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)

Healing Hands

Year: 2016

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

We’re two films deep into Marvel’s Phase 3 and going strong. I mean, if Ant-Man didn’t derail the superhero powerhouse’s stranglehold over Hollywood, Doctor Strange certainly wasn’t going to. But still, the other shoe has to drop sometime.

Luckily, Doctor Strange mostly deserves its box office success. It’s probably the best film from director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil), who has made a career out of mediocre horror projects. Although its implications for the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe are worrisome (Doctor Strange joins Scarlet Witch in their cadre of massively overpowered characters with the introduction of straight-up magic), it’s a fun enough kaleidoscope of a film.

Quite literally.

In Doctor Strange, a brain surgeon with the actual god-given name Dr. Stephen Strange is, to put it light, an asshole. He’s a cocky, flagrantly rich genius who cares more about his reputation for greatness than actually saving lives. He shuns the film’s Useless Female Character Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), who’s into him for some unfathomable reason, and treats his staff like crap. When he loses his surgery skills in a bizarrely hands-centric automobile accident, he desperately seeks increasingly experimental treatments, eventually finding himself at the Kamar-Taj compound in Kathmandu, run by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton).

Although he only wants to learn enough to heal his hands, The Ancient One and her disciples Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Wong (Benedict Wong) begin to teach Strange to channel ancient magic, in the hopes that the medical genius can help them save the world from Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), an ex-student who has turned to the Dark Side, and is now attempting to – yadda yadda, big floating evil lights in the sky.

I can’t wait for the inevitable Kaecilius make-up tutorials.

As far as I can tell, the only truly unique thing Doctor Strange has to offer the MCU is its bizarre visual schema. The mystical, otherworldly dimensions accessed by the warriors of Kamar-Taj are an infinitely recurring series of shapes and colors that fold into one another in legible but uncanny patterns.

Sometimes it looks like a back catalogue episode of Rainbow Brite. Sometimes it looks like Benedict Cumberbatch got trapped inside a blacklight poster. Mostly it looks like they saw Inception one too many times. But when this surreal imagery is good, it can be truly great, especially in the film’s most straight-up horrific image: Doctor Strange’s fingers sprouting an infinitum of hands that tear him apart. This imagery is frequently frustrating and generic, but it’s bold and colorful, offering something visually stimulating for once in is godforsaken franchise.

It’s a good thing too, because Doctor Strange is a pretty cookie cutter entry into the MCU for so many reasons. Let me count the ways.

1) The protagonist is a f**king asshole.

Iron Man he is not. Stephen Strange prances through life putting people down and calmly rebelling against the rules. Only, instead of serving an actual character arc, he is allowed to be a raging gaper the entire film and is mostly rewarded for it, even though he’s pretty explicitly following the same path at Kamar-Taj that the villain did. Maybe this doesn’t work because Cumberbatch isn’t as effortlessly charming as Robert Downey, Jr. Or maybe it’s because his performance is handicapped by a strangled American accent. But Doctor Strange is more abrasive than Doctor House and I’m really not excited to spend more time with him.

Also, Tilda, if you don’t want people to read the Super Secret Evil Magic Book, maybe don’t have it displayed right in the middle of the room.

2) The villain is a wet mop.

Marvel villains get a bad rap for being boring and undercharacterized, and Kaecilius fits that description like a glove. Mikkelsen nails a couple tossed-off quips, but he makes next to no impression with his geeky ponytail and Alice Cooper make-up. His motives are murky, he’s onscreen for what feels like ten minutes, and he’s quickly dispatched with the weakest deus to ever machina.

3) Female character? What female character?

Pepper Potts, Peggy Carter, and Jane Foster have all been given a chance to shine outside of being just love interests, but the MCU is also full of characters like Sharon Carter, who exist just to kiss Captain America in a pointless and really gross thirty-second scene. Rachel McAdams’ Christine Palmer falls squarely in the Sharon camp. She waits offscreen twiddling her thumbs until Doctor Strange has a use for her, after which he immediately ditches her again. They don’t even have a scene together during the last half hour, because the film completely forgets she exists. It’s a massive waste of a talented actress.

Speaking of…

Yeah, as much as I love me some Tilda Swinton, she’s not up to much here other than some exquisitely timed gags. She’s trapped in an Obi Wan Kenobi role, devoid of all personality other than “wise and mysterious,” and the way the movie plays the reveal that The Ancient One is a woman (eek!) is so painfully 90’s. And then the score sounds like it was ripped straight from an 8-bit Legend of Zelda game. I know that’s not related, but this review is winding down. I had to get it out there.

A lot of Doctor Strange is frustrating or mediocre, but since when has any Marvel movie been much different? The gags this time around are remarkably funny, even a bit of slapstick comedy that couldn’t have worked in any other context, and there are two genuinely terrific action setpieces: one an astral battle in a surgical suite, the other a fight through a city street as time races backwards.

Doctor Strange makes some very interesting choices in its presentation and its surrealist aesthetic, and these manage to redeem its severest flaws. It’s another fun popcorn superhero movie, and I guess I’m OK with that.

TL;DR: Doctor Strange is a forgettable superhero flick spruced up with some cool surreal imagery.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1015
Reviews In This Series
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)