Rewatching Rogue One on American May the 4th (sort of)

A few days before May the 4th -- a day I mildly look down upon, all evidence to the contrary in the date-specific viewing I'm about to tell you about -- I thought about how Star Wars Day was falling on a Saturday this year, and it would make a good opportunity to finally rewatch Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

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.

Joker's got a Rogue One problem

SPOILERS for Joker. 

Joker puts bad things into the world. It's one of the reasons I don't like the movie, and reason enough.

But since I haven't yet figured out why I think Joker puts bad things into the world, but why I don't think The Dark Knight does that, I'm going to save my criticisms in today's post for something more superficial and plot-focused.

When I wasn't being bothered by the gratuitous shocks and tone deafness of Joker, I was being bothered by the way it makes mincemeat of the familiar Batman mythology.

Or, at the very least, the way it recontextualizes the most notorious moment in Batman's backstory, the one that gets parodied more than any other.

And this is something it has in common with Rogue One.

Rogue One -- which I also gave a milquetoast 2.5 stars as a way of acknowledging that I appreciated certain elements of the film without actually liking it -- does things I don't like, have never liked, with what functions as the inciting incident of the whole Star Wars saga.

Instead of the transfer of the Death Star plans from Princess Leia to R2-D2 serving as this almost quiet moment in an episode of successful espionage, we now know that it was preceded by a giant battle involving AT-ATs. So much for the innocent little space caper that led to a galaxy-defining narrative. It was always operating on the largest of scales, we now know.

That didn't sit well with me at all. It was complicating a story I admired for its simplicity, and it was all in the spirit of mining our nostalgia to sell us "additional breadth and depth" on what we already knew. Or thought we knew, it turns out.

I think the agenda in Joker is a little different, but the result is the same.

I think Todd Phillips and company set out to make a movie about how the world can mold a deranged supervillain in its cruel crucible, and knowing that it was the Batman villain the Joker helped us understand exactly what type of psychopath we're talking about, because we've known that psychopath for more than 50 years. In its ideal form it would have been beholden to no other story or existing narrative timeline.

But we live in a world of cinematic universes, and the suits at DC just could not resist continuing to ram the connections to the story of Bruce Wayne down our throats.

Which I guess is why they ultimately have Thomas and a pearl-clutching Martha Wayne killed on the same night in which the Joker announces himself to the whole world by killing Gotham City's version of Johnny Carson live on air, launching a citywide riot.

Come on.

Look, this origin story for the Joker does not have to fit in perfectly with what we know about the character. Looking him up on Wikipedia just now, I found that his origin story has changed to fit the needs of whichever of the umpteen stories someone was telling about him at the time. I'd appreciate something close to the story where he falls into a vat of acid that turns his skin white and his hair green, but I'm okay if you don't want to give me that. There's only so many times you can film that scene.

I'm even okay if you give me a Joker who's "just some joker," to quote late night host Murray Franklin -- who has no "particular set of skills" that allows him to marshal an army of freaks, create all kinds of poisonous weapons, and evade capture for as long as he does and as often as he does. If you want to make Arthur Fleck just a failed clown with the remnants of childhood brain damage, I can work with that as well.

What I can't work with is the idea that the Joker would be on the scene for something like 15 year before Batman even becomes Batman. I mean, how old can Bruce Wayne be in that scene in the alley where his parents are killed? Eleven? Twelve? And what's the youngest Batman can be when he first emerges? Thirty?

So in Todd Phillips' and Joaquin Phoneix's Gotham City, Bruce Wayne grows up with a hatred for the Joker his whole life, with a single focus for all his efforts toward shaping himself into a tech-savvy vigilante. No, this Joker does not pull the trigger that killed his parents, but he might as well have. He incited those copycats to violence, and besides, he came to my damn house and talked to me through the gate. He's the face on my voodoo doll and my punching bag. He's the last face I look at when I go to bed and the first I see each morning before I wake up.

It's a problem because I can't abide by a world where the Joker is on the loose for 15 years, menacing Gotham City, begging for someone to rise up and do something about him, until someone finally does. If he's on the loose for that long, it speaks incredibly poorly of the Gotham police -- though it speaks even worse of the prisons and the justice system if he keeps getting caught and keeps escaping.

I had always thought that the killing of the Waynes was a random crime, a robbery, not some vendetta on the rich launched by the villain who would become the future Batman's greatest nemesis. I had always thought their alley demise was the narrative equivalent of Leia Organa hunching over and surreptitiously sliding a disk into a slot on an R2 unit.

Rogue One tried to tell me something quite different about that scene, and now Joker is trying to do the same, and I don't like it.

