Movie Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

With the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the third coming of the Star Wars saga has broken the prequel curse placed on the franchise by creator George Lucas. And although none of the marketing for this movie ever used the P-word to describe it, the chronological setting, in advance of the events of the original Star Wars (later subtitled A New Hope), does indeed make the film a prequel. While this film does not reclaim the high-water mark Star Wars established with The Empire Strikes Back, it does prove that the new crop of producers are not likely to sink to the depths of Episodes One through Three.

Rogue One is the story of a McGuffin, those original Death Star plans that Princess Leia sent down to Tatooine inside the memory banks of R2D2 at the beginning of Star Wars, an event that pulled a farm boy named Luke and a retired Jedi named Obi Wan into the rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire. This film tells the story of how those plans were stolen in the first place. Jyn Erso (Felicty Jones), a criminal of some sort who was separated from her parents at a young age (when her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), was forcefully recruited into the Empire’s Death Star project), is sprung from an imperial prison by the rebels and recruited into a mission to find her father. The rebels want some information on a rumored new super-weapon that the Empire is about to deploy. Some of them also want Galen dead for his role in the development of this weapon, but they don’t tell Jyn that. The path to the plans lead through a rebel extremist (and Jyn’s former guardian) named Saw Gerrara (Forest Whitaker), a rain soaked Imperial Base, and finally a planet that looks like Hawaii. We know somewhat how the story will end, because Star Wars.

Rogue One has the redeeming quality of being fairly smart for a Star Wars movie, much smarter than last year’s The Force Awakens, which treated the concepts of both space and time with singular contempt. Sure, it is still a space fantasy, but at least it all makes sense within the context of the Star Wars universe. Rogue One focuses more on the war aspect of Star Wars, and features harrowing sequences of ground, air, and space combat. The film introduces us to a whole cast of new characters, but fails to develop them significantly. For all of the dumbness and repetition, at least The Force Awakens had heart. There is a lot of fan service in Rogue One, and some of it may be pointless, but it wouldn’t have been a problem if the characters had been developed better. But for anyone who is a fan of the series, or just enjoys a good science fiction adventure, Rogue One provides plenty of entertainment. B

Alien Motivations

I finally got around to seeing Independence Day: Resurgence, the sequel no one asked for to Roland Emmerich’s 1996 alien invasion/catastrophe flick Independence Day. Emmerich is back as director, with Jeff Goldblum and other actors reprising roles they played in the original. It was nice to see Brent Spiner getting work again, but it was evident that Will Smith was wise to steer clear of this particular project. The film’s five writers did not generate an original or intelligent idea between them. Independence Day: Resurgence may be one of the stupidest movies ever made, but then stupid has never been a crime in Hollywood.

You don’t need to look far to find the stupid early in this film, but if you wait long enough you find out that the reason the aliens have returned and parked a 3,000-mile spaceship over the Atlantic basin is to drill a tiny little hole down through the layers of our planet to extract our molten core. Why they need a 3,000-mile spaceship to drill a single hole into a single spot along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is never explained, but we are told that they likely want to use the energy of our planetary core to power their spaceships and industry. While it was just generally stupid for them to have traveled across the universe to strip mine our planet of natural resources, the motivation given for the original invasion in ’96, coming all that way to use the core of the Earth as an energy source is a very specifically stupid thing to do.

Of course the core of the Earth has a great deal of energy, and even tapping into near surface level energies of the planet makes a lot of sense for those of us already living here. But the universe, the universe that these aliens traveled through at a great cost of energy and resources, is full of bright and shiny nuclear reactors called stars, the weakest of which generate many times the energy that you can find inside the Earth. And even if you are too stupid to figure out how to utilize that energy (not something likely in a species that has mastered interstellar travel) there are plenty of other places in the universe to find it. Gas giant planets like Jupiter generate enormous levels of energy. There is no deficiency of energy in the universe that would make coming to Earth to drill a tiny hole to tap our core a reasonable alternative.

But what about the original premise of the Independence Day franchise, that the aliens came to Earth to strip our planet of its natural resources. Again, the universe is a big damned place, full of rocks, gas, dust, asteroids, comets and uninhabited planets that are composed of the various naturally occurring elements that we find on Earth. Even the most rapacious consumers of these raw materials would find enough available within their own solar system, or nearby uninhabited systems to satiate their appetites. But even if they did decide to drop into our neighborhood looking for such resources, they could probably more easily mine them out of the asteroid belt, the planets Mars, Venus and Mercury, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, than they could from the Earth, a planet that has already been mined of much of its natural resources by the natives. Why bother with an invasion when you can take what you want without a fight?

