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)

American Godz

Year: 2014

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

From the beginning, Godzilla was never going to please everybody. It's hard enough to successfully reboot a foreign franchise into an American market, but when the franchise is a beloved 60-year-old kaiju series with a despised American remake only 16 years earlier, it comes saddled with a lot of expectations.

On top of his limited directing experience, visual effects artist Gareth Edwards had to face the precarious challenge of updating a cultural icon just enough for it to seem fresh and relevant in 2014 while staying true to the character's original intent way back when he was introduced in 1954, as well as the ways the proceeding years shaped his development. It should come as no surprise that the film was a mixed success.

Poor guy can't catch a break.

Let us also not act surprised that the human element is largely clichéd. That one was a given and, in fact, is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the franchise. The film is full of people shouting things into telephones and melodramatically putting on glasses, but you won't catch me complaining. It's all in good fun.

So, the humans. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is an American worker in Japan, of all places. Basically, he has Homer Simpson's job, managing the local nuclear power plant. When his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in a mysterious accident that collapses the entire structure, he dedicates the rest of his life to discovering the true cause of the devastation.

Fifteen years later, their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of Kick-Ass and current holder of the title of Broadest Man in the World) is all grown up in San Francisco and is a lieutenant in the Navy who works with defusing bombs. He has a wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) because of course he does. I'm just glad they aren't estranged and forced to reconcile during the inevitable disaster.

An ill-timed encounter with his father in Japan sends Ford smack-dab in the middle of a full-scale catastrophe as they discover the truth behind the wreckage - a massive insectoid monster known as a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that immediately flies off in search of more radiation to devour, destroying everything in its path.

It's impossible to find production photos of the MUTO so soon after the film's release. Please accept my apologies and this photo of Bryan Cranston.

So off they go to stop the monster menace before it finds its mate and destroys the world. But lo! Help is on the way in the form of a giant lizard known only as Godzilla, protector of the natural balance of nature. Will these giant monsters duke it out, destroying entire cities in the process while the sound designers pump out rumbling bass that will rattle the bones out of your sockets? Hells yeah they will.

Let's get into it. Because the good largely outweighs the bad, why don't we start with that? The film takes a lot of cues from Jaws and Jurassic Park in the first act, using a slow burn tactic and subtle imagery (pencils rolling off a desk in an aircraft carrier and a terrific "airplane domino" scene are reminiscent of the rippling glass of water in the latter film) to hint at the impending doom before we get our first true glimpse of the titular monster.

The action is excellently choreographed across the board, at least where the humans are concerned and during the bulk of the monster mayhem, interspersed with some dazzling shots that I will not ruin here. I'll just mention the one used in the teaser trailer of parachuters falling over San Francisco, trails of lights following their paths. It is majestic and truly epic and not the only sequence in the film that feels that way. Edwards really knows how to frame an event for maximum import.

This scene is accompanied by a taut orchestral piece by Alexandre Desplat that is the standout in a mostly nonintrusive score and is certainly one of the best cinematic moments of the year, if not the decade so far.

That and Aaron Taylor-Johnson shirtless.

So that's all fine and dandy. The artists behind Godzilla had a real eye for visual storytelling and it is a massive benefit to the film as a whole. But it can't entirely overcome some of the more telling weaknesses in its plotting.

Unfortunately, the largest issue is, in fact, literally the largest: Godzilla. At the risk of sounding like a petty fanboy, he's not in the movie nearly enough. The human scenes are great, as are their tense interactions with the unleashed monsters, but this ain't the MUTO show. This is freakin' Godzilla and he only gets about a fifth of the screen time that they do.

It's the arrogance of man (specifically Edwards) to think that he can sideline our title creature - a veritable force of nature and king of the monsters - for some B-side kaiju of his own creation. And while there are some great moments in the monster clash finale, it's all a little clunky and haphazard and Godzilla is a little too fallible. 

Not that I'm asking that there be no element of conflict or suspense, but I just wish we could have spent more time with Godzilla destroying crap instead of wrestling crackerjack original creatures. I'm sure some people agree with me. And I'm sure some people don't. 'Tis the nature of the medium. But for what it's worth, it's still massively enjoyable even with what I consider its wasted potential.

Speaking of wasted potential, let's talk about the female characters. There are two women with major speaking roles and both are sidelined almost immediately, even though one of them - a scientist played by Blue Jasmine's Sally Hawkins - is ostensibly an expert on the subject of giant monsters. The other, Ford's wife, spends the back half of the film running around in the rain and crying.

It's like she was trapped in a Nicholas Sparks poster.

I do understand that the human characters are inconsequential in a Godzilla film. But come on, people! We can do better than this! Other than that though, Godzilla is a great popcorn flick and I have absolutely zero regrets shelling out the money to go see it. I'm just hoping it'll garner enough money to warrant a sequel where they can work out the kinks and bust out a truly magnificent American kaiju film. It's in the DNA of Godzilla, we just haven't quite reached it yet.

TL;DR: Godzilla is a terrifically tense action flick but some missteps with the giant monsters deflate it somewhat.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? This month, you've got Godzilla or X-Men. Nothing else matters. If you're on a budget, pick one. If you're into pop culture at all you'll already know which one you'd rather see.

Word Count: 1165