Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One opens on remote planet where Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is impressed back into Imperial Service by Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn).  Erso's wife is killed and young daughter flees.  Soon thereafter, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) arrives to takeover as young Jyn Erso's guardian.  Next we see Jyn (Felicity Jones), she is in an Imperial jail.  She is rescued by the Rebellion and used as a means of contacting Gerrera, who has broken with the more formal Rebels, and hopefully access to her missing father.  There is a rumor that he is working on a super weapon that could destroy a planet.

 

Jyn soon finds herself in the company of a ragtag group, most of whom are not rebels when she meets them but are by the movie's climactic battle.  There is Rebel Captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), reprogrammed Imperial Droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), blind force-user Chirrut, his machinegun-wielding partner Baze Malbus, and a defector Imperial Pilot named Bodhi Rook.  K-2SO was a bit too reminiscent of C3PO with his offering of odds (maybe that is something droids do), but in other respects I thought he was a great character.  Yes, the droid was the comic relief.

 

Though many characters from the original series return, this doesn't feel like a Star Wars movie.  It is much grittier.  Our Rebel heroes are more in the anti-hero vein and not in a charming way like Han Solo.  In a standard Star Wars movie, all these characters would be extras running around to get shot.  They do that here too but they have a lot more development before getting shot.  Speaking of those return characters, we see Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, Grand Moff Tarkin, Princess Leia, Red Leader, Gold Leader, and, of course, Darth Vader.  With Tarkin and Leia, CGI was used to change the face of the stand-in actor to look like Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher from A New Hope.  This was not as effective as one might have hoped.  There was something unsettling about the CGI faces.  They were wrong but it is hard to pin down exactly how they were wrong.

 

I think the heroes needed an alien, their Chewy.  Rather than species diversity, we had racial diversity.  There was a Mexican, a Pakistani, and a couple of Chinese.  With Star Wars names being ethnically neutral, I doubt this was accidental.  With Daisy Ridley as the lead character in the current run of trilogies, it seems a bit overkill to have another woman lead.  In fact, if not a single line was changed - except maybe some pronouns - the role of Jyn is written entirely non-gendered.  Put a male actor in there with the same lines and the same actions and it would make no difference.  Is that also intentional?

 

Overall, I enjoyed it.  Seeing the classic X-wings back in action was awesome.  I far prefer them to the new delicate split-engine model.  It was a better movie than The Force Awakens but it plays mostly as a prologue to A New Hope.  Thumbs up.  Get out to the theater and see it on the big screen.

Arrival

Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a brilliant linguist.  She is at the university when the news reports the arrival of 12 alien craft that have landed around the world.  Soon thereafter, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) requests that she translate something that sounds like angry whale song.  The next day, she is on her way to one of the alien craft in Montana.  While she will be the lead linguist, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) will be the lead scientist.  The two are quickly prepped and then sent to the alien craft where they attempt to communicate with the aliens.  The rest of the film covers the efforts to do so amid the growing chaos across the globe and a pending clash with other alien ships.

 

The movie opens with Louise's daughter, Hannah.  We see her as a baby, a toddler, a tween, and finally as an early teen.  It is sad.  Throughout her interaction with the aliens, Louise has frequent flashes of her daughter, which hint at solutions to her current problem in decoding the alien language.  It seemed very much off topic though it eventually proves to be important overall.

The movie is very engaging but it touches on subjects that it entirely fails to explore.  It is mentioned that language influences how one thinks.  This is certainly true.  In English, you can actively 'like' ice cream (i.e. I like ice cream), but in Spanish, you passively 'like' it (i.e. Me gusta helado - Ice cream is liked by me).  When the Romans studied philosophy and science, they borrowed Greek words.  In fact, the most learned Romans would simply converse in Greek.  I once met an Austrian woman who was fascinated by "the bartender was a woman."  In German, the word bartender expresses the gender internally.  That English didn't supply the gender amazed and delighted her.  At this point, I have discussed the specific topic more than the movie.  However, the movie does detail many other language issues in a first contact situation, especially if you don't have Star Trek's universal translator handy.

That the super-advanced aliens left all the work of translating their language to the comparative primitives was irritating.  Imagine a modern man traveling back to the Stone Age and then just sitting around and waiting for the cavemen to figure out English.  These aliens can traverse the stars but are no help at all when it comes to communication.  They are completely passive.  One can argue that the whole point of the movie was that humans learn the alien language and refusing to communicate in anything but their language would expedite that goal.  Such is not stated but I can think of no other reason that the aliens would be so passive during the entire process.

Though I enjoyed it for most of its runtime, the ending was unsatisfying.  Of all things, I was reminded of Slaughterhouse-Five when the movie concluded.