Spoiler alert: 'Rogue One' is dark, violent and brooding but is still too predictable and disappointing to recommend

Disney is again looking back rather than forging ahead in their retro vision of the Star Wars franchise
Updated 12/29/16!

The second week box office receipts for Rogue One has dropped 58.5% in its second weekend of theatrical release over the Christmas holiday weekend, down from $155 million over December 16-18 opening weekend to $64.4 million over the big December 23-25 Christmas weekend while still being exhibited in the same number of theaters, 4,157, across the country.

Has Star Wars jumped the Binks again with creepy CGI characters,
deceptive advertising and one too many corny call backs?
By comparison, The Force Awakens, only dropped 39.8% in box office receipts from $248 million to $149 million in its second week of release over the same period of time last year.

It appears that box office business for the Rogue One, like The Force Awakens before it, was again front-loaded based on hype generated from Disney's massive marketing campaign and pre-release fan-boy anticipation rather than word of mouth of how good or bad the movie actually was.

The precipitous second week box office drop suggests audiences were not as impressed with the movie in the flesh in theaters as they were in seeing the trailers and immersed in the marketing build-up to the movie release which doesn't bode well for the franchise moving forward.

After all, how many times can Disney build-up anticipation for the next Star Wars movie without actually delivering what they promised to fans?

It should be noted that much of Disney's marketing campaign leading up to the movie's release was based on deliberately deceptive and misleading advertising with a lot of scenes and suggestive story elements shown in the movie trailers that never appeared in the movie.


That kind of unwise and dishonest marketing move could potentially bring a class-action lawsuit or other governmental regulatory actions against Disney for false advertising, especially given the fact that Disney admitted they knew a lot they were advertising wouldn't be in the final cut of the movie.



Original article:


Rogue One: A Star War Story is finally out in theaters, and we give our review of the movie. There are some spoiler alerts in this movie review, so for those who do not want to have details of the movie revealed, we recommend not reading any further in the article.

Has Disney turned Star Wars into a PC princess warrior franchise?
First, the verdict. The movie doesn't live up to the hype from Disney and is wholly too predictable with a lot of recycled story elements and wholly unsatisfactory, very fleeting and annoying call-backs—again—from the original trilogy, which is too bad because it appears that disappointment over Rogue One may ultimately further harm the momentum that Disney had generated in reviving the Star Wars franchise when they first bought out LucasFilm back in 2012.

Rogue One is better than Episode VII: The Force Awakens, but that's not a very high bar to clear since The Force Awakens was among the very worst and most unoriginal of Star Wars anthology movies ever released into movie theaters thus far.


We will see how bad that disappointment is in the second week of the Rogue One's box office receipts, if box office numbers dips below 50% from the initial opening week.


The movie suffers from many of the same problems that Episode VIII: The Force Awakens suffered from, when it was released almost exactly one year ago, being completely unoriginal and appearing to be more like a fan-fiction movie made by Star Wars geeks, recycling old story lines from the original trilogy and pandering to the most base common denominator of fans reliving previous Star Wars nostalgia, rather than being an authentic Star Wars movie experience breaking away from the shackles of the original trilogy and standing on its own merits under Disney's more recent stewardship.

CGI Grand Moff Tarkin was a distracting novelty
Does anyone remember George Lucas creating this many annoying and embarrassing call-backs in the original Star Wars trilogy as Disney has thus far in just two movies?

The problem with Rogue One, much like The Force Awakens, is that it looks back too much with a rebooted and rehashed vision of the old Star Wars from the 1970s and 80s rather than forging ahead with anything that is remotely new, bold or imaginative.

Disney has said that Rogue One is an experiment of sorts, being a stand-alone movie that doesn't rely on being an integral part of the larger ongoing story line of the larger Star Wars anthology; however, the story for Rogue One fits in as a direct prequel or prelude to the original trilogy, which could fittingly be described as Episode III.V, so the story never really stands alone outside of the greater Star Wars canon.

In fact, the movie's storyline basically was sprung out of two lines in the opening title crawl of Episode IV: A New Hope, which read: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star."

Thus, it was no surprise that Rogue One didn't have a traditional opening crawl of its own that all the other Star Wars movies have enjoyed, although it did keep the introductory title card: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."


