Star Wars: Rogue One [Now with GIANT SPOILERS, so beware!]

I totally disagree about The Force Awakens. It nailed the mythological element, and had richness and depth. It felt nothing like a typical modern-day action movie (aside from the sound design), and felt exactly like a Star Wars movie (though I admit it had some shortcomings.)

The Rogue One trailers have been going for more of a straight-ahead action vibe, but it remains to be seen how the actual film will play out. I can already see homages to classic WWII war films and samurai films in it's visual aesthetic.

 

I'm hopeful about this one. But for me Awakens was just a pretty good. I saw it in the theater once and haven't felt the need to see it again yet. Probably I'll get it on blu-ray at some point.

 

International trailer. This one has a bit more plot info in it.

 

A pretty cool parody trailer in the style of the original 1976 Star Wars trailer.

 

Meesa hope the movie will be more like-a this:

 

How jarring!

 

Well, this is not good. Disney chief Bob Iger is basically providing excuses in September for why the movie won't make big money when it's released in December...

‘Star Wars: Rogue One’ Not Expected to Do ‘Force Awakens’ Business, Disney CEO Says »

 

That seems hardly newsworthy. Did anyone really think a SW offshoot movie was going to rake in as much Avakens ($2.1 billion) - a highly anticipated reboot? Especially now that they're going to be cranking these films out on a production line basis.

 

Where in that article does Iger provide excuses for the film, as you put it? All he's doing is managing expectations. In fact he was quite positive about the film when he said that he'd seen a rough cut and "loved what he'd seen"

 

I suspect the same overall number of fans will see this movie as any other Star Wars movie. However, I imagine it probably won't generate the same sort of repeat viewing of the "main" films.

 

Under-promise, over-deliver. He's lowering expectations a tiny bit so that when it makes huge money still, it looks like a bigger success.

 

Nor as much viewing from non-fans (whereas many probably went to last year's main event).

 

There's been a couple mentions of an Episode 8 trailer releasing with the Roque One release. I think they should hold it back until January and start it at Rogue One only. This would surely get some mega fans out again and would keep some excitement for those who might be straggling out on the fence thinking of going to see it. The only way to get even in same zip code of Episode 7 business would be to maintain business through January.

 

Don't forget that they hurriedly rewrote and reshot 1/3 of the movie in April/May. This is not a sign of a happy production. The word is that the film turned out "darker than expected," so they had to rework the film in order to make it a bit more upbeat.

Disney Orders Reshoots for 'Star Wars' Stand-Alone 'Rogue One' This Summer »

https://www.inverse.com/article/21185-rogue-one-star-wars-squad-death

 

Of course, there are two sides to that story, the other side being that reshoots are not only common, they are routine and that the reshoots were not plot driven but cosmetic such as close-up shots. The rumor that they reshot 1/3 is probably highly exaggerated and has been shot down. So, as it turns out, the rumors are all a bunch of BS.

What is true and false?
Rumors about the reshoots are so varied, it’s hard to know what to believe. Some reports say nearly half the movie is being redone and that the tone is being shifted from heavy war film to a lighthearted caper.

EW’s sources have insisted that’s impossible — that an effects-heavy film like this couldn’t reshoot that much of its story in the summer and still be finished in time for the Dec. 16 debut. In our own deep-dive into the rumors, we found that about five weeks of reshoots were set, wrapping up just before Star Wars Celebration in mid-July.

Our confidential sources also revealed that Bourne screenwriter and Michael Clayton filmmaker Tony Gilroy was being brought in to write additional dialogue and direct some secondary units on the movie — alongside director Gareth Edwards, who collaborated with Gilroy in a similar capacity on 2014’s Godzilla.

But what fans want to know is: Why? What do they need that they didn’t capture the first time?

The movie has not been screened for test audiences, but EW’s sources on the film say that Lucasfilm’s in-house braintrust — which weighs in on films similarly to the way it’s done at Pixar — felt Rogue One needed to punch up its emotion and action beats. (They also confirm that although it went largely unreported last year, The Force Awakens also underwent weeks of reshoots in the summer of 2015.)

What do the filmmakers say?
Edwards was candid about the situation and even acknowledged in the interview that he was due back on set in the morning.

“I mean it was always part of the plan to do reshoots. We always knew we were coming back somewhere to do stuff. We just didn’t know what it would be until we started sculpting the film in the edit,” he says.

What’s the nature of the material being reshot? “There’s lots of little things that we have to get, but it’s all little things within the preexisting footage,” he said. One complication, he added, was that the cast is large, so individual shots with small groups of them add to the schedule.

“Obviously, you’ve got to work around everyone’s schedule, and everyone’s on different films all over the world, and so it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare,” he said. “That’s why I think it’s been blown out of proportion a little bit.”

He sounded exasperated by the wilder rumors. “It’s funny, making a film stops you believing anything you’ve ever read on the Internet,” he said.

Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm and producer of Rogue One, said the tone of the movie — which was billed as a Band of Brothers-style combat tale at last year’s Celebration event — isn’t being altered.

“There’s nothing about the story that’s changing, with a few things that we’re picking up in additional photography,” she said. “I think that’s the most important thing, to reassure fans that it’s the movie we intended to make.”

What is the tone?
By all accounts, it’s still a war film. Always has been, from the first pitch by ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll, and will be when it hits theaters in December.

“One of the things we’re doing with these Star Wars stories is embracing the uniqueness of the different genres, and we’re very deliberately leaning into the various styles of directors that we’re approaching so that each of these movies will very intentionally have a very different tone and style from the saga films,” Kennedy says, referring to the trilogy movies. “Gareth has shown a stylistic preference that’s much more handheld, visceral, inside-the-action kind of feel.”

