I’d even go further, people have seriously just forgotten the first 2/3rds of Rogue One. The characters are stiff and boring, the plot is meaningless because you know nobody survives, and the few action sequences before the big battle are nothing to right home about.
Once you get to the big battle, it’s bombastic and exciting, and you even get a little tension from “but how exactly do all these people die?” I don’t even think it’s just nostalgia talking, the battle really was executed incredibly well. It’s like ~45 minutes of the greatest sci-fi war porn ever made. It’s so high quality that it makes you forget the other hour and a half of your life that the movie wastes on Jyn Erso’s angst.
I don’t know about you, but knowing the characters die does not make them uninteresting to me. They aren’t real in the first place. Why does the fact that they die matter? Its the same as saying the character building for any other character that isn’t in a sequel doesn’t matter. Once they’re off the screen, does it matter if the character is dead?
In fact, I’d potentially say them dying adds more to the character potential. We get to see what made them willing to die. That said, I don’t think Rogue One pulls this off. Andor absolutely does, and it’s the best thing that has come out of SW because of it. We rarely get to see that in this universe. We sometimes see what people will kill for (with Anakin at least), but not the reason they’re willing to die for the cause, other than just they’re supposed to because they were written as heroes.
I’m not claiming that you cannot tell an effective story when you know the fates of the characters, just that Rogue One was particularly ineffective. Usually to make those plots compelling you need to have interesting well written characters with motivations you can understand and care about. The most compelling character Rogue One has is a funny robot.
Exactly. The first half of the movie doesn’t deserve the ending it gets in the second half.
I unsubscribed from /r/starwars after a few weeks of trying to have a friendly conversation about it. “The first half didn’t develop the characters as well as it could have”. You come back a half hour later to a -36 score. People were rabid fans of that movie and that was the final piece that made me want to not interact with that community anymore.
I’d even go further, people have seriously just forgotten the first 2/3rds of Rogue One. The characters are stiff and boring, the plot is meaningless because you know nobody survives, and the few action sequences before the big battle are nothing to right home about.
Once you get to the big battle, it’s bombastic and exciting, and you even get a little tension from “but how exactly do all these people die?” I don’t even think it’s just nostalgia talking, the battle really was executed incredibly well. It’s like ~45 minutes of the greatest sci-fi war porn ever made. It’s so high quality that it makes you forget the other hour and a half of your life that the movie wastes on Jyn Erso’s angst.
I don’t know about you, but knowing the characters die does not make them uninteresting to me. They aren’t real in the first place. Why does the fact that they die matter? Its the same as saying the character building for any other character that isn’t in a sequel doesn’t matter. Once they’re off the screen, does it matter if the character is dead?
In fact, I’d potentially say them dying adds more to the character potential. We get to see what made them willing to die. That said, I don’t think Rogue One pulls this off. Andor absolutely does, and it’s the best thing that has come out of SW because of it. We rarely get to see that in this universe. We sometimes see what people will kill for (with Anakin at least), but not the reason they’re willing to die for the cause, other than just they’re supposed to because they were written as heroes.
I’m not claiming that you cannot tell an effective story when you know the fates of the characters, just that Rogue One was particularly ineffective. Usually to make those plots compelling you need to have interesting well written characters with motivations you can understand and care about. The most compelling character Rogue One has is a funny robot.
Exactly. The first half of the movie doesn’t deserve the ending it gets in the second half.
I unsubscribed from /r/starwars after a few weeks of trying to have a friendly conversation about it. “The first half didn’t develop the characters as well as it could have”. You come back a half hour later to a -36 score. People were rabid fans of that movie and that was the final piece that made me want to not interact with that community anymore.