A title crawl within a movie based on the narrative of another title crawl just seemed ridiculously and overly incestuous. Too bad because title crawls of the Star Wars movies are far more entertaining than this movie ever was.


While the main cast of the movie is entirely played by relative Hollywood unknowns, except for Forrest Whittaker who plays a militant "terrorist" revolutionist named Saw Gerrera (an allusion to Che Guevara), the constant, fleeting, and disruptively annoying call-backs to the well-known original and prequel trilogy characters and rehashing of numerous story lines, elements, and props from the original trilogy, seen throughout the movie, seems all too familiar and argues that Disney cannot break away from the very bad habit of rebooting the same old story lines from the original Star Wars anthology or trying to innovate anything new on their own to breath new life into the now very stagnant franchise.

Saw Gerrera was clearly supposed to be Che Guevara in Rogue One but only
because alluding to a true terrorist like Osama bin Ladin would have been
fatal to box office receipts
Despite how the movie eventually turned out, it is very clear Gerrera was a central character in the original version of the movie.

It is clear the tone and key themes around the original cut of the movie really revolve around what he represents about war and extremism.

Saw Gerrera, whose name purposely sounds like the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, is portrayed as an extremist, whom many in the Rebellion consider to be a terrorist, because to him war means the ends justifies any means conceivable (e.g., murder, torture, mayhem, terrorist acts, etc.) in the struggle.

A key line he said in the trailers was taken out the movie that makes what he represents very clear: "If you continue to fight, what will you become?"


Despite the profound thematic weight his character should have taken on in the movie, Disney made a bad decision to soften and diminish his character in the final cut with numerous reshoots (e.g., he was bald in many shots in the trailer) and not exploit what he brought to the movie in exploring how the lines blur for our rebel heroes between being freedom fighters and terrorists.


After Gerrera left the movie, that internal character struggle within the movie's main hero, Jyn Erso, was not explored much further as she became a bland, cardboard hero whose bright-line motives for fighting with the rebellion were never again called into question. This where Rogue One lost its edginess, grittiness, and soul in making any pronouncements about war.

The Disney view on rebellions are 'they are built on hope'
Too bad because exploring that aspect of a revolutionary's internal motives and struggles to fight for his/her very existence could have turned the movie around as a very gritty war movie about how the means justify the ends in waging war.

Instead, the movie fell back on old themes about the struggles of bland, idealistic freedom fighters who didn't blur the lines between good and evil, as seen in previous Star Wars movies, with a litany of morales about good and evil, topped with a lot of needless nostalgic call-backs and references to the old canon.

It's time to stop all the lame call-backs altogether just for the sake of pandering to the fanboys at Comic-Con because it's just getting embarrassing at this point and takes away any credibility from the franchise.

CGI Pirincess Leia was a trainwreck
The story line is, as you guessed it, centered around the evil Empire completing the construction of another Death Star, the original one in fact, but the twist in Rogue One is that there are no Jedi, no Force, and no Skywalkers in this storyline, save for the brief and insignificant two fleeting cameo appearances of Darth Vader (A.K.A. Anakin Skywalker) and a very brief CGI Princess Leia appearance at the very end.

CGI characters in Star Wars was on par with CGI Arnold in Terminator Salvation
There is a supposed force-sensitive being in a blind martial arts spiritual warrior named Chirrut Îmwe, played by Donnie Yen, but his too familiar martial arts skills in Rogue One blurs the line in what it is to be a Jedi as opposed to some other Force-related and confusing martial arts spiritual that supposedly permeates the same space, in the same universe.

The appearance of the CGI Princess Leia makes you think that actress Carrie Fisher had unexpectedly died recently, but that's far from being the case.

Vader, however, is not an integral part of the story line and really contributes nothing to this movie. Darth Vader's presence essentially comes in at the end of the movie, much as he did in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

He's there briefly twice in the movie, but unlike Revenge of the Sith, you learn nothing more about him than you had previously known, and his addition to the movie was a way to just directly bridge the storyline into Episode IV: A New Hope. His adrenaline-fueled fight scene at the end seems like an homage to Darth Maul's acrobatic battle in Episode I: The Phantom Menace.


Too bad there was so little of Vader in Rogue One because that was a missed opportunity as he could have been an integral part of the movie as the story's main villain.

