[Movies] Rogue One

[Kyle]

I just watched Rogue One last night and really enjoyed it. Fun, dumb movie. Great action. Awesome.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

Which is exactly the way I feel about Suicide Squad. I actually equate these two movies as about the same in the sense of "Dumb plot that makes no sense, with characters who are thinly developed and whose motivations make no sense, but none of that matters because the movie was a blast."

Here's what I don't get. I take a lot of shit for how much I enjoyed Suicide Squad, but these really are very similar movies-- they are both not-quite movies, but a series of awesome cinematic vignettes.

So here's what I'm saying- stop grandstanding about Star Wars and shitting on DC. Just enjoy movies you enjoy, and stop breaking your arms to jump on critical bandwagons.

[WillyGilligan]

I enjoy all kinds of movies. Suicide Squad had some glaring flaws that interfered with it for me. As in "brought me out of following the plot" flaws while I just witnessed all of the nonsense decisions. Rogue One had fewer of those moments, as I recall. BUT, I think the biggest issue is that the Empire forces a genius to design the Death Star against his will. I love that the design flaw was intentional, I just would have preferred it to not be something they should have totally seen coming.

Plus, what is the deal with Star Wars and WILDLY inefficient technology? Retrieving a data file shouldn't require me to play a bowling alley claw game. I think the guys that designed security for Resident Evil were behind it.

[El Jefe]

[Kyle]

You're full of shit, Jeff. You need to either: (1) think about it more; or (2) rewatch Rogue One.

I get it if people hate Suicide Squad- it was dumb. It made no sense. The editing was terrible. All of those things apply to Rogue One.

If you don't think the editing in Rogue One was terrible, then you closed your eyes during the entire first hour and fifteen minutes. Everything until the last act was horribly edited. Much of what was nonsensical about the first part of Rogue One is, I think, due to producers coming in and trying to re-edit the movie into something that it wasn't. This was supposed to be a war movie. It was re-edited to be a Star Wars movie. The same thing is true with Suicide Squad.

I agree the cinematography is better in Rogue One- but I think a lot of that is due simply to the "Disney Star Wars World Creation Team" that is now in effect. That being said, the cinematography in Suicide Squad wasn't bad- it was just darker and grimier, which is an effect I liked a lot.

This morning a coworker told me Suicide Squad was super racist. I said, "How so?" And he said, "Because they reveal Killer Croc is black by him requiring BET to be streamed into his cell." To which I said, "How do you know he's black? Can only black people watch BET? WHO'S THE REAL RACIST?!?!"

Stop being a racist Jeff. And stop just jumping on an opportunity to rant about Suicide Squad that you don't actually feel passionately about, but think you can be funny when you rant about it. Is Suicide Squad a great movie? No. Was it fun? Yes. Just like Rogue One.

[Kyle]

[buckett]

Spiciest movie take of the year. As someone who hasn't seen either movie, I also think it's a terrible and wrong opinion.

[El Jefe]

[Stan]

Haven't seen Suicide Squad. Rogue One felt, to me, like many big budget effects movies, being all about a few particular scenes. The dialog and plot are weak in scene movies, just enough to set up the next big scene.
Let's have a scene where they have to crawl out and get the data and they could fall and die.
Let's have a firefight in a fake forest that evokes 'Nam movies and has people having to do stuff as well as fight.
Let's make the space battle unusual in that there is a magic keyhole around the planet and we can have ships slam into each other.
Let's have people running away just as the whole continent is coming apart
Let's show how badass this rebel is by having him torture someone

It was good but it was definitely weaker than VII.

[Kyle]

[El Jefe]

[WillyGilligan]

Last act of Suicide Squad. That reminds me. DC wants to stand out from Marvel, so they go for this dark and gritty tone. Batman is now just shy of being a serial killer, Superman's a distant God and a killer as well, Ma and Pa Kent are douchebag parents instead of the ones that gave Clark his moral compass...I get it. They even want to make an antihero movie with SS. Awesome. But, the final fights looked like crap and I stopped caring pretty fast. That's not what the climax of your movie is supposed to be.

First, you've washed most of the colors off the screen to make everything Grimdark*, so your smokey/fire/whateverthehell monsters look like bags of crap sliding down the tinted windows of a purple lamborghini (my son bought the soundtrack). At least Michael Bay's Katamari-Damacy-through-a-home-depot fights had enough color to track roughly which robots were slamming into each other in any given sequence.

Second, the protagonists are villains. They are okay with killing people. I don't know why they went with the TMNT tactic of fighting an entire army of ctrl-v mooks with nothing to remind you that they are supposed to be possessed human beings, but that's what they did. The Matrix Burly Brawl was a technical achievement that was awesome at the time, then overstayed it's welcome quickly. Same thing here. You keep shooting the same vaguely humanoid shapes over and over, and it gets old, fast. Rogue One had Stormtroopers - the EPI-TOME of faceless mooks - and they managed to have memorable fights with characterization, because they altered the armor, the weapons, they had character moments like "Traitor!", etc.

* This is also a problem in the Justice Leaque trailer. Apparently they are racing off to a citadel/tower thing that's growing out of the city at one part. But it lacks any visual distinction when your entire pallet is BLACK LIKE MY SOUL with occasional splashes of fleshtone. So I didn't notice the tower in the footage at all until some website pointed it out to me. Maybe they'll color correct that for release, though.

[Phoebe]

The plot of Rogue One made no sense whatsoever, but it was enjoyable enough despite having to lie to small kids about the ending. That tall salty bot we all love, right?

[Mike]

I thoroughly enjoyed both of these movies. SS was more broken than Rogue One by an order of magnitude, and Kyle's cries of equivalency ring as really forced to me. Yes the are both flawed, and yes I enjoyed them both, but Rogue One at least had the ability to string it's various vignettes into a cohesive narrative with a semblance of internal logic. SS looks like it didn't even try.

[Phoebe]

But did Suicide Squad have a tall salty robot we all love?

[Stan]

[Mike]

Alan Tudyk is a goddam American hero, and no matter what other flaws Rogue One has, K-2SO was the best part of that or any movie.

[Kyle]

I'm not trying to antagonize- but for personal preference, I enjoyed Suicide Squad more than Rogue One. But I think there's a real element of fanboy going on-- everyone was set against Suicide Squad when it came out and-- even though a shit ton of people went to go see it- the consensus is that it's a terrible movie. Everyone was set to love Rogue One in the wake of Episode 7- they saw it in droves and the consensus was that it's a good to great movie. My point is that it's the communal expectations going into the movie that are shaping it. People are willing to forgive all the same flaws in Rogue One that they are definitely not willing to overlook in Suicide Squad.

[Mike]

[El Jefe]

[Kyle]

Mike- I distinctly remember the opposite- that it was a troubled shoot with a ton of reshoots (which is also true of Rogue One), and was edited to change the tone from the grim Zack Snyder tone (which was also true of Rogue One). People were set against it.

Jeff- I welcome your experiment- but we both know that you are entrenched in your positions now and will only be watching both movies to reinforce them. And you're a jerk that will never get a pm from me again on facebook.

How have we not talked about this-- of both sets of characters only Rogue One's was the real Suicide Squad.