One Less Rogue in Rogue One Please

Beware! This post is chock full of spoilers and contains some unpopular opinions. If you haven't seen it yet or don't want your love diminished, stop reading now.







This is your last chance to change your mind.

Alright, first off I want to say that I did like the film. I didn't love it. I wanted to love it. When I saw Wil Wheaton's tweet that the last time he loved a Star Wars movie that much, it was 1977 I was really excited. While there were parts and characters I loved, it wasn't enough to compensate for the film's many flaws.

First off, the parts I loved.

Like everyone, I loved Chirrut and K-2SO. Few things would make me happier than an origin film for Chirrut and Baze, and a ringtone of K-2 saying "you have a phone call. The captain said I had to tell you." Chirrut, while still being the stereotypical sage-like blind monk that kicks ass, has a lot of heart thanks to Donnie Yen's brilliant performance. It's hard (both mentally as well as requiring a lot of skill) to take a role that's clearly a stereotype and turn it into something genuine. Some day I hope I get to talk to him one on one when there aren't any cameras or PR people around so I can ask him about his process for that character.

K-2SO has some of the best one-liners in the film. To be honest it was hard at times to believe that this was a robot. How can a robot understand humor? But then he'd say something funny or snarky and I'd be amused enough to forget that question until the next lull in the plot. This should have bothered me more than it did. But I have to admit that the jokes were really well timed and it does take skill to place them just so...even if the placement is to distract from the proverbial man behind the curtain. I wasn't really surprised when K-2 died. I mean, of course he did. All of Alan Tudyk's best characters die at the end of the film. It's his curse.

Jyn Erso is a character I wish we'd spent more time with. While it was fascinating seeing her as a child and then jumping to her as an adult, I wanted to know more about her journey. How did she deal with the trauma of witnessing her mother's murder? How many times did she have to run from agents of the Empire who were hunting her? How did she become the crafty bad ass that we see for most of the film? Why was she okay with not having any agency in the events that transpired? Most importantly, was she really that bad of a character that she needed to be redeemed? More on that in a bit.

The little geeky inside jokes were awesome. "Pig Nose" and "Scott" from the cantina? I loved seeing them together, as usual, and grumpy, as usual. The storm troopers talking about the T-15 being marked obsolete? That made me laugh. Seeing Vader's bachelor pad/temple on Mustafar? It was like watching an episode of Lifestyles of the Sith and Famous.

The last part I loved was the last five minutes when everyone is doing a relay race with the transmitted plans. That was the only part of the film where I was on the edge of my seat, squeezing my mother's arm, squealing because what it WAS SO COOL!!!!! That was some quality plotting. It  lived up to my expectations of the film. 👏👏👏

Now the parts that I had serious problems with:

(Cue Imperial March)

The opening. Where's the fanfare and the scrolling prologue?! Seriously, Disney should have done their research. Starting a Star Wars movie with anything other than fanfare and scrolling prologue is the kiss of death. Why? Three reasons: The Ewok movies and Life Day. I don't care if this was a between-the-episodes film. I want to feel the goosebumps on my arms when the brass section plays that first note. That moment alone is worth the ticket price! Don't steal that moment from me!

The writers need to apologize to Forrest Whitaker for the awful job they did on Saw Gerrera. We were shown so many conflicting accounts of his character that it was impossible to know what kind of person he was. Was he the monster the torture of the defector led us to believe? Was he the extremist that Mon Mothma labeled him as? Was he the kind surrogate father that Rey claimed him to be? There are too many conflicting accounts that I have no idea which to believe. So when he accepts his fate during the destruction of Jedda City I have no idea if it's true to his character or a redeeming moment. Instead it just felt like a wasted moment for a wasted character. On that note...

I feel that the subtitle to this movie shouldn't have been "A Star Wars Story" it should have been "Redeem all the peoples!!!" Who thought it was a good idea to try to redeem the entire cast in a single film? It's ludicrous! I found it hard to believe that a bunch of misfits would all suddenly decide to do the right thing. Especially Jyn. She had no reason to take matters into her own hands. The rebellion treated her as badly as the Empire had. Why not enact vengeance on the organizations that were each responsible for the death of her parents? Why save the rebellion from themselves? Then there's Cassian. Why couldn't he continue being the rebellion's morally ambiguous agent of chaos? None of it made sense and they didn't bother to take the time to explain it. They just plowed on with the action hoping that we'd be so distracted we wouldn't notice. Well I noticed.