Who could forget CGI Jeff Bridges from Tron Legacy?
The reemergence of yet another Death Star in the storyline of a Star Wars movie makes you want to never see another Star Wars movie again, but they keep popping up, over and over again, as an incipit plot device in every Disney reincarnation of the Star Wars saga. It's about time to put all the Death Stars out to pasture because that plot device has been way overexploited.

Thus, it appears Disney has taken out the essential-most elements of a Star Wars movie that makes a Star Wars movie a Star Wars movie (i.e., the Force, the Jedi, and the Skywalker clan.) What you have left is just the struggle between Resistance fighters and the Empire, essentially a movie just about war randomly set in space without much else to fire up the imagination for a compelling sci-fi movie.

Some critics in recent weeks have said the producers of the movie may have been trying to also make some kind of political statement about war itself, but that seems contradictory to what Star Wars has always been about, given the fact that the rebels always have had something to fight for, which is their freedom and very existence.

In that sense, the whole Star Wars franchise argues that war is not pointless or futile and is worth waging if you have something dear to your heart to fight for. What kind of political statement that can be made about war itself from Rogue One seems ambiguous, if not contradictory, at best.


Rogue One is dark and violent, appearing to be more like a conventional war movie about World War II or the Vietnam War, but with some bridging scenes set in space. In fact, if you took out the allusions to space and the laser blasters, it would be just that, a conventional Hollywood Vietnam war movie, especially in the Battle of Scarif with the all-too-familiar tropical palm trees, which no longer puts the audience in the suspension of disbelief, thinking that it's taking place in another world.

Suspension of disbelief was stretched to the limit seeing the all too familiar and
very earthly palm trees in the Battle of Scarif
The sight of palm trees simply does not evoke the tone and atmosphere of a galaxy far, far away.

Unfortunately for Disney, the movie's storyline is also very predictable, insipid, uninspiring, depressing, very boring at times and wholly unconvincing that die-hard fanboys may not enjoy and which may not be appropriate for young children due to the level of carnage in the movie.

It's the second Star Wars movie to earn a PG-13 rating after The Revenge of the Sith, and that's because everyone in the movie, very predictably, dies by the end of the movie. Nothing happens in the movie that you couldn't have predicted would have happened ahead of time, and that's the biggest problem of the movie in a nutshell.


Who couldn't figure out that this was a suicide mission when it was known that the goal of the small band of rebel insurgents was about getting the blue prints of the Death Star into the rebels' hands? Obviously, everyone had to die, so it was a given that the story wasn't going to catch anyone off guard.

Killing the entire cast off might have also been inevitable because all the characters in the movie were either expendable to the conclusion of the story or forgettable altogether, but in the end, it also takes away anything uplifting or hopeful about the movie. In this movie, Rebellions, as they say, are not built on hope.
    

While good for drama, killing everyone off is worrisome for Disney because that kind of dark, moody tone generally is something that will keep kids from coming back to see the movie, again and again, or buying merchandise of their favorite characters or toys.


Everyone knew the movie's conclusion well ahead of time in which the plans for the Death Star was going to get in the hands both Princess Leia at the end in a small spaceship that escaped the Imperial fleet and would later be pursued by Darth Vader in his Imperial destroyer in Episode IV: A New Hope, so it made the protracted final battle at Scarif very anti-climatic for the audience. The ending for Rogue One was a foregone conclusion.

It's time to put the Death Star out to pasture
The main heroine of the movie, Jyn Erso, is also just joyless to watch. Although not the same flat Mary Sue caricature that Rey was from Episode VII, Jyn Erso's transformation from a reluctant, brooding, skeptical and rebellious Debbie-Downer to a righteous and idealistic but rather bland social justice warrior full of optimism was just not credible nor convincing either in her struggles through the movie.

The Disneyfied line that "Rebellions are built on hope" betrays what little substance that could have been flushed out in this movie and any profound statements that could have been made about the struggles of war. Thus, it's very disappointing how quickly Jyn lost any sense of regret or bitterness from the tragedies in her life as it would have made her much more sympathetic and relatable to the audience in her struggles to find her place in the world.


Her transformation occurred all within one scene when her father Galen Erso, the chief Imperial scientist and engineer of the Death Star played by Mads Mikkelson, dies after a failed rescue and/or assassination attempt from rebel fighters.


