So, assuming technical competence in filmmaking, or writing: how can you take a project from not working, to working, with the least possible effort? How do you 80-20 this expensive piece of art? You identify choke points. You find the small exhaust port, just above the main port, where…. Similarly: if you work hard for your prose, you want to keep as much of it as you can. Which is similar to the challenge of reshooting a movie. Scene production is expensive! You want to do as little of it as possible. You’ve done work you care about, you’ve made the structure’s bricks by hand, and now you need to bring in the wrecking ball? Arrrgh! For careful writers, refactoring a complete manuscript feels like death. You could cut eight words from that sentence, and you obviously want to. Let that image go.” Fixing good writing with bad storytelling, though, that’s hard! Because good writing takes time. “Stop using that word! No, hm, why that construction here. The problem is, errors in sentence-level writing are easy to spot and fix. These two movies remind me of the difference between an extremely well-written book on the technical level-sharp sentence work that does what’s needed and no more, flexible and muscular and graceful as appropriate, worldbuilding folded into drama and dialogue, dialogue itself that feels speakable and believable-but which, for whatever reason, the reader puts down halfway through, and a clunky book that nevertheless compels the reader to turn the page, and finish-even if they kind of hate themselves afterward and will never mention the book in polite company. When Saw asks Jyn “what do you want,” about thirty minutes into the film, we don’t know the answer. But an even bigger problem, for me, is that the film doesn’t know where it wants to go, or how to get there. The characters are loosely connected at best, is part of it they don’t have that moment of party cohesion so key to, for example, Guardians of the Galaxy. But I didn’t feel pulled along dramatically as I did by TFA, even at the height of TFAs’ absurdity. By the final battle sequence on Scarif, the film had me-but that’s an hour and a half into the show! I don’t think this was the actors’ fault I found Felicity Jones expressive and riveting, Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang deliver brilliant performances Riz Ahmed didn’t have much to do but he did it well, and Alan Tudyck’s K2SO worked really well. Diego Luna has a stand-out moment in the cargo shuttle arguing with Jyn about the ethics of the Rebellion. Rogue One tries things The Force Awakens didn’t dare.Īnd yet! I loved the characters in TFA from their earliest appearances, while I found myself struggling to care during the first act and a half of Rogue One. Rogue One has powerful points to make, about scale, about faith, and about destiny thematically, technically, and in storytelling. Rogue One also does some true EU-quality worldbuilding through background visuals: the relationship between the Jedi and Jedah, the fact that the Emperor’s crimson guards’ uniforms are copies of the red Kyber Temple guardian uniforms, the scripture written on the crystals Saw’s team rescues from the Imperial shipment, the interplay between the crystals and the Force, and most significantly the canonization of the old EU feature that Kyber crystals, used for Jedi lightsabers, were part of the Death Star design, which makes the Death Star itself a sort of religious symbol (and, indeed, it appears in the final act as a sort of warped fascist technocratic God), the thematic interplay between Saw (“Call me Sol”) Gerrera and Darth Vader-there is so much richness here. Nothing feels too small or too big, even the stuff that really is too big. The film felt expansive and space operatic in a way The Force Awakens really didn’t The Force Awakens showed a cramped Galaxy that just didn’t quite fit together, while, though I can pick a few nits (how fast can you get from Yavin to Scarif in hyperspace, anyway? Where was Cassian’s ship on Jedah?) Rogue One’s spaces are navigable and consistent. Edwards’ cinematography is top notch, and I love his sense of monstrosity and scale, which he showed off in 2014’s Godzilla. It was, in many ways, a better movie than The Force Awakens in many ways it was worse. This is where you want me to say “I liked it!” or “It was terrible!” but I can’t. I’ve seen Rogue One twice now, the first time at a midnight showing, and the second while recovering from a New Year’s hangover. Feel free to check back next week, when we’ll talk about something else presumably! If you haven’t seen Rogue One yet, I’m sorry, but I’m about to spoil a good chunk of the film. Happy 2017, y’all! Today we’re going to talk about Rogue One, editing, and least effort fixes.
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