It's A Trap!

Year: 2016

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I liked The Force Awakens a lot, so I’m certainly not against Disney’s attempts to defibrillate the Star Wars universe. But I’m worried that they’re turning the franchise into a Marvel machine, churning out films at an unsustainable rate. They’re raking in billions right now so it doesn’t make business sense to stop, but one day a film is going to jam a wrench in the works and it will all come crumbling down. And if every spinoff is as careless as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which errs on the side of good, but not for lack of trying), that will happen sooner rather than later for George Lucas’ beloved franchise.

But what the f**k do I know? The series survived The Clone Wars, after all.

In Rogue One, we zoom and enhance on a story implied by the plot of the original Star Wars: the acquisition of the plans to the Death Star by Rebel forces. If you don’t know what that means, 1) You don’t exist, and 2) good luck. There is no primer here for newbies. There’s not even an opening credits crawl, which I guess is a luxury reserved for the official Star Wars entries.

Anyway, here we have Jyn Erso (felicity Jones, who is having quite the year), the roguish daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen, who is also having quite the year), who is instrumental in the Empire’s development of the Death Star. She is busted out of prison (she has committed the crime of… being sassy? Who knows. This is a universe where backstories haven’t been invented yet, apparently) by Rebel forces and taken by Cassian Andar (Diego Luna) and his sarcastic droid K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) on various missions to use her family connection and help the Rebels find the Death Star’s weaknesses (and cement over some of the original film’s biggest plot holes once and for all).

On the way, they meet friends who will come along on their journey: the defected imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), blind monk Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) , and his friend Baze Malbu (Wen Jiang), who’s a… soldier? Mercenary? Outlaw? Postal worker? Of all the paper-thin characters, he’s the one who most resembles a random plastic Star Wars action figure pulled from a bucket.

Batting for the Empire’s side, we have Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the ambitious man in charge of Death Star development, Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry with a Getty Images still of Peter Cushing glued to his face), and some random imperial henchman called Darth… something.

There’s a lot of weird names in this movie, you can’t expect me to remember them all.

OK, guys. I’m about to rip into Rogue One quite a bit, but there are some things you should know before we dive in. First, this is an exciting popcorn action movie with stellar special effects (minus one horrifying rictus mask of Peter Cushing) so every complaint relative to its entry in the canon of Great Cinema is kind of pointless. And there’s one thing that I or anybody else can’t take away form it: Rogue One has an astoundingly diverse cast. The only white person on our ragtag crew is a woman, and the rest are Latino, Asian, Pakistani, and so on as we descend the cast list to its further reaches. And there’s not a dud in the bunch. This kind of representation is seamless, avoiding tokenism or calling itself out for how progressive it is. This is how all of Hollywood needs to start casting tentpole movies As Soon as F**king Possible.

I don’t have a punchline for this. The idea that non-white kids across the world have an entry point for dreaming of traveling the stars is just too sweet.

So, yeah, the script. It’s a rule of thumb of mine that a screenplay is terrible if it has a flashback to something that happened ten minutes before. ...Guess what Rogue One has. Yeah. 

This movie has no trust that the audience will understand its barbarically simple character arcs, so it chews the plot into mush and vomits bit back down your throat. It also strikes upon its themes with the grace and delicacy of a hippo on a pogo stick. You can practically see the highlighted-all-caps-italics on the page whenever they utter stilted lines about hope, geddit? This is a story that treats its thematic buzzwords like they’re holy writ, but doesn’t have the right kind of characters to get that over-earnest tone across.

Only Jyn has any kind of development or backstory, but her character arc conveniently avoids requiring her to actually make any real decisions about her values. Everyone else is drawn with an Etch-a-Sketch, given one character trait if they’re lucky. They’re well-acted repositories of action movie quips, but they’re not compelling in the slightest. And I’m sorry K2-SO, you have some solid line deliveries but you just don’t pass muster in a Droid Sidekick pantheon that incudes f**king R2-D2, C-3PO, and now BB-8. Your name isn’t even as catchy, man. Put some elbow grease into it.

The villains suffer much the same fate. Krennic’s one note characterization can’t survive the litany of cameos shoehorned into the film, creating an endless parade of my least favorite type of scene in movie history: two identical old white dudes yelling at each other. And while Vader gets a showstopping sequence in the third act, there’s no reason to have him appear before that, especially with Spencer Wilding’s garish pantomiming during the dialogue scenes.

Maybe he’s been taking ballet classes since Episode III.