You would think that because the rebellion was responsible for Galen's death, and because they even planned on assassinating him, that Jyn would be more skeptical of trusting the Rebellion, but a speech by her rebel fighter cohort, Cassion Andor played by Diego Luna, who was secretly assigned the task of assassinating Galen Erso, somehow immediately showed Jyn the light and facilitated her character arc to pledge her allegiance and loyalty to the Rebellion. Her transformation was just too hokey and far-fetched to be believed to turn on this one scene.


The continuing assassination plans by the Rebels on Galen Erso was a major plot hole in the movie. The Death Star had already been completed and was operational. Cassian and the Rebels knew that after the destruction of Jedha, so it was too late to stop the completion of the Death Star. Killing Galen would accomplish nothing for the Rebellion in that regard.

Unexplainable: Why were the Rebels trying to assassinate Galen Erso even after
the completion and successful testing of the Death Star?
Bringing Galen back alive to the Rebellion was obviously far more important at that point than killing him since his usefulness to the Empire had somewhat reached its limit with the Death Star completed, and his expertise of the Death Star would have sufficed, in lieu of obtaining the blue prints to the Death Star, to defeat the Empire's most menacing weapon.

Galen is essentially a human blue print to the Death Star, so what purpose would killing him accomplish for the Rebellion? Having him in custody would be far more valuable than having even the blue prints to the Death Star. Clearly, if they brought Galen back to the Rebels, they wouldn't have even needed to get a hold of the blue prints.


This was something that even Jyn could not figure out in trying to rescue her father. She thought getting her father back to the Rebels to testify about the Death Star would convince them to go on a mission to get the plans of the Death Star from the Empire. Clearly, this major plot hole was not that well thought out.


Jyn and Cassion ultimately die at the end on the beach of Scarif in a tearful embrace waiting their inevitable fate to be washed over from a menacing mushroom cloud from the Death Star's blast exactly in the same manner that the the father and daughter died at the end waiting to be washed away by an enormous tidal wave after a meteor impact in Dreamworks' Deep Impact from 1998. Again, something borrowed from another movie.


The two most charismatic characters in the movie were a robot named K-2SO, played by Alan Tudyk who plays the role of comedy relief for the movie, and the CGI reincarnation of Grand Moff Tarkin, played by the late Peter Cushing, who died more than 22 years ago in 1994.

Rogue One's main villain Orson Krennic left something to be desired from
a Star Wars villain
Unfortunately for K-2SO, he is a big linebacker-sized robot who is almost a doppelgänger, character-wise, to C3-PO, so this is essentially just a character reboot of C3-PO from the original trilogy, much like BB-8 was a rehash of R2-D2 in Episode VIII.

Grand Moff Tarkin, on the other hand, is more a novelty than anything else. The actor who plays him, Peter Cushing, has been dead for more than 22 years, so in the movie he has been resurrected back to life through the magic of CGI.

All anyone wonders when he is on the screen is how LucasFilm animated his character to give him an eery and very creepy lifelike quality. Princess Leia, on the other hand, who is also resurrected in CGI just looked completely fake.

Both CGI Tarkin and Leia served as yet another call-back to lend some feeling of nostalgia to the fanboys who crave to relive the glory of the old trilogy.

You certainly couldn't take your eyes off of either one of them when they were on screen, but for all the wrong reasons. They were both a distraction from the storyline and were added just to bridge the story into Episode IV. That seemed to be just a circus sideshow that desperately cried, "Look at me!"


The other problem in the movie is that there really was no menacing villain in this movie. Imperial Weapons Director Orson Krennic, played by Ben Mendelsohn, who oversees the construction of the Death Star, is emasculated by both Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader before he even interacts with the protagonists in the final confrontation in the Battle of Scarif, making him seem more pathetic than threatening. We've seen this before with Disney's Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens.


Krennic is way overshadowed by both Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader, who are not the true antagonists of the movies, so he seemed underwhelming and meek in his final showdown with Jyn Erso. After Tarkin and Vader come into the movie, one wonders what use Krennic had in being the movie at all.

