Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
It get’s a lot of hate, especially from armchair critics. I’m an armchair critic myself, but I truthfully do not understand the hate. Everytime I rewatch Rogue One, I try to find reasons to hate it, but it’s pretty watchable if you ask me. People hate Jin and complain that her character and motivations make no sense, but I disagree. Her decisions are logically consistent with what she learns about her father as the movie progresses.
Anyway, I enjoy it every time I watch it, which is far more than I can say for the vast majority of Star Wars movies and shows produced in the 21st century.
The first time, I walked out. I was dubious when they introduced Cassian by having him straight up murder an innocent person, but when it came time to assassinate a legitimate military target and suddenly he gets all sweaty and, OH! JUST - CAN - NOT - PULL - THE - TRIGGER!
Yeah, I was done. It took me 3 tries to actually finish watching it, it was so bad.
I found out later exactly WHY it was so shitty…
The original writer/director never started with a script. He started with a supercut of scenes from other movies to try and figure out how long each scene should be. So the bit with Jyn arguing with the rebellion? That was the scene from Aliens with Ripley arguing with the corpos, and so on.
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/movies/rogue-ones-editors-reveal-scenes-added-in-the-star-wars-standalone-reshoots-exclusive-110124381.html
"There was no screenplay, there was just a story breakdown at that point, scene by scene. He got me to rip hundreds of movies and basically make ‘Rogue One’ using other films so that they could work out how much dialogue they actually needed in the film.
It’s very simple to have a line [in the script] that reads “Krennic’s shuttle descends to the planet”, now that takes maybe 2-3 seconds in other films, but if you look at any other ‘Star Wars’ film you realise that takes 45 seconds or a minute of screen time. So by making the whole film that way – I used a lot of the ‘Star Wars’ films – but also hundreds of other films too, it gave us a good idea of the timing."
So not starting with the script is problem #1. Problem #2 was just shooting random shit with no purpose. This is why the trailers were full of shots not used in the movie. He called it “Indie Hour” and straight up admits he had no idea why he was doing it:
https://gizmodo.com/why-the-rogue-one-trailers-most-iconic-shot-never-appea-1790910745
“I was like, “Oh my god that looked great.” And I was like “Stop stop stop!” and everyone stopped. “This will take 10 seconds, just roll camera”….Then obviously 10 seconds turned into a half hour, and we probably did 17 takes. So that ended and there’s that feeling of, “Well what was that for?” And I was like, “I don’t know, that just felt good.””
So, naturally the original writer/director got bounced out and they had to bring in a new guy to salvage the mess as much as he could, which meant re-writes, re-shoots, etc. Problem #3. His biggest problem was he never liked Star Wars and didn’t feel strongly about it. So, main character murdering an innocent? Meh, no big deal.
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog//2018/04/tony-gilroy-says-rogue-one-shoot-was.html
“That was my superpower. A) I don’t like ‘Star Wars’—not that I don’t like it, but I’ve never been interested in ‘Star Wars’ ever, so I had no reverence for it whatsoever, I was unafraid about that and they were in such a swamp… they were in so much, terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position.”