[Today’s run: 5 miles]
*** Spoilers!
I had today off from work and we took advantage of that to go see the movie Rogue One this afternoon.
This movie is definitely a Star Wars movie but is substantially darker in viewpoint. It is a prequel of the original movie when the plans to the Death Star are obtained and eventually used by Luke Skywalker to blow the thing up.
I remember seeing the original Star Wars in the movie theater east of Vets Auditorium in Des Moines long ago. That film starts with the bad guys chasing a lone space ship as it tries to flee with the purloined Death Star schematics, exactly where this one ends. At the time I think they hinted that the plans had been smuggled out. But this movie has no smuggling in it. There is a basically a suicide assault on a big installation and tie fighters and a battle fleet and all sorts of stuff and the only ship that survives is the one lone ship.
It kind of puts a different spin on the original movie when you figure that a few hundred people get zapped to obtain these plans. It takes a lot of the fun out of it, at least to me.
It isn’t a “happy ending” movie, by a long sight. But it is kind of a “we are fighting for the cause and we’ll all die but the cause will prevail in the end” movie.
So anyway, there are multiple mission-at-all-costs heros. I think the main protagonist is the girl, as in last year’s movie. She and a jaded warrior find respect for each other which starts to maybe look like blooming love at the end right before they get toasted in a nuclear-ish conflagration.
And the bad guys have a hard time too. The main “bad guy” just wants to get credit for building the Death Star and making things go. But he is thwarted in that desire and gets toasted also. It’s even tougher to be a bad guy in these movies because they have no honor or fellow-feeling… or at least so it goes in Star Wars land. That guy just wants Darth Vader to put in a good word for him with the Emperor, but we already know the Emperor is a self-centered twit who will soon be thrown down one of those ubiquitous empty power shafts they seem to build their space ships around. Darth Vader makes a bit of good at his end three movies later by throwing the Emperor down the shaft.
The zapping and blasting was good. The weird looking aliens were good. The robot was good. The spaceship shootout was good, but not as good as the one at the beginning of movie #6 (#3 chronologically ?). The characters were more jaded and tortured and angsty, but not unbearably so. They had a lot of references to the original movies. And Darth Vader was not a central figure; not a lot of Jedi and Sith stuff at all, which is a plus in my book. The Ip-man dies though. That was kind of sad.
I think it sorely lacked the kind of humor of the original movies. It almost made me miss Jar Jar Binks… Nah.