It’s probably likely that I forgot how militaristic the rest of the franchise is. They do, after all, ask that we cheer while literally faceless evil masses are mown down, but wail in tragedy any time some random pilot in orange beefs it. But it’s a bit shocking what a jingoistic, patriotic hash Rogue One becomes. If you love noble sacrifices and people clutching corpses while screaming toward the heavens, this is the movie for you. But as a distinct anti-fan of war movies, I find its jaunts toward the tone of 300 troubling, especially considering what a Wacky thrill ride it so clearly yearns to be in most of the other scenes.

This is a movie that, within minutes of each other, has a blind monk deliver Jackie Chan-esque quips while kicking ass, and shows a crying girl shrieking in a dusty street as her city is laid to waste by laser fire. These two sides of Rogue One are distinctly incompatible, and their clash creates the biggest fissure in the surface of a film already spiderwebbed with cracks.

It doesn’t necessarily break (though, in its dull first act that hops from planet to planet in a grueling, pointless gauntlet, it frequently threatens to), but Rogue One is definitely a misstep. While it’s still a Star Wars film and thus worth a shut-your-brain-off, popcorn-munching watch, unless they really step it up with these side stories, the whole thing is gonna capsize before you know it.

TL;DR: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is decently amusing and boasts an incredible cast, but it can't overcome ghastly tonal shifts and a general sense of silliness.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1228
Reviews In This Series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2018)

Once On This Island

Year: 2016

Director: Ron Clements & John Musker

Cast: Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Jemaine Clement

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Disney is in the midst of what some might prematurely term a Third Golden Age, but let us always remember that following the likes of Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons doesn’t leave newer entries with a high bar to clear. While I loved Tangled and Big Hero 6, Disney’s computer-animated output has never reached as consistent and satisfying a level as its two previous Golden Ages, which produced timeless works like Snow White, Pinocchio, and The Little Mermaid.

If you hold the much-ballyhooed Frozen up to the likes of Beauty and the Beast, the pitiful quasi-musical would melt in a microsecond. And while the box office-gobbling Zootopia is good, it’s an inconsistent allegory that hangs its hat on a Shakira track. So I urge you all to approach the highly praised Moana, Disney’s 56th theatrical animated feature, with a grain of salt, especially as it’s married to the other lavishly praised love object of 2016, Broadway songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a terrific and talented person, but maybe not the second coming of Sondheim.

Forgive me theatre friends, for I have sinned. I have spoken against the church.

First, the plot. Moana is precede by the cute but inconsequential anatomy-based short “Inner Workings,” depicting the battle between an office drone’s head and heart (his job is a hilariously dour cross between the opening of The Producers and 1984 – the short has a killer electronic score and a cool mixed-medium design, but it’s no “Piper.”)

So, Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) is the daughter of Chief Tui (Temuera Morrison), the leader of a secluded island village. Moana longs to be an explorer out in the ocean, but nobody is allowed beyond the reef surrounding the island. However, when a dark force begins draining the island of tis resources, she must embrace her destiny, sail past the reef, find the deserted demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), and persuade him to return the Heart of Te Fiti, a mystical stone imbued with the power of creation. She must deliver him to the spot where he stole it (which is guarded by the lava demon Te Ka) in order to halt the encroaching darkness that threatens her island.

It’s definitely an inconvenient truth.

So, I’m gonna make a bold assumption and guess that you’ve seen any Disney movie before. If so, you’ve likely already experienced some element of Moana, which scavenges bits and pieces from Mulan, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, Pixar’s Brave, and pretty much every entry in the canon, polishing and renaming them like a regular Scuttle. Failing to carve out new territory isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes Moana uses its Disney ancestry to buff out gaping holes in its character arcs, assuming you already know how these stories go, so they don’t have to put in the maximum effort to have them makes sense this time.

Also, I hope you love adorable sidekicks, because Moana is rotten with ‘em. Moana could start an adorable sidekick baseball team with its roster, including a comically tiny pig that the movie pretty much straight-up admits will eventually be slaughtered, ditto an idiotic chicken named Heihei (Alan Tudyk, for some reason), a magical animated tattoo, and even the Actual Literal Ocean. Not since Aladdin found himself saddled with a genie, a monkey, and a flying carpet has there been such a  surplus of wacky reaction shots and goofy hijinks. None of them are execrable, like Frozen’s Olaf, Prince of Darkness, but it’s an overdose of saccharine at times.

But the best thing about Pixar’s island-themed short “Lava” is that no animated island projects could possibly be worse that that, so Moana is in a very safe place.

