I yield to no-one in my love for Star Wars. As I've written here before, I saw the original films when they came out in the 70s, and was young enough to be overwhelmed by them, although old enough to recognise that the moral, personal and political world they portrayed was fundamentally tosh.
I made my wife, my eldest and a friend come out and watch Rogue One with me yesterday, because it was my birthday. This is what I thought.
1. It was an enjoyable way to spend two and quarter hours. The film looks great, although once SPOILER ALERT you know that the fleeting cameos of Peter Cushing and the young Princess Leia are merely CGI mock-ups, you can tell. Interesting that the human face should prove so hard to fake.
2. Rogue One is, as Mark Kermode keeps telling us, dark; which is all very well, except part of the attraction of the original three films was that the darkness (particularly in The Empire Strikes Back, easily the best of them) was nicely mixed with humour, a variety of tone which is very, very difficult to accomplish without the one undermining the other. No such luck here. The new 'droid, whose name escapes me, was often funny, but the other characters were wooden dullards by comparison.
3. The original characters were interesting and memorable. Any one of Han Solo, Leia, Vader, C3PO, the other 'droid, Obi or Yoda has more interest than the whole of Rogue One's cast put together. The new baddie, played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn, looks like a middle-manager at Debenhams who has just been told the company golf day has been cancelled, again. I didn't care SPOILER ALERT that the cast were overwhelmed by the Death Star at the end, because they failed to come alive in the first place.
4. The plausibility issue. The blind martial arts bloke who thinks the Force will protect him, and then finds out that it won't could have made tragic viewing, but Rogue One just made it look the idea of the blind ninja ridiculous. The hero of David Carradine's Kung Fu series in the 70s looked daft enough fighting men with guns, and he could actually see. Why do the Death Star operators don hats which look to this (retired) cricketer as they have put their heads inside a bowling machine? We don't know, and the film doesn't tell us.
5. My son points out that the Empire in the Star Wars franchise is perhaps the only one in (cultural) history to have no ideology. It's almost as if the Empire is so bad that its sole purpose lies in being bad, just for its own sake. And then there was the lazy set design - Darth Vader lives in a ghastly evil genius tower set at the heart of an Icelandic CGI lava flow. Why? Did he go to some architect and say, "I'd like an evil genius tower please"? It's almost as if the film makers had got together and said, "How could we find somewhere for Darth Vader to live which will look like every villain's retreat ever since cinema began?" As for the transmission tower from which, at the denouement, our heroine - the heroically dull Felicity Jones - must send the Death Star plans to the Rebel mothership, how curious and unimaginative that the clunking controls should be on the outside of the tower, exposed to the elements and in plain view of passing Empire vessels. Yes, expecting Star Wars to be realistic is naive. But what we expect from fantasy adventure is not realism: it is internal consistency. If the world is to be like that, we want it to make sense on its own terms. This is something Mervyn Peake does so well in Gormenghast, and, for that matter, George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
6. The music. John Williams has taken a back seat, and the reins have been taken by Michael Giacchino, who first came to my attention with The Incredibles. Giacchino does a decent job, but he is not Williams, and the few occasions when he uses the master's tunes only remind one how operatic and varied were the original scores. I listened to Luke and Leia today from The Empire. Now that is quality.
7. That so half-hearted, ill thought through and badly written a film (the Council scene is beyond lame) could have been given a reasonable reception goes to show that film critics my age who were brought up on the originals are almost willing the new films to be as good as the first three. I think the truth is that the first three mixed adventure, humour, great characters, peerless scores, a new world of special effects and a sort of camp approach to cliche which induced a suspension of disbelief in a young audience which is now well on into middle age.
So on the whole B or B minus. But I'll still be going to see the next one. My birthday or not.
