn good.

And some silly stuff like a super important security controls panel being out in some random open area.  Plenty of things to criticize about it, but I loved the spirit and concept of the film.

[Putnam]

yeah, my point being that rogue 1 is surprisingly uncontroversially the best star wars movie of the last 30 years but is not particularly characteristic of star wars

[scriver]

Oh common there were lots of railess 9000 feet up walkways!

[EnigmaticHat]

yeah, my point being that rogue 1 is surprisingly uncontroversially the best star wars movie of the last 30 years but is not particularly characteristic of star wars

I think part of what made it different for people was how it was sold.  Rogue One advertised in advance that it was going to cut straight into the action with no text crawl.

A lot of what made Rogue One "not" a Star Wars movie was the main characters.  There's no jedi, the male lead is introduced by (spoilers?) killing a civilian, the comic relief droid can talk mostly like a normal person and fights alongside the rest of the team.  Oh and they all die.  But it treated the villains (arguably the most enduring icons in SW) with a sort of reverence.  In particular giving Tarkin a huge role that doesn't make much sense structurally.  Since he isn't a true antagonist to the heroes his main function is to make the primary antagonist more pathetic.  But Tarkin is one of the big touchstones in regards to the Death Star, and Rogue One loves using the Death Star to evoke nostalgia.

This compared to TLJ.  Based on the trailers I expected about what we got.  But I can see why other people wouldn't see it that way.  It was following up The Force Awakens, which was basically a whole plot clone of A New Hope, with most of the "new" stuff simply coming from other OT/prequel movies.  The Force Awakens is the most "Star Wars" movie that has ever existed, arguably moreso than the *actual* original trilogy movies which are full of a lot of... odd moments that have mostly been forgotten.  So then you follow it up with The Last Jedi, which visually resembles the OT more but is the least "Star Wars" movie out of the 8 mainline ones to date.  And so people approach the movie with a different mindset than they would Rogue One.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

yeah, my point being that rogue 1 is surprisingly uncontroversially the best star wars movie of the last 30 years but is not particularly characteristic of star wars

-snip-

I would disagree with you guys. Rogue One has been the MOST Star Wars-y movie since the originals. Though Hat here cites the R1 characters are not like the other main characters, that's actually one of the weakest points of the movie. The two actual real main characters are terribly forgettable. As for the rest of the cast? You got ya comic relief droids, you got ya space wizard, you got ya strong man (who is a samurai with a large gun instead of a bear-man), etc. etc. (Tarkin and Krennic standing in for the Emperor and Vader respectively even though Vader does make an appearance.)

Everyone dying is neither here nor there and honestly while it's executed pretty well, it just feels like more of the "I'm not in the originals; guess I'll die" maxim. Pretty sure Tarkin would be like hey let's NOT obliterate this incredibly important Imperial record keeping facility after we've already failed to stop the message.

This compared to TLJ.  Based on the trailers I expected about what we got.  But I can see why other people wouldn't see it that way.  It was following up The Force Awakens, which was basically a whole plot clone of A New Hope, with most of the "new" stuff simply coming from other OT/prequel movies.  The Force Awakens is the most "Star Wars" movie that has ever existed, arguably moreso than the *actual* original trilogy movies which are full of a lot of... odd moments that have mostly been forgotten.  So then you follow it up with The Last Jedi, which visually resembles the OT more but is the least "Star Wars" movie out of the 8 mainline ones to date.  And so people approach the movie with a different mindset than they would Rogue One.

What? The opposite to all of those sentences is true. TFA is good, but missing the spark of inspiration and wonder that really runs through Ep4 (carries pretty well in the beginning and end, but is hopelessly lost in the middle after finding Han and going to Cantina 2: Electric Boogaloo.) Odd moments? Like what? The new trilogy def has more. And then, TLJ does NOT. AT. ALL. Resemble the OT? Dude. On this particular point I have to call bullshit. TLJ is a vast departure from the artistic style of the OT. TLJ kept to it much better, and Rogue One marvelously so, but TLJ is the peak of bullshit visual design that has very little thought put into it outside of bigger=badder.

[EnigmaticHat]

Odd moments like the trash compactor (particularly the strange alien that lives inside it), almost getting eaten by a giant worm, the plethora of minor characters that never did jack shit.  Like the scene with Darth Vader and the bounty hunters, where most of them never come back.  Princess Leia throwing a world out to be destroyed without giving the audience enough evidence to tell what kind of world it is or if she's telling the truth.  Single line exposition on things that are never referenced again.  Obi wan's derpy ass spin attack against Darth Vader.  A lot of the little comic relief bits involving droids.

Its a lot of off-tone or off-pace moments.  It throws the audience off balance and its what can keep up some of that wonder, but from Episode 6 onward it was mostly gone.  If you look at the prequels, the animated shows, the video games and the extended universe, they've kept the big memorable stuff but they've mostly forgotten the oddness.

JJ Abrams is a SW fan and he "got" a lot of what made the originals tick, but he still made a very modern Michael Bay-esque action movie.  The result was a "cleaned up" version of A New Hope movie.  It was too... fast, for lack of a more precise word, to match the OT's style.  Too tight.  Its the OT as people remember it, not as it was.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Dude. I don't even know how to rebuttal those statements, it's just the opposite of what I believe to be true.

[NRDL]

Elephant's gonna press charges the way it's getting felt up by us blind men.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Elephant's gonna press charges the way it's getting felt up by us blind men.

What's the Elephant in the room here? I literally am unable to rebuttal because every argument I make goes back fundamentally to what good film and storytelling is which is kinda hard to articulate when people are just like, nah its the opposite of what you are saying, you specifically don't have control over what makes a Star Wars movies, or they state that most people liked it therefore it's good.

[EnigmaticHat]

I had to look it up, but he's talking about a traditional story with many variants, "the elephant and the blind men."  3 blind men encounter an elephant without knowing what it is, each touches a different part of it and tries to describe it.  This causes an argument between.

So I guess "art is subjective" or "y'all are only seeing different parts of the big picture" would be the moral here.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ah, thank you for clarifying. I thought he was combining metaphors, lol.

[SalmonGod]

I agree with Urist here... those odd bits of flavor that didn't necessarily mean anything to the story were a large part of what made the original trilogy memorable.  It was Show, Don't Tell being put to good use in convincingly portraying the characters as being part of a larger universe.  This goes right back to my criticism of the progression of the films since then, where they clean up that stuff and the result is the feeling that an entire galaxy warps around the existence of the main plot cast.  If we're supposed to believe that this story takes place on the scale of a whole galaxy full of life, then the characters should make random off-comments about it or get sidelined by encounters with stuff that's not directly plot-related.  Else the whole premise of the setting just isn't convincing.