I agree with a friend of mine who stated that the movie would have been better off leaning away from, rather than leaning into, the Bruce Wayne stuff. Like if they had to get Bruce in there for a cameo to make the audience chuckle, make it like Wolverine's five-second cameo in X-Men: First Class. Not everything has to be related to everything else. If Joker were more of a standalone, I might have liked it better.

Or, I might have just written this post about why I think it puts bad things into the world instead.

The mellowing of our Star Wars expectations

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens this week.

Ho hum.

Han Solo is arguably one of the most popular characters in movie history, yet a movie devoted to him is not causing the stir we have come to expect, especially from Star Wars movies.

I think this says more about the state of Star Wars movies than it does about Han Solo.

Forget the “troubled production,” about which the average person likely knows diddly squat. Also forget whether the previous movies have been good, because some people have loved each of the three newest Star Wars movies and some people have loathed them. There isn’t one that can be acknowledged generally as a turd, the way the prequels were.

But we are now in our fourth straight year with a Star Wars movie, and we’ve just mellowed out on all this hype and other tangential buzz. Which is both inevitable and a bit disappointing.

Even 18 months ago, when Rogue One was released, I made sure I was there at a midnight screening. Actually, I think the midnight screening was necessitated by the fact that I needed to record a podcast about it two nights later, and had to be sure I’d get to see it before then. If something terrible happened and I missed the screening, I’d have time to compensate with another showing before the podcast recorded. But I suspect I would have been drawn to that midnight screening anyway.

What Rogue One and Solo have in common is that they are both prequels, meaning certain characters were guaranteed to escape them alive. Spoilers were not the big factor they might be in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

What they don’t have, or seem to have, in common is the hype leading up to them.

For one, I noticed that they already screened Solo for critics. My editor has already written and posted his review, even though the first public screenings are still nearly 32 hours off as I write this. For the previous three movies, they wouldn’t show anybody the movie until about six hours before those midnight screenings were set to happen. My editor beat the rest of us plebes to the screening, but only by a short time, barely even enough to brag.

Then I noticed the relative paucity of midnight screenings tomorrow. At the Village Cinema at Crown Casino, where I have started to go for my big budget movies on large screens, there’s only a single midnight screening, and it’s actually at 12:15. Hoyts, the other option for big screens, does have three screens showing the movie at 12:01, but only three, and only once each. When The Last Jedi came out last year, I’m pretty sure it played a good 20 times before weary Hoyts theater staff got to go to bed that night.

Again, I don’t think it’s the fault of Han Solo. But I do think Rogue One makes a good point of comparison, as these both have the “A Star Wars Story” label on them. Just 18 months ago, people were hungry enough for more Star Wars, any Star Wars, to line up for a midnight showing, even when they knew that nothing they didn’t already basically know would happen in the movie. Now, not so much.

You could argue that the narrative of stealing the Death Star plans is inherently more interesting than watching Han Solo on just some random adventure, though I’m sure the movie will do its darnedest to convince us of the stakes of this particular adventure. But I really don’t think so. Solo allows us to explore a beloved character – three beloved characters, actually – while Rogue One focused on characters we didn’t know and only hinted at a few we already did. (We knew Darth Vader was going to be in it, and we probably thought that was going to be cool, but I don’t think it could be described as the film’s primary draw.)

What I really think is that this is the first sign of our Star Wars fatigue, the fact that a new movie is coming out this week and only in the past day or two did I even start to think about my intended strategy for seeing it. Basically, I don’t think I’ll need one. It’ll be playing enough, with few enough total people seeing it, that I’ll probably be able to just roll up to the theater on Thursday night and use my critics card to snare a ticket. (I am going to see it in its first 24 hours – I haven’t mellowed that much.) But I also am not that worried if I go and it’s sold out. A need to see it does not feel desperate. Too bad, because it should.

I guess I partly blame Rogue One, as I didn’t really care for it and it demonstrated to me that the characters I knew probably played more of a role in my affections than I wanted to acknowledge. Or maybe these particular characters were just lame. Or maybe they turned the stealing of the Death Star plans into an epic battle the likes of which would be discussed in history books, when it should have been a cloak and dagger mission. But now I’m getting sidetracked.

I blame Rogue One more as the first sign of the new normal in the Star Wars universe, where after 2019 we will continue to get Star Wars movies but they will each be a bit more shrug-worthy than the one that preceded them. Once the Skywalker saga is (presumably) over next year, each new Star Wars movie will be a Solo, with increasingly fewer midnight screenings, increasingly less urgency over how soon we see it, and increasingly fewer characters we care about.

I don’t totally mind the mellowing, mind you. That day after the midnight screening is always rough, and my this Thursday at work thanks me in advance.

But there’s something I’ll miss about the excitement of Star Wars, which reduced my capacity for rational thought and just turned me into a fanboy.