Of course other fictional aliens have invaded Earth for other things, such as water, breeding stock and tasty, tasty humans. Water is again a relatively common material in the universe, and if you were coming to our solar system to find some you might try catching snowballs in the Oort cloud or draining the seas of Europa. And while Mars may need women and To Serve Man may be a cookbook, it is not likely that any aliens would be biochemically compatible enough with us to make either mating or digesting possible. It just wouldn’t work. So there really isn’t anything on Earth that is unique enough or useful enough to any alien species to justify an invasion. But who knows, if they’ve been getting old episodes of the Jerry Springer show they might just do so on principle.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

Spoiler Alert!

Jon Snow is back. You don’t need to watch Game of Thrones to know that, it’s been all over the internet. As many of the show’s fans predicted when his fellow Night's Watch brothers went all stabby on him at the end of last season, Melisandre called on the magic of The Lord of Light to resurrect everyone’s favorite bastard. And it was an all too predictable outcome. Snow is the audiences’ connection to events on The Wall and among the Night's Watch. He may also be a Targaryen and not Ned Stark’s bastard, which is a significant storyline that needs to be resolved. Unlike his brother (cousin?), Robb, he was never really expendable enough to stay dead in either the books or the TV series, so no one should be surprised he is back.

Snow’s resurrection remained a poorly kept secret for most of the last year, with the producers and actors going out of their way to assure us that Jon Snow was dead and would stay that way. But nobody bought that story, and it did not generate enough suspense for those involved to continue to lie about it. All it accomplished was to make Kit Harrington (the actor who plays Snow) look like a liar. Covering up Snow’s inevitable resurrection was one of those desperate secrets that film and television producers seem to get irrationally invested in every so often. Poorly disguised surprises that never surprise anyone.

It all started with George Lucas’ reveal at the end of The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. This was a genuine surprise to most people, a nice unexpected twist in the story. Lucas claims that he had planned that all along, and I guess it may be possible, although I have my doubts. The problem with the whole Luke’s father twist is that it inspired a whole generation of TV and film makers to become obsessed with creating clever twists or unexpected surprises. Plot secrets designed to stun the viewers. Game of Thrones did this well when interpreting the source material. The Red Wedding shocked many, as did Snow’s murder at the end of last season. But nobody was ever going to believe that Snow would stay dead, and it was a waste of energy to try and convince us otherwise.

In 2011 director J.J. Abrams, obsessed with this idea of the mystery twist, named the antagonist of Star Trek Into Darkness John Harrison, and spent a lot of time trying to convince us that John Harrison was not actually Khan Noonian Singh. Which he was. Everybody familiar with Star Trek was pretty much convinced that Harrison was Khan, but Abrams and his crew remained adamant that he wasn’t until the release of the film. Nobody was surprised. We were all just annoyed that we had been so poorly lied to. Benedict Cumberbatch’s pasty white Khan was not only an insult to the original character’s Sikh origins, but also to the intelligence of every Star Trek fan watching. Those outside of the fandom probably asked “Khan who?” and moved on. The real surprise would’ve been if it wasn’t Khan, if the villain had been another of those 72 genetically enhanced supermen (or women) travelling through space on the Botany Bay. But Abrams had to choose the most predictable surprise and hence failed to surprise anyone. And based on his equivocations regarding the parentage of Rey in the new Star Wars trilogy, he hasn’t learned his lesson. Because after the fans have run through all of the possibilities, no choice the producers make is ever going to be a surprise.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

My original intention for the first post of 2016, marking the rebranding of my blog from Tabula Rasa to Four Mile Circus, was to write a critique of director JJ Abrams’ questionable understanding of outer space. Abrams has the distinction of directing movies in two of the largest space-based film franchises ever conceived (Star Trek and Star Wars), and has done so with very little understanding or respect for it as a setting. But apparently since the science in Star Wars has always been atrocious (and it has been) Abrams’ scientific failures are off limits when discussing the film. That is some of the feedback floating around on Twitter anyway. It is still my intention to write about the topic, but I will probably wait a month or two until The Force Awakens has become less of a sacred cow. 

Overall, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a solid Star Wars movie. It may be the most inherently Star Warsish Star Wars movie since the original, as The Empire Strikes Back aspired to be greater than the first and all of the other sequels and prequels aspired to be less. The new characters, scavenger Rey, ex-Storm Trooper Finn and pilot Poe Dameron, are paper thin and questionably motivated but great fun, as are the returning characters of Han, Leia, Chewbacca and the droids. The plot has been wholly recycled, down to the droid carrying important data, a planet destroying superweapon and a visit to an alien filled tavern (although I always felt that it was somewhat unfair to declare that no movie could ever feature a bar filled with aliens without being accused of ripping off Star Wars). The villains of the piece, genocidal maniacs based on their actions, never generate much in the way of fear or intimidation. Darth Emo is in no way as complex or compelling as people think he is. Tantrums do not equal conflict. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun and fast paced film, but it really doesn’t add up to much more than that. B+