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I dunno if it was being born in the very late 80s then growing up in the 90s and having a very brief window with the OG edits before the Special Editions dropped and I watched the hell out of them and ate them up because it was the age of Super Mario 64 and everything CG was insane to me, followed by MY trilogy being the prequels...
But yea, I loved and love that this movie did the best it could to showcase how gritty and scummy the franchise has always hinted at being. I think I can agree with the takes out there that think it all feels a little showy and even arduously outside the usual Star Wars boxes...in ways that maybe feel egregious just because the characters are all boxed in by the narrative...let alone, as you said, that insane Darth Vader reveal...
But they've leaned into what that Vader scene felt like across pretty much all media at this point, right? And a lot of the TV shows are just explaining things, or offering theories for things, that the original trilogy didn't ask for, the prequels didn't care for and the sequels only demand because if you don't see a crew of mercenaries stumbling into the biological experiment that (we reasonably assume until told otherwise) justifies many of Rise of Skywalker's dumbest decisions (or flattens some of Last Jedi's more challenging subversions) they're just totally stupid instead of simply absurd...
It would've been so cool if Edwards could've squeezed his vision of a Great Escape/Longest Day/River Kwai mashup via the Star Wars mythos into the early days of Disney's Star Wars revival without all the producers, writers and marketers wondering how the hell they were supposed to sell that story to the Funco Pop and Lego people because whether or not Rogue One fully sells either it's entertainment value or it's purpose within the CINEMATIC UNIVERSE, at least they were trying to get back to a moment I never got to live when it felt like Star Wars wasn't just trying to answer questions nobody was asking, or waging war with contemporary films' action sequences just because it felt like scared money couldn't make money OFF OF STAR WARS...
It's the only Star Wars movie other outside the final hour of Empire Strikes Back and the first 15 minutes of Force Awakens where I felt curious, and unlike the first 90% of Mandalorian refused to hedge on whether that curiosity deserved, as modern fandom seems to have defined this word, satisfaction. To me that word is the worst thing about modern Star Wars, and it's been so surprising in part because no matter how low the stakes in Marvel's Phase 3 ultimately were Disney seemed willing to confront how high they could possibly be. Rogue One recognized that Star Wars isn't just amazing sound effects, exceptional art direction, the only franchise with laser swords and a story about people struggling over whether good and evil is a binary or staggering dichotomy. It let us in to all the stuff that's implied in the quieter moments but the Skywalker narrative has no space for. No matter how or why it might feel Rogue One hedged some of that, it did get to attempt to do it. That was so fucking cool.
Or, most simply, despite being a basely grim film with some embarrassingly shoehorned moments of levity, Rogue One wasn't afraid to admit the core of Star Wars, whether it's fascism versus representative republics, space ninjas with wizard powers vs. generic military bros or even just the goddamn the universe really is big enough to believably host anything and be about anybody aspect...I'm just so tired of everything tying back to the Skywalkers, honestly. If Leia's cameo in this movie felt both appropriate and slightly misshapen in this movie, Luke appearing at the end of Mando Season 2 felt like an admission that the money behind this franchise is terrified of having a good time.
~~~~~~~~~ "This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517 Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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