Well, that probably wasn’t a strong start to a positive review, but let’s carry on and see if we can’t pick things back up again. Moana is a charming film, even if it’s a little childish at times. Hell, it is for kids, and they’re gonna adore the ever-loving sh*t out of it, so who am I to complain? Although Moana could definitely do better than a frightfully repulsive pun about “Tweeting” that is damnable for its anachronism, but mostly because it’s just the pits, even worse than when Frozen bald-facedly stole the “we finish each other’s sandwiches” line from Arrested Development.

Wow, Frozen is really taking a beating tonight. Sorry, folks! I like “Let It Go.”

But let’s talk about the reason anybody over the age of 14 was excited to see Moana: Lin-Manuel Miranda, who co-wrote the music with Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i. While I will never dispute that the musical orchestration itself is ever less than fantastic, his lyrics always seem to tend toward the descriptive rather than the poetic. Here’s an actual line from “I Am Moana (Song of the Ancestors)”:

"I am the daughter of the village chief / We are descended from voyagers… I am Moana."

It ain’t exactly Shakespeare. However, a song where he really pulls out all the metaphorical stops is the villainous ditty “Shiny,” sung with gusto by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement. It’s a bombastic celebration of wicked wordplay that sparkles amidst many great pieces of music, including several tracks that are brave enough to include entire verses in native Pacific Islander languages, using the orchestration itself to carry the soaring emotional heft. I’m also partial to the opening verse of Moana’s “I Want” song, titled “How Far I’ll Go,” which is in a challenging minor key that I’ve literally never heard before from a children’s film. It’s a great soundtrack, except for maybe “You’re Welcome,” a solo number which Dwayne Johnson clumsily tumbles through like the Rock that is his namesake.

It’s a perfectly lovely film, even if it isn’t perfectly perfect. It has two charming leads, a solid theme about respecting the past and discovering who you are, and two perfectly horrifying monster designs that I guarantee some kid is having a nightmare about this very second. I have my problems with it (especially the introduction of the sentient ocean, which only deigns to help out Moana when the plot needs a deus ex machina), but I’ll definitely buy the soundtrack, which is the highest praise a Disney movie can ask for.

TL;DR: Moana is a serviceable animated adventure with a mostly great musical soundtrack.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1077

We Can Be Heroes, Forever And Ever

Year: 2014

Director: Don Hall & Chris Williams

Cast: Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Daniel Henney

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I doubt all hope is lost for traditional animation. The last hand-drawn Disney animated feature was Winnie the Pooh in 2011, not quite long enough ago to start carving the gravestone yet. But it is quite apparent that CGI animation is in vogue and we'll just have to go with the flow. It's true that Walt Disney Studios hasn't sufficiently produced digital animated pictures that in any way match the style and aesthetic of their early Golden Age work, but The Princess and the Frog was traditionally animated and look where that got them. It was decent, but nowhere near a masterpiece.

In today's world, we're just going to have to accept the computers for the time being and take the films as they come. Disney is far from its Renaissance in the 90's and while the films certainly have a higher baseline of quality than other studios, nothing has been quite as enduring a classic as The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. Since its last traditional feature, Disney has given us Wreck-It-Ralph - a decently charming pop culture-laden parable, and Frozen - a strikingly uneven, quasi-feminist, wildly popular half-musical that didn't even give Jonathan Groff a real song, the lunatics, what were they thinking. 

Neither of these films could be considered failures and both of them are quite amusing in their own right, but not really up to snuff with the reputation of the studio that produced them.

Big Hero 6 doesn't necessarily break the mold in that regard with its stock situations and comic booky sensibilities (this is the first Disney animated film to be based on a Marvel property), but within those parameters it leaps and bounds ahead of its peers. With a story holding the emotional weight of a cannonball, a nonstop pace, and a team of effortlessly diverse, effortlessly relatable characters, Big Hero 6 gives us hope for Disney's dawning age of Behind the Keyboard animation.

From Gus the Mouse to a computer mouse, we can't stop the company from evolving.

Big Hero 6 takes place in the futuristic city amalgam of San Fransokyo, which (in a filmic cliché I'm all too pleased to indulge in) becomes a character in and of itself as the story progresses. Bot-fighter Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter) is a precocious wunderkind, a savant, a prodigy, whatever language you want, really. His brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) wants to encourage him away from illegal bot-fighting and gambling so he takes him to his laboratory at the local university, where he meets young geniuses from around the world who are working in the field of robotics.