While I do want a Baze and Chirrut origin film, it's not for the reason you think. Well, okay. Yes, I want to see more Chirrut. Babe however I want to see more of in order to get to know what kind of character he was. On screen he wasn't anything more than a jar head with a big gun. Yes, it was a really cool gun but it may as well have been held by an ambulatory cactus. We know absolutely nothing about him except that Chirrut is his buddy and because of that I want to know more. I'm really sad that they didn't give him more of an identity. If they had his death would have had the impact they were going for. Instead it was just meh.

The Death Star design flaw is something that has bothered me for thirty years. How is it that no one noticed this glaring error? Why did no one just put a steel plate over the exterior port? With that many people involved in the project and with Krennic breathing down their necks, how were any of them, Galen most of all, able to hide that? It made no sense then and it makes less sense now.

So...my overall feeling? It was an okay movie. I liked it but mostly because of the good jokes, the digitally inserted found footage from episode 4, and the stellar ending. Was it up to par with the good Star Wars films? No. Was it better than the prequels? Yes, but that's not saying much. The visuals were great and the ending AMAZING but the rest was an entertaining hot mess.

New travelers on an old path

Every movie I've seen the last two weeks has shown the trailer for Interstellar. If you've missed it you can watch it here. It's probably the most vague trailer I've ever seen and yet, I have a pretty good idea what direction the story will take. It's not a new concept in sci-fi. Ken Liu's Mono No Aware (you can read it here) and Mary Robinette Kowal's The Lady Astronaut of Mars (you can read it here) are beautifully written examples. Neither is derivative and that's certainly not my concern for Interstellar. I'm worried that because it's so vague that the general public either won't be interested or they won't realize what they're in for.

I'm going to ignore the possibility of bad science and trust that Christopher Nolan and his team did their research. They did a great job of making the gadgets in the Batman films functional in a real world sense so I'm willing to take a leap of faith on that. The possible conclusions for the story however...

There are a couple forks in this particular story path. The first is whether or not they can establish Earth 2.0. Astronomers have already found some likely candidates so if my research assumption holds true than the film will focus more on preparing the selected planet for the coming settlers. If I'm wrong than they'll waste screen time with an improbable search that could have been done by satellites and drones instead of people. The average American probably won't be bothered by it but those of us who actually pay attention to science will be throwing popcorn at the screen.

The second fork is whether or not they make it back home. This path has no in between. They either make it or they don't. If they do, Yay! Happy ending. If they don't (which I think is more likely) it's going to be a massive tear jerker that will catch many an unsuspecting viewer off guard.

Unfortunately we're going to have to wait until November to find out which direction the story takes. If they've done it right this has the potential to be a spectacular film but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Heaven knows Hollywood has let us down plenty of times before.

Captain plot hole and the repetitive threat

(SPOILER WARNING)

I saw Captain America: the Winter Soldier on Saturday night and even though I enjoyed it immensely there were a few plot holes that prevent me from calling it the best Marvel film of all. Yes, the predecessors in the franchise all had their flaws too (I'm still trying to forget the first Thor film) but I don't feel that their flaws were as far reaching as CA2's. Remember that I still liked the film. The action sequences were excellent and I love Steve and Natasha's interactions. I also loved the congruity with the TV show. However, those delights didn't compensate for the rest of the film being poorly written.

Two of my friends have commented on their blogs that Hydra's presence within S.H.I.E.L.D. should have been discovered years prior. They're right. Someone would have let something slip in conversation or an intercepted communiqué that would have started an internal investigation. I also have problems with Hydra's reasoning, as explained by Zola. He claimed that the only way for them to succeed was to have the people freely surrender their liberty but when they were allied with the Nazis that's exactly what they had. Not across the entire globe of course though they had enough of it. If that approach had already failed than why try it again?

I also had big problems with the Winter Soldier. First was that he had supposedly been operating for fifty years without anyone catching him or discovering his identity. Again, someone would have found something in all that time. They also eluded to his having been repeatedly frozen, thawed, and had his memories forcefully repressed. Unless he possessed the healing powers of Wolverine he shouldn't have been able to survive that. One freeze and thaw, sure. But a repeated course over fifty years? No way. And since we're on the subject of his abilities wouldn't the changes resulting from the Hydra experiments have manifested during the many operations he, Steve, and the rest of the team carried out in Europe during WWII?

My second problem with the Winter Soldier was that he was Bucky. In the first Captain America they used him for the gut-wrenching plot twist. That they did the same thing with the same character a second time is lazy. They could have expounded on Steve's dissolution with S.H.I.E.L.D. or the fact that the Winter Soldier was a Hydra operative and that would have been enough, I think. The fact that they went ahead with this copycat twist when they took the time to give Thor and Iron Man new and interesting conflicts is appalling. Especially when they negate all Steve's "I don't want to fight my friend" stance in the final fight scene. If Steve was so against it why did he throw the first punch?