CGI characters in Star Wars are an ominously bad sign for the franchise
Too bad because there was a very big missed opportunity in the movie. Darth Vader was, by far, the most menacing character in the movie and could have been integral to the movie as a very compelling main villain, and not a lot of exposition would have been needed to give credence to his participation in the movie.

A more compelling ending to the movie would have been if Darth Vader hunted down all the rebel insurgents himself, adding to his already ruthless legacy, but alas, he was underutilized and relegated to a footnote as a cameo.

Instead, the protracted finale of the movie and final battle at Scarif was completely ripped off from the story line of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Rebel insurgents, led by their rogue leader Jyn Erso, go to the tropical planet of Scarif to steal the blue prints of the Death Star.


They are belatedly joined by part of Rebel fleet who decide to help in the battle, out of the blue for reasons that were never explained in the movie, by attacking the space station that controls the shields getting into the planet.


It's confusing because the Rebel council earlier had just declined to help Jyn retrieve the schematic plans for the Death Star due to deep reservations and skepticism in their ability to defeat the Death Star.



In any case, Jyn and her small band of rogue insurgents had to dismantle the shields at the base of the planet to transmit the blue prints back up to the rebel command ship.


Thus, the only difference in the plot of the final act between Rogue One and Return of the Jedi was that the rebels had to take down the shields so that the schematics of the Death Star could be transmitted to rebel command ship.


This is pretty much the exact same plot line of the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi, minus the Ewoks, that led Leia and Han to take out the shields to the Death Star at the base of the planet. The only thing missing in the Battle of Scarif was Admiral Akbar yelling, "It's a trap!"

Star Wars in Maldives seemed a bit too familiar
The Shields and the blue prints to the Death Star were kept on a tall Citadel tower that was reminiscent of the tower inside the Death Star that maintained the tractor beam on the Millennium Falcon in Episode IV: A New Hope.

It also becomes quite apparent from the number of missing scenes from the trailers to the final cut that the ending was completely rewritten and reshot, but without knowing what was in the original script, it's hard to tell if the main heroes somehow escaped in the end as many people have suspected.

The biggest problem that die-hard Star Wars fans might have about Rogue One and The Force Awakens, however, is that Disney has been turning the Star Wars franchise into one of its own patented formulaic family movies for kids from years gone by.


That formula almost always encompasses a coming of age movie of a young heroine, which has also been mockingly labeled as Disney princess movies, who is tragically orphaned during the movie.


In the case of Rogue One, Jyn is tragically orphaned as a child when her mother is killed by Imperial forces when they come to take her father Galen away, and later again as an adult when her father dies in her arms at the hands of Rebel fighters.


Somehow that poignant tragic event magically transforms her into a great heroine. It comes off as overly sentimental and all too convenient a plot device for forced character development.

Unrealistic and annoying CGI characters were the least of the
problems facing the latest installment of the Star Wars franchise
In any case, the rather simple story became just too elliptical and disjointed to follow because the protagonists were constantly bounced around from planet to planet for no apparent reason whatsoever.

You basically had to piece together what happened from the movie frantically hopping from planet to planet and scene to scene (e.g., remote unnamed farm planet of the Erso family, Ring of Kafrene, Jedha, Wobani, Yavin 4, the Death Star, Eadu, Mustafar, Yavin 4 again, Scarif, etc.) for no apparent reason at all.

It seemed that all that planet hopping was just an excuse for Disney to showcase more destinations for their Star Tours ride in the Disney theme parks.

In any case, Disney's first attempt at a "standalone" Star Wars movie fell flat on its face due to a lack of originality and trying, again, to reignite the old nostalgia of the first trilogy with too many lame call-backs and useless easter eggs that suggests everything that has ever happened in the so-called Star Wars expanded universe is linked by only six-degrees of separation. Give me a break!

It also appears that Rogue One suffered from the same pitfalls as The Force Awakens with too much recycling of old material and reliance on nostalgia from the old trilogy.


The reception so far for the new Disney-rebooted Star Wars franchise is dismal critically, far worse than George Lucas' reception for the prequel trilogy. Even when trying to go dark, like Empire Strikes Back, it seems Disney's best efforts fall apart due to too much production interference from the studio.


You can also check out the movie online for free on streaming video here. Next on the list for Disney's Star Wars anthology: Episode VIII: Revenge of the First Order, coming to a theater near you next Christmas.


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