Said geniuses include Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), a nervous, straight-edged giant who specializes in laser technology; Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), a peppy chemistry genius who has somehow managed to survive in the world despite being made of toothpicks; and Go Go (Jamie Chung), an edgy rebel whose area of expertise is magnetic travel. Said geniuses adamantly don't include Fred (T. J. Miller), a school mascot who's best friends with all of them and has all the stereotypical traits of a stoner but with the edges blast-sanded off by the Disney corporate machine.

[ACT ONE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] Following a student showcase in which Hiro applies to the school using a team of microbots that he invented, a fire erupts. When Tadashi runs inside to save his beloved Professor Callaghan (James Cromwell), he perishes in an explosion, leaving behind his little brother along with his creation - a cheery robotic health care provider known as Baymax (30 Rock's Scott Adsit, possibly the last man I would have expected behind the mic). When an unknown villain in a kabuki mask steals Hiro's microbots and begins using them for sinister purposes, Hiro must team up with his brother's friends to defeat him and save the town from total destruction.

Kabuki puns are harder to come up with than you think. Feel free to submit one in the comments.

But Baymax's endearing cuteness and eagerness to help Hiro overcome his trauma are more than just a pandering marketing ploy (though this is Disney, so we can't pretend it wasn't intended to function that way - the corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the cuddly). He functions simultaneously as a manifestation of Hiro struggling to overcome his grief and the remnants of Tadashi's altruistic spirit that remain on the earth following his departure from the mortal coil. It's a clever device but not so complex that it will go over its young audience's heads. The film's simplicity is a virtue, providing the ever sought-after link between adult situations and feelings and gleeful childish storytelling.

Some might say that the subject matter is a little too dark for youngsters, and they might be right to a point. Sitting through this movie without having a single tear well in your eye is a challenge on par with eating just one Lay's potato chip. But there's another side to the argument. We all want to protect our children from the bad things in life (look at me, pretending I'm old enough to actually have kids - what a tool), but that's not always possible. We can't prevent a kid from losing his or her parent or guardian and being forced to cope with a tough situation. 

It's films like Big Hero 6 that help children understand that loss can be heartbreaking but overcoming it and pulling oneself together is an important part of life. Hiro is a role model for any struggling kid, and the fact that he's Japanese-American (or, if we're engaging with the singularity of San Fransokyo... Jamerican? Americese?) is another brick in the still all-too-white media wall demonstrating that, despite our differences, the human experience is universal and we can triumph over adversity.

I don't know about you, but I'd want my kid learning that.

I'd also like my kid to learn how to power punch, but that didn't tie into my thesis.

So all that thematic stuff is nice and good, but on the surface level, Big Hero 6 is just as entertaining. From the second it starts, the pace of the film never flags, alternating between solid character moments (even the minor roles are engaging and lively) and action sequences that for the first time in a long while access the potential of the animated medium to provide sights and movements that live action photography is incapable of rendering.

Perhaps this is because it is based on a comic book, but Big Hero 6 relishes being a cartoon. It's still set in the real world realm of physics, but it pushes the envelope of what animated realism can mean in terms of action-adventure superhero movies. The showstopping action sequences bring a fresh eye to the medium and create a villain that has actual menace. At no point do you feel that he is not capable of actually hurting the characters, which raises the stakes so high that they reach out of the screen (side note: this film is not recommended for vampires).

Or adorable-haters.

The film's design combines modern comic book stylings with Japanese architecture and anime aesthetics to great effect. And despite anyone's potential qualms about the inherent ridiculousness of the portmanteau "San Fransokyo," the city itself only wows. Japanese animation is a huge influence on today's young artists and that new cultural ideal permeates Big Hero 6, combining the best parts of the art of two very different styles to provide a vibrant new world.

The plot is about as generically American as one can get ("We're just wimpy nerds, but we can learn to believe in ourselves and harness our unique skills as part of a team."), but the atmosphere is undeniable. It's a new type of family film sandwiched firmly between where we've been and where we're going. And it's a thrillingly fast-paced, delightfully funny glimpse at the future of animated film.

It's not perfect. It's a tad too meta in parts and there's a supremely jarring Fall Out Boy song shoved haphazardly in the middle, but Big Hero 6 is a ton of fun with a meaningful message wrapped inside. Highly recommended for children, adults, and humans everywhere.

And I just can't wait for the Big Heroes Avenging the Galaxy crossover in 2025.

TL;DR: Big Hero 6 isn't as high caliber as a Disney Renaissance film, but it carves its own path with nonstop fun and delightful characters.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1429