Rogue One (2016)

It’s Disney’s galaxy, folks; we just live in it. But as I’ve said over and over, now is the best time to be alive. We’ve got comic book superheroes on film and television, engaging as ever, and we’ve got a new Star Wars film coming out every year. And if they continue to be as good as Rogue One is, that’s reason enough to hold onto the planet for another rotation around the sun.

As the Empire nears completion of its mammoth Death Star weapon just before the events of the original Star Wars film, a band of Rebels led by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his droid co-pilot K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) seeks out Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the weapon’s chief engineer. While the Death Star’s military director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) grapples for power by proving the strength of his facility, Jyn bristles at the notion of joining the Rebellion but finds herself drawn into the struggle as she searches for her father.

If you’ve been around this long, you know I’m something of a shill when it comes to the genres I love. It’s not that these movies can do no wrong – I took Suicide Squad to task for biting off more than it could chew and for being “more than a little strangely crafted” – but maybe I’m a little more forgiving just because these are “my” genres, movies that feel made for me. But Rogue One is, I think, a great Star Wars movie that does everything a Star Wars movie ought to do. Since buying Lucasfilm lock, stock, and Greedo-shot-first barrel, Disney has been quite enamored of the Original Trilogy era, setting its television shows, comic books, novels, and now spin-off films in that period. But they’ve been equally keen on butting up against our sense of what Star Wars can be – that is, led by someone who isn’t a whiny blond dude, with next-to-no lightsaber combat.

Rogue One is both of those things, and more, depicting the run-up to A New Hope in a way that will forever color the way we look at the original film (answering in the process a question fans have had for about forty years in the process). But it does so in a way that deepens our understanding of the Star Wars mythos – at least, the post-Disney purge canon. Rogue One unites disparate elements from the Prequels, the Original Trilogy, Clone Wars and Rebels, from tie-in books like James Luceno’s Catalyst to what I’m pretty sure are a few weapons from the Lego Star Wars video games. We even, finally, get references to the mysterious Whills, referenced in early drafts of the screenplay and novelization to Star Wars. All of this, thankfully, is never beholden to an audience’s preexisting knowledge, serving instead like bonus frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum for those of us who have eyes trained to see them.

Because at its core, Rogue One is a film about a girl, her father, and the galaxy that finds itself depending quite unexpectedly on them. If you always thought the galaxy revolved around the Skywalkers, Rogue One asks you to look again; there’s only one Skywalker here, but as I predicted last week he’s treated like an ominous specter at the periphery of this story, the armor-plated embodiment of fury waiting for an excuse to unleash his hate. By and large, though, Rogue One is more interested in its scrappy band of Rebels, new characters all, some of whom are bound to become new fan favorites. K-2SO’s deadpan cynicism recalls a kind of killer Baymax, while the warrior duo of Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen, my personal fave) and Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) shed light on the Force from the vantage point of someone who isn’t a Jedi.

Amid all the fresh new characters who I’d gladly follow into spin-offs of their own, though, Rogue One is thoroughly Felicity Jones’s show. Although some have drawn superficial lines between Jyn Erso and Daisy Ridley’s Rey, Jones does a fabulous job differentiating her character from the one found in The Force Awakens. There’s an unexpected emotional depth to Jyn, which Jones lets us see Jyn has repressed for so very long. She lets it burble over every so often, to great effect, and we never have a hard time believing that the tough persona she puts on in front of the other Rebels is just a defensive mechanism.

On the subject of the film’s villains, I will say that my first impression of Orson Krennic is that he’s a little undercooked. I have the disadvantage of having read the prequel novel before the film, so I know him a little better than most filmgoers, but his motivations and rank in the Empire might have been made clearer. Mendelsohn does a good job turning Krennic into a snarling power-hungry Imperial middleman, but as it is, Krennic takes a backseat to the Empire at large. Here the Empire is a giant and well-oiled machine, whose hold over the galaxy is more intimidating than any one figure could be. Then again, how daunting can an Imperial be in a film with Darth Vader? As the trailers have hinted, Krennic has a very memorable scene with Vader which puts Krennic in perspective relative to the Imperial machine he serves. Still, there’s a more personal story to be told, considering Krennic’s long history with the Erso family.

