Thoughts on Rogue One – A Star Wars Story

(Obviously: spoilers ahead.)

I’ve just come out of the cinema, watching Rogue one. I have not yet gone on Wikipedia to read up on it, and I didn’t seek out any information about it before watching it, so what I’m writing here is almost entirely based on what I saw in cinema (except for general Star Wars knowledge, I guess).

First off: Tarkin. By God, Tarkin. That was fucking incredible. The spitting image of Peter Cushing OBE, Wilhuff Tarkin, in A New Hope. Flawless. Amazing. How did they pull that off? I assume it must be some combination of a similar-looking actor, makeup, and visual effects, but I have no idea how much each part contributed. (Hell, for all I know, the actor might look completely different, and have been cast exclusively for his voice – that was also perfect, and I didn’t see a separate “voice of Tarkin” in the credits.) I don’t know to what extent it was already the case before, but Disney/Lucasfilm have now established that an actor having been dead for decades is no obstacle at all to them appearing in an entirely new film. I wonder if many other films will start doing the same thing. (I’m now terribly afraid that other films have done this before and I just didn’t hear about it, making me look like a fool.)

I was surprised with how little of the Star Wars themes there was in the soundtrack. For some time, I wondered whether somehow, ridiculously, they didn’t have the rights to John Williams’ themes, but then came the scene with Vader and wiped that theory away. At least the credits music still followed the pattern.

Darth Vader was… pretty good, but I’m not quite as impressed. The voice was perfect – of course it was, it was still James Earl Jones – but I thought the helmet looked a bit too smooth, and his gait in his first scene looked a little off. (Awesome visual with his huge shadow on the wall though, in that same scene.) But the fight scene at the end was pretty sweet. We’ve never seen Vader actually fight outside of a duel – on the Tantive IV and at Hoth, he pretty much arrived once the fighting was done – and it was very impressive, showing him as the formidable force of destruction he should be. I got a slight horror movie vibe from it, which feels appropriate. (Though you should take that sentence with an entire boulder of salt, given that it’s coming from someone who hasn’t yet ever mustered the courage to watch an actual horror movie.)

The blind Asian Force monk fighting with a stick felt rather cliché.

Seeing all those ships I knew from the days when I played Empire at War was neat.

Great visuals all around, by the way. The one shot that really stuck with me was the one of the Star Destroyer being pushed into another one, slowly cutting into it. I wish they would’ve lingered on it a bit longer before cutting to the destruction inside, but it was still plenty long, and looked gorgeous.

I love that they got Jimmy Smits again to reprise his role of Senator Bail Organa.

The plot at the end felt a bit weird. Once Mon Mothma announced that there would be no grand mission to assault that Imperial base and get the plans, I assumed they would go for a covert mission. Nice, quiet job, the sort of thing the Rebellion should be good at. It started out as that (though why it needed to be unsanctioned, I have no idea), but then they pulled in the entire fleet in after all. What for? Sure, to punch a hole in the shield, I can buy that, but what did the additional units on the ground achieve? Their task became to send a transmission up… somehow… the content being that something needed to be done to get another transmission through. How did the first one go through that? I didn’t understand that (I’m sure there was some explanation), and it just feels weird in general. And the confrontation at the top of the tower was also weak – why does this dish, which is presumably in regular use, need readjusting? And if it’s supposed to be directed, how did it know where to align itself to, with the shield still up? And why does it need assistance to realign itself anyways? And why is there a terminal right there at the dish – do they have to use that every time they want to transmit data? (Same thing for the ridiculous manual aspect of getting the data out of storage. Why do humans have to play tape robots?)

I’m not sure what to think about Leia not saying the full “A New Hope” at the end there (instead of just “hope”). We were all expecting that, right? It seemed so obvious. Perhaps it’s better that they didn’t go there, but then again, it’s not like the rest of the movie was devoid of wink wink nudge nudge moments (gee, I wonder who Bail Organa wants to entrust the plans to).

Where they wanted to replicate the Original Trilogy looks – Yavin IV, the Death Star firing – they did it pretty well. I also liked the inclusion of the AT-ATs, except that they got taken down too easily in my opinion.

And I think that’s all the comments I can think of for now… let’s go to Wikipedia.

Okay, so Tarkin’s face was apparently entirely digital (the physical actor was the same guy as Pius Thicknesse), and the voice was a different actor after all. And I thought one pilot looked familiar from Episode IV – turns out two were unused archival footage. Neat.