She said that remains the look and the feel of Rogue One. “He does a lot of handheld, intimate, close-up work. That’s not something you’ve necessarily seen in a Star Wars movie before,” Kennedy says. “And we brought in [cinematographer] Greig Fraser, to shoot it, who had done Zero Dark Thirty. So a combination of Greig and Gareth has been, I think, fantastic, and it just gives it a really unique style.”

Edwards reiterated that the hardscrabble vibe of the movie has not been undermined.

“I’d definitely describe it as: It’s got dark tone,” he said. “The studio has been very supportive of that. I mean, the sort of tone we were going for when we started was the tone you have in films like The Empire Strikes Back. And that’s not in any way been compromised.”

What happens now?
After the reshoots wrap and the new footage is woven into the movie, the edit is on track to be locked in August, with the score by Alexandre Desplat and the sound effects added in September. (By comparison, The Force Awakens locked its edit in October.)

Another thing they’re grappling with, Kennedy says, (and it has nothing to do with the reshoots) is whether Rogue One should incorporate some of the standard tropes of a Star Wars film, like an opening crawl, or whether it should distance itself stylistically from the “saga” trilogy films.

“We talk about that all the time. It’s something that we’re right in the midst of discussing even now, so I don’t want to say definitively what we’re doing,” she said. “The crawl and some of those elements live so specifically within the ‘saga’ films that we are having a lot of discussion about what will define the [stand-alone] Star Wars Storiesseparate and apart from the saga films. So we’re right in the middle of talking about that.”

Whatever they decide will likely set a new template for future stand-alone films. The next one, based on the adventures of a young Han Solo, is coming in 2018.

As for the reshoots on Rogue One, it’s as natural for the people involved in a film to want to protect it as it is for fans of a franchise to feel anxious or uncertain about it. Edwards said he understood the concern. “We have a lot of attention on this. I’d be [worried] the same if I wasn’t involved in it,” he said. “So it’s just part of the privilege of making Star Wars. But hopefully, people will get to see it when it comes out, and everyone will feel the same way we do.”

He also said fans should try to understand that retooling is an important part of telling a story. “A film is a very creative, organic process, and it evolves over time,” he says. “There’s no right or wrong. There’s just ‘better’ and ‘best,’ and with Star Wars, nothing but the best is going to do. So we’re just putting a lot of pressure on ourselves until the very end, making this the greatest film it can be.”

Rogue One tells the story of how the Rebels acquired the plans that revealed the Death Star had a fatal flaw — that tiny port that allowed Luke Skywalker to fly in and blow it up with one shot.

Whatever you choose to believe about the reshoots, there may be a metaphor there: If the Empire could go back and plug that exhaust hole in the Death Star, wouldn’t that just make sense?
'Rogue One' creators address reshoot concerns »

 

After the last I promised myself I'd never see another Star Wars movie. If I wasn't on a date I would have walked out. What people saw in that inept effort I have no idea.

 

As long as there really is a scene where

Spoiler

Vader is in a bacta tank getting his limbs replaced

I'll be happy.

 

Then why are you in a Star Wars thread? My favorite thing to do on here is to go into a thread where people are talking about a band I can't stand and tell them how much their favorite band sucks.

 

It was a fun movie with charismatic characters. That's what I saw in it but different strokes for different folks.

 

I think that group meets up in Music Corner on most days ending in Y, actually...

 

I have reason to believe that there are more problems with the film than expected. And I have no spin and no magazines to sell, unlike Entertainment Weekly. (My old boss used to be the managing editor of EW, and I know quite a bit about that magazine.) I have no axe to grind with Lucasfilm or Disney or anything else, but there have been problems with Rogue One going back a year, widely reported in the trade press and known by crews in London and Vancouver. It's very unusual for a film to do weeks of reshoots with a different director, in this case Tony Gilroy replacing Gareth Edwards. They can spin it all they want, but the reality is that things like this don't happen when the film is going well.

I also think Disney is acutely aware that they need to justify their $4.06 billion investment in Lucasfilm's assets. They're looking at feature films, animated shows, theme park rides, comic books... it's a big venture, and they can't afford even a relatively small film like this one to get bad reviews and so-so box office. I think the biggest problem is that they were staring at an etched-in-stone release date of December 16th, which is a major problem for a film that wasn't even finished being written 18 months ago. (There are some interesting notes in Wikipedia on the number of writers hired and fired for this project over the last 5-6 years.)

I'd be very curious to know what the total costs on Rogue One are, and they've kept a tight lid on that. Interestingly, they made no secret of the budget for The Force Awakens (a record $245 million), but they've been very quiet on the budget for this one. I've also been told the 3D people are going absolutely nuts, since the film was only locked a couple of weeks ago. It takes a solid 6 months to dimensionalize a film of this scale, so it's going to be a nightmare to do that much work in only 3 months. Ditto with having to create VFX for scenes only shot in June and July.

 

I don't think it has been mentionned here, but Alexandre Desplat is no longer composing the score, being replaced at the last minute by Michael Giacchino (not a fan, I find his "style" very bland) because of changes in the schedule...

 

It's fair to say the post schedule is a shambles and people are going nuts.

 

Probably because the appeal of the film baffles me and I am genuinely confused by it. I don't do the your band sucks thing. Star Wars came across as a project that was corporate committeed to death like many of the big films these days. But you are right, I won't post anything else about it.

 

Do you like Star Wars? Would you like more Star Wars?

It's that simple, really.

(and my answer to both is "um, duh". in case anybody's wondering.)