It wouldn’t be a Cinema King review without a wild comparison or two, and so I offer that Rogue One is very much akin to Captain America: The First Avenger. We knew where both films would end up – Darth Vader tells us as much in Star Wars, while we knew Cap was going to end up on ice, only to be thawed out in time for The Avengers. But just because the ending is a foregone conclusion, an accidental spoiler forty years in the making, that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun along the way, in a movie that feels more heartfelt than you might expect, given that at least a few of our heroes might have a tragic fate bearing down on them. There’s room for a few surprises along the way, but more importantly Rogue One clicks up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in its personification of the quintessentially human emotion of hope. Both films, even as things look quite grim, find room for optimism, for persistence in the face of adversity because “men are still good” and “rebellions are built on hope.” It’s always darkest before the dawn, we recall from an earlier Batman film, but the dawn – or in this case, the new hope – is coming.

And for moviegoers, it isn’t all that essential to hope that the Star Wars franchise continues to thrive under the gloved thumb of the Mouse. Mickey’s two-for-two. The Force is truly with us.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of sci-fi violence and action. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Chris Weitz & Tony Gilroy and John Knoll & Gary Whitta. Starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, and James Earl Jones.

Godzilla (2014)

It really doesn’t get much more summer blockbuster than this – an enormous and very loud creature destroying stuff in spectacular (meaning “like a spectacle”) fashion.  Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the umpteenth entry in a franchise now sixty years old, is not a perfect movie, but it is a more than enjoyable popcorn feature with plenty of eyeball kicks.

Fifteen years after a nuclear meltdown, physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is convinced that the quarantine zone is a cover-up for something much more sinister.  His son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), however, believes his father is crazy.  While Ford is content to move on with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their son, a mysterious scientist (Ken Watanabe) hopes to study a series of strange caverns and organic pods growing within...

I almost don’t want to reopen this old wound, but Godzilla is very nearly the film that I wanted Pacific Rim to be.  Where Pacific Rim was a rather empty and noisy experience, bereft of many of Filmmaking 101’s basic storytelling elements, Godzilla is much more smartly crafted.  Edwards, working with some very talented performers and with a solid debut screenplay by Max Borenstein, does good work pulling the audience into his story which zigs when it ought to but every once in a while zags in an unexpected way, which I really mustn’t spoil.

Let me get the bad news out of the way before I continue with the “effusive praise” bit, because I really did enjoy the film despite being aware of its shortcomings.  And I’ll do these in relatively rapid-fire order, because they’re not overwhelming problems.  Firstly, the film is, toward the middle, a bit too long; there’s maybe one subplot or character too many, and the narrative does meander a bit heading into the final act.  Conversely, there’s not enough Cranston in the film; Taylor-Johnson is not an incredibly charismatic protagonist, while Cranston continues to play at the top of his game.  And finally, there’s very nearly not enough monster stuff in the film – I think I could have used a few more minutes of action for this to be a perfect popcorn movie.

One senses, though, that Edwards is deliberately holding back on the creature-feature scenes.  Instead of bombarding us from frame one with terrible beasties in combat as Pacific Rim did, Godzilla imbues a very Spielbergian sense of awe by withholding the monsters for so long, teasing us with hints of exposition and glimpses at parts of the whole.  It’s very reminiscent of Cloverfield in this respect, and it allows us to get attached to more than just the visual elements.  We get lured into the story and end up caring about what happens.  I said “I think” in the previous paragraph because I’m not sure I actually do want more Godzilla in the film; one thing that really struck me as I exited the theater was just how much restraint there was in this film and how judiciously Edwards doled out the combat sequences.

And this is a very smart hand at the wheel.  Edwards films some very beautiful scenes here, as when the HALO jumpers trail red smoke into the drop zone over an eerie chorus straight out of the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien.  The homage to the original Toho films, when Godzilla lumbers through San Francisco’s Little Tokyo, is another highlight, but the real eyeball kicks come from the immense sense of scope, very finely intoned by Watanabe just before the film’s third act begins.  There is a terrifying sublimity to Godzilla, which most lesser horror films tend to overlook.

Not Edwards.  If he’s in any way involved in the inevitable sequel, perhaps he too will one day be crowned “king of the monsters.”

Postscript:  absolutely see this on the largest and loudest movie theater screen you can.  I’m talking about genuine chills running up my arms at the Godzilla roar.  I can’t imagine Godzilla working nearly as well on a smaller screen.

Godzilla is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence.”  There’s a ton of property damage, stuff blowing up, people running in terror, people getting stepped on by monsters – in the words of Godzilla vs. Biollante’s rating, “traditional Godzilla violence.”