The last plot hole that should have been addressed was Zola. If his mind and the algorithm was so essential to Hydra's operations why hadn't he been uploaded to a more modern interface? Those circuit boards shouldn't have been operable and the speed of modern components would have made the transfer worth the risk.

In any other film all of these flaws would have made me call it a massive failure. Fortunately for them the first class fight scenes made me a very happy bloodthirsty girl. Oh, and the relationships and the continuity with the TV show. But mostly the violence.

Plot liposuction

Once upon a time I had a weird, vivid dream. When I woke I said "This is a great story idea" and proceeded to write down the idea. The writing went well and before I knew it I had an outline for a novel and a couple partial scenes. Then an evil sorceress cursed me with so many writing projects that I had no time to see this project come to fruition. The outline then spent many years languishing in the pit of postponed ideas.



All right. I wish I could blame my lack of time on an evil sorceress -- actually, there are a lot of things I'd like to lay on her doorstep -- however, seeing as I have no conclusive proof nor an address where I can lay said proof and blame, I have to take it on this one.

There is one thing that was omitted from the above fairy tale. The first half of the story was a trope-laden affair with only a couple of interesting things happening before the stellar ending. At the time I had no idea how to fix it so I allowed the "no-time curse"to take effect. Well, I can proudly say that this particular tale's curse was broken last week.

I needed a short story idea that I could whip out before a contest deadline. As I went over my list of sidelined projects (it's a long list) it occurred to me that if I simply wrote the cool stuff at the end of this story, I'd have a pretty good piece. It wasn't until I was halfway through the first draft that I realized the novel version of the story didn't need to be fixed, it just needed surgery. By cutting away the excess weight it became a much stronger story. As for those two interesting things that were supposed to happen? Apparently they weren't as cool as I originally thought because they got cut and the story won't suffer from the loss.

Why did I have so many lame ideas in one outline? It wasn't story idea overloaditis, I can tell you that much. What I think happened was that because this was one of my early ideas, I made the new writer mistake of assuming that every idea I had was novel worthy. I had yet to learn that some ideas are much better when allowed to be short and simple. In some ways it was a blessing to be time cursed. If I had written it right away, it would have been an atrocious trunk novel. Since I waited until I had enough skill to suck away the fat without killing it, it's become a story that I can be proud to put my name on.



Note: Don't forget that this Saturday I'll have a guest post on The Fictorian Era.

Witches, candy, and ass-kicking...oh my!

This weekend I took some much needed time off to go see Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with a friend.

Overall, the movie was good. It's an action packed flick which was exactly what I needed to blow off some stress. That being said, there were a few things that made me scratch my head and wonder what the writer was smoking?

(Spoiler Alert)

It was like they were trying to set the story in the same universe as Van Helsing and with the same modern attitude of A Knight's Tale but they didn't know how to combine the two. (I plan to use this film as proof that directors shouldn't write unless their first name starts with a J.) The steampunkish weapons were very cool but since we didn't get any explanation about where/how they were acquired, how strange and wondrous they were, or introduced to their eccentric and reclusive creator, they had a tendency to be an anomaly rather than an asset.

For example, the hand-crank tazer was a great tool, especially at the end when Gretel used it as a defibrillator. However, when the woodsman used it on the horned witch I wasn't sure if that was a sign that such technology was common or if they (Hansel and Gretel) instructed him on its use. Either way, I have to flag it as bad writing. There's a reason why in every classic Bond movie there is a scene where James visits Q. It's not just so Bond can get new toys, it's to show us what each discreet gadget does and to flag it as something important to the plot. Somehow that innocuous wristwatch that can summon a flock of rabid seagulls at the press of a button is going to save his life.

Another thing that bothered me about the tech was that the second they used it in a clever way, I had to unplug my brain before it was filled with a long list of reasons why that shouldn't work. The afore mentioned incident with the tazer turned defibrillator is a key example. A gadget like that isn't capable of producing a strong enough charge to restart a heart.

I will give the writer/director credit for a couple things. He did a good job of putting a new twist a classic Grimm's Fairy Tale and on witch lore. The explanations for the physical differences between white and black witches, while simple, was very effective and it fit in well with how both are portrayed in fairy tales. I also liked how Hansel and Gretel's journey came full circle in the end. That was a nice touch.

When all is said and done, despite how much I like the film, I have to say that Hollywood has provided us with another shining example of how not to tell a story. Exciting action sequences and a spectacular music score can't hide bad writing.