STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE

[Ares]

KINDA-SORTA SPOILERY:

Vader pretty much owned every scene he was in, and was nice reminder of why Vader was such a fearsome presence in Star Wars. His appearance turns the war movie into a straight up horror film.

Jesus, yes. Looked like freaking Jason Voorhees going through Camp Crystal Lake, there. The good guys completely losing their shit made it all worthwhile.

That poor bastard at the door. That poor bastard on the ceiling. . . .

[Batgirl III]

The writers and director of Rogue One apparently know what young George Lucas knew and that older George Lucas forgot:

• Show don't tell.
○ We don't get a three paragraph text crawl about the political situation. Instead, in the opening five minutes the Empire shows up, dressed like Space Nazis, and guns down a farmer's wife, shanghais him, and tries to kill a kid.
○ The rebels don't stand around reading exposition to each other about how they have to use guerilla strategies and other unsavory insurgency / asymmetrical warfare tactics. We see them ambush a supply truck in the middle of a crowded market; We see our ostensible deuteragonist shoot an informant — point blank from behind! — when he jeopardizes the mission; No one monologues about how Darth Vader is a powerful space-wizard-jesus... He just shows up and kicks fifteen metric tons of ass.
○ Jyn doesn't talk about how she feels — "I don't like sand." "Anakin you're breaking my heart!" — the director remembers why he hired a BAFTA nominee who studied (and performed) Shakespeare at Oxford and he just lets her emote.

• Less is more.
○ Vader and Tarkin, combined, are on screen for less than fifteen minutes of screen time. Both are more impactful on the story than every villain in the prequels.
○ It's not a story about the space-wizard who may or may not be the messiah and his rise/temptation/fall/redemption. It's a war story about a small rag-tag unit on a specific fetch quest... I mean extraction mission.

• Visuals that impress, not distract.
○ Film is a visual medium. You communicate with the audience as much (arguably more) but what is shown on the screen, how you show it, and so forth. The opening shot of Star Wars (1977) communicates so much just by the scale, geometry, and screen positions of the Tantive IV (small, frightened, speed/urgency, colorful/hopeful) and the Imperial Star Deatroyer (massive, unyielding, slow/brooding/inevitable, grey/emotionless/uncaring) that the opening text crawl is almost superfluous... This same genius for visual storytelling is seen throughout the films. Then the "special editions" vomited up all sorts of visual clutter all over the screen... the prequels were even worse.
○ By comparison, Rogue One is clearly better at this than the special editions and prequels. My favorite bits were the Storm Troopers patrolling the urban setting where we first "meet" Casian or the marketplace in the Holy City... In short: they're all filthy. Mud on their helmets, dirt everywhere, scuffed boots, and the like. These are the clean and tidy Storm Troopers patrolling the antiseptic starbase where a farm boy rescued his princess from the evil wizard's tower that we saw in '77. These were Battle-hardened troops in the on guard against of a insurgency and on the brink of full scale civil war. A little mud and dirt can say so much.

[Thorpocalypse]

Vader pretty much owned every scene he was in, and was nice reminder of why Vader was such a fearsome presence in Star Wars. His appearance turns the war movie into a straight up horror film.

Jesus, yes. Looked like freaking Jason Voorhees going through Camp Crystal Lake, there. The good guys completely losing their shit made it all worthwhile.

That's what I loved about the movie. Don't get me wrong, I loved watching a full on Jedi battle in Attack of the Clones, but I really liked that Vader was the only true Force user in this one. With him wiping out all the Jedi (save for a handful) it truly made him an even more terrifying presence across the galaxy. It would basically have been about 20 years without anyone seeing anything like him so when he shows up somewhere and starts doing what he does...yikes and double yikes.

And the Rogue One crew being pretty much normal people raised the stakes higher and made it easier to root for them, as BGIII noted before.