Then I plum forgot.
But I remembered in time for Sunday night, and since many of the hours of our Sunday here in Australia are Saturday in the U.S. -- May the 4th, in case you've already forgotten -- I thought I could squeeze in the viewing Sunday night, even though Saturday would have expired in all U.S. time zones by then (yes, even Hawaii).
But first let's get into why I look down upon both May the 4th and Rogue One.
If you truly love Star Wars, then you don't need a day to celebrate it. You do Star Wars things at regular intervals. Not daily, of course, because that would be too nerdy by half. But you'd keep Star Wars in your heart and home -- "keep" in the sense that Ebenezer Scrooge talked about keeping Christmas -- and you wouldn't need to draw special attention to it once a year. For a real Star Wars fan, May the 4th is for tourists. (When every major league baseball team playing a home game on May 4th has some sort of Star Wars themed night, you know it's become too commercial by half. Much like Christmas.)
And Rogue One? A true Star Wars fan does not like Rogue One.
How do I figure? Well, I say, a true Star Wars fan does not believe that the stealing of the plans to the Death Star was an epic battle with the loss of many lives, starships and planets, the kind so consequential that they'd devote entire history books to it. A true Star Wars fan thinks the stealing of the plans for the Death Star was a cloak and dagger mission involving clever betrayals, intrigue, and probably only the deaths of a couple Imperial soldiers who might have gotten in the way.
Yet Gareth Edwards' movie did indeed posit that this epic battle had taken place immediately before Princess Leia came into possession of said plans, which is the biggest, but not nearly the only, reason I didn't dig the movie when I saw it back in 2016, and had not yet rewatched it.
When I watched and appreciated Andor, I started getting the hankering to give Rogue One another shot. I thought I'd wait until after the second and final season of Andor, but I also found myself getting impatient for that to arrive. As it turned out, I would have only had to wait three more months, as it'll be on Disney+ this August.
But Cassian Andor was decidedly not one of the things I appreciated in Rogue One. He had to grow on me in his eponymous show. I generally like Diego Luna, but I did not think he was right for this movie and I did not think his performance was up to snuff. The fact that English is not his first language was likely a factor, but I also thought he just had a big charisma deficit. Again, I've softened that stance since then.
And true enough, Cassian Andor was not a bother to me this time around. He might not stack up to other recent iconic additions to the Star Wars universe -- your Oscar Isaacs, your Daisey Ridleys, your John Boyegas, your Adam Drivers -- heck, pretty much everyone in that whole trilogy -- but he's fine here, and it's not really his story anyway.
But I also had an issue with Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso. My memory was that I thought her facial expressions were too overdetermined, and that she needed a sure-handed director to tell her not to be going off the reservation with the looks she was giving the camera.
I must say, I really don't know where I got that the first time. I sat there during this viewing and I specifically tried to detect why I reached that conclusion about Jones. I could not. She, too, is fine, perhaps better than that.
While we are on the cast, in 2016 I did not like Donnie Yen's chanting about being one with the force and the force being with him. I guess I just don't feel like the force and incantations go hand in hand. Shouldn't you just be able to feel the force, and have it serve or not serve you, without speaking about it? Perhaps Edwards was intentionally drawing a comparison between belief in the force and religious zealotry, but if so, I was not a fan of that comparison.
Guess what? Didn't bother me so much this time.
Riz Ahmed's mumblings about being the pilot?
Didn't bother me so much.
Forest Whittaker's admittedly scenery chewing performance?
Didn't bother me so much.
The story?
Yeah that still bothered me.
I still don't like that this movie culminates in a battle costing the lives of, would it be exaggerating to say thousands of people? That's not so good.
But I found myself appreciating the staging of this battle, at least, on the level of pure spectacle. The beach scene with the palm trees is a good place to have a Star Wars battle. And some of the stuff going on up in space, with the assault on that invisible shield, is good material.
This is not me becoming a Rogue One acolyte. I promise you it is not.
Though it is someone who does not like dislike the movie anymore, and might already watch it again after I conclude Andor after all. Yes, even if that means two Rogue One viewings within about a year's time.
I am eager to see if they are consistent with the depiction of Andor, whom they had not conceived as the center of his own TV show when they set out to make this prequel. His killing of a person who appeared to be a friend or colleague during his first scene does not, for example, seem consistent with his character -- or not consistent, anyway, with the person he seems to have become by the time the show ends. To see how they sew this all together, it probably really will behove me to watch it right after I watch the show.
Anyway, this leaves exactly one Star Wars movie that I have seen only once. And you should be able to guess what that is.
That's right, it's Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I always considered to be worse than Rogue One and looks a lot worse right about now.
I can't imagine the circumstances that will come along to make me want to watch that one again ... but if my feelings toward Rogue One can be rehabilitated, I won't rule out that same thing being possible here.
After all, there's another May the 4th only about 363 days away.
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