I guess I’ll get one more shot with Episode IX next year.

In the meantime … Alden Ehrenreich, eh? I still wish they’d gone with Anthony Ingruber.

Four heads are better than one

A possibly accidental, probably intentional arrangement of paste-up movie ads really brought my attention to a marketing trend that is probably not new, but is definitely having a moment.

As you can likely guess from this picture, it's the use of character heads from the movie -- one per poster -- to sell the movie in and of themselves.

Usually it's characters you're familiar with from at least one other movie, as in one of these examples, but sometimes, the strength of the brand is enough. Or I guess, Rogue One was enough of a hit that the heads of brand new characters can now sell it -- though maybe that would have only worked for a BluRay release, not the original theatrical.

As both Star Wars and Marvel are owned by Disney, these posters are likely in cahoots with each other, but I like to think of their placement as random, as it would do more for my thesis that this advertising strategy is gaining in popularity. (There are also four Rogue One posters, but I had to cut off Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso for framing reasons. I was stopped at a red light so I'm kind of lucky I was able to snap this shot at all.)

And there's no doubt there's something really captivating about it. The Guardians posters benefit from their color scheme, to be sure, as the array of pastels is really pleasing. The Rogue One posters stand in contrast to that, though, their uniform blue and black color scheme probably subliminally functioning as a way to make you think of the packaging of a BluRay itself. (Or not so subliminally, as an actual Rogue One BluRay figures into each poster.)

I suppose I don't have a lot more to say about this -- it doesn't really strike me as indicative of some greater trend in the advertisement of movies, or some underlying psychology about the modern-day viewer. It's just smart design.

And thanks in part to the proximity of two ad campaigns with similar concepts, I'll now surely be on the lookout for it elsewhere.

Another midnight in December

Tonight I will again be seeing a new Star Wars movie a good 24 to 36 hours before anyone in the U.S., reminding me of one of the rare times it is a cinematic benefit to live in Australia.

But I almost left this one to chance.

Let me explain.

I'm plenty excited to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -- I've steadfastly avoided all of the trailers -- but I might not have prioritized it within its first 48 hours except that I'll be discussing it on a podcast Friday night. As "Friday night" in this case actually means "Friday around dinnertime," that left me exactly two time slots in which to potentially see it: Thursday at midnight (i.e. "Wednesday night"), and Thursday after work.

The difference between the two options is $32.20.

Which is not insignificant, considering that we're planning a trip to the U.S. (only a week from now!) and every penny counts.

If I waited to watch it on Thursday after work, I could get in free with my critics card. I'd have to choose one of the theaters by my work, and also hope that they weren't sold out, rather than one of the Hoyts theaters with the bigger screens. (Hoyts only honors the critic card on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I don't think I can convince them that tonight's 12:01 a.m. showing counts as a Wednesday.) But it would probably be doable.

But what if it weren't? What if all showings are sold out? If I left it to chance, there was at least some possibility that I'd miss my reasonable opportunities to view it before the podcast. And with only a few days before my trip and holidays being a busy time anyway, it wouldn't work to reschedule the podcast. I'd have to do something like take Friday off work in order to see it in time. (Another extreme no-no at one of my job's busiest times of the year.)

So why not commit $32.20 for the IMAX 3D screening tonight ($31 with a $1.20 booking fee), both guaranteeing myself a viewing time and allowing me to immerse myself in the most confronting version of the movie possible?

So that's what I'm going to do.

It was my wife who ultimately convinced me. She reasoned that by never spending more than my $75 annual membership fee for the Australian Film Critics Association, which allows me to see all of my movies in the theater for free, I've earned a splurge on Rogue One. That was pretty big of her, because she's really conscious of how we're spending our money right now with the trip coming up. But she knows it's important to me, and that you can only see a new Star Wars movie for the first time once. (Though I will be getting a chance to do that like once a year, from now until, I don't know, 2032.)

Now that that's done, my primary concern is staying awake.

I've been up past midnight watching movies each of the past two nights, a bit foolishly on Monday but out of necessity last night, when I completed my four-hour viewing of Erich von Stroheim's Greed. (Separate post forthcoming.) A pretty bad schedule leading in to a night when I will be up until 3 a.m.

Thursday at work will be rough, but I'll manage. I always do.

And don't worry, The Audient will remain a safe space for Star Wars spoilers until you get to see the movie yourself. Though I had a discussion online yesterday with friends about whether spoilers will even be a thing with this movie. It's a prequel, and we don't know anything about the characters, so casual mentions of what may or may not happen to them will a) probably not be something we have to try very hard to avoid exposing ourselves to, in part because b) people probably won't be making these casual mentions anyway.

Plus, I take seriously the spoiler avoidance responsibilities bestowed on me by my occasionally advantageous time zone.