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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

I remember leaving Rouge One _shocked_ that it was a self contained story, no post credits scenes, no need to commit to an entire trilogy or need to understand half a dozen recent releases.

Given Marvel and similar franchises at the cinema around the same period, it was a breath of fresh air (also a great film)

I was just watching the X-Men films. I only went up to 2014, but that appears to be basically contemporary - Rogue One is from 2016 and the MCU apparently has a formal division into phases of which "phase 2" centers on 2014.

The X-Men films have the property you want, with plots and characterization included in the movie instead of relying on you to bring them with you in your mind.

(Are the later films good? They're not great, but if you watch one you'll come out with a sense that the movie had a plot, the things that happened were related to that plot, and the characters had reasons for the things they were doing. The films are quite inconsistent with each other, but they're very coherent considered individually.)

The MCU films of phase 2 have already lost it. (For context, phase 2 starts with Iron Man 3 and is mostly garbage with the exception of Winter Soldier, concluding with Ant-Man.)

My conclusion is basically just that someone at the MCU decided "we can save on the budget if we stop using writers".

I don’t think it’s budget, i think it’s about the churn. They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence. If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc. much easier to just take whatever the best thing laying around on the deadline day and keep moving forward.

> They want an assembly line of blockbusters at a predictable cadence.

This is something that everyone wants.

> If you need a good plot it adds a lot of uncertainty into which script, how long it will take to write, etc.

This is true of everything too.

Why would these common factors only lead the MCU to abandon the idea of plotting its movies? How come Moana had a plot?

It was a prequel to one of the greatest films of all time so there is no way they can top that.

It is very sad that this is the state of moviegoing these days. That said I’ve learned to just lean back and forget about it. I’ve missed more Marvel movies than I’ve seen (haven’t seen any of the Avengers movies beyond the first I think) and still enjoyed the recent Deadpool movie by just switching off my brain and enjoying the silliness. Same with the second most recent Thor movie… it’s when these movies get excessively self serious that it all unravels.

That’s because many of the people watching already committed to three trilogies. Without the previous world building, Rogue One wouldn’t be as good.

I loved that rogue one was was self contained. It's a great single mission movie expanding on a throw away line in a previous movie. Solo on the other hand was either way too long for a kid who stole someone's ship and did a joy ride and turned it into an outlandish tale or way too short for a 3 year career. Should have been either a side plot in a movie or a 3 episode arc. Per the movie he's been soloing for like 45 minutes or 63 parsecs total.

Agree, it was by far a much better story line and set of characters than The Force Awakens and so on. I generally like a lot of the series on Disney+ and get the sense you have a few different creative teams pushing this stuff.

I didn't even notice that Tarkin was a CG rendition until this post. I thought they did a wonderful job.

I remember Rogue One as one of the better Star Wars movies, especially with how they patched up certain holes in other movies while remaining mostly self-contained. If Star Wars were software, Rogue One might be more of a "bug fix release" as opposed to a "feature update", and bug fix releases are the best releases.

> I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

Not super surprising to me.

I've only seen episode 8. And that was enough for me to be completely uninterested in seeing any new Star Wars media.

It's made me strangely nostalgic for the prequel trilogy. At the time they came out I was a little sad at how poorly they compared to the original trilogy. But at least those movies wanted to be in the Starwars universe.

8 has a few low points but overall I think it was great tbh. Took some risks and tried to get away from the importance of “who your parents are”/general “great man” nonsense a lot of heroic epics lean on.

9 on the other hand…oof. Don’t watch that.

I watched 9 in 3-d on my Meta Quest 3.

The villain in the last three movies is hard for me to take seriously because he seems to have stepped out of an episode of Doctor Who.

I appreciate the last three movies though for outdoing themselves in scale as did early space operas such as Skylark of Space.

I see Star Wars as a project that suffered because it went on for way too long; there were major changes in the external culture inside of and between the last two trilogies that make them hard to watch together.

If you mean Snoke technically he wasn’t in the 3rd! But yes point taken haha

No, I think it's Kylo Ren who seems to have come out of Doctor Who but I guess Snokes might come from there too.

Ahhhh my mistake

8 was not great. David Mitchell puts it best.

“My enjoyment was predicated on it amounting to something. It was an IOU to be redeemed at the point of pleasurable revelation, and as there was none, the IOU was never redeemed. Therefore, I hadn’t enjoyed myself.”

Agrees to disagree I suppose!

Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney "Star Wars" movies, and the only one that fits with the Lucas movies. Highly recommend it.

This. Loved every minute of Rogue One, it worked great as a self contained story, then the finale blended so gracefully with the beginning of Ep IV. That is how a prequel should be made.

Newer SW movies aren't that good, but at least they also aren't as bad as Ep. I, II and III, while it seems they're going on the right direction with most of the series.

See, I have to disagree,.episodes 1, 2 and 3 were far and beyond superior to the Disney episodes.

The characters and story fit in the universe. Disney created an alternate reality for their garbage. The Han Solo movie having so much potential and it was the worst of the bunch, worse then the Holiday Special.

Big whoops, I completely forgot about the Solo movie, probably because it was so bad I really removed it from memory. About 1,2 and 3 I probably have to rewatch them as I was so negatively impressed by them, especially 1 and 2, that they're the only SW movies I watched just once while I watch all others almost every year.

Connecting Rogue One directly to the beginning of A New Hope really made the Leia / Darth Vader interactions work differently though.

Maybe you imagined the leadup to A New Hope differently, but I thought it all fit very well.

It originally seemed like Darth strongly suspected but wasn't certain that Leia had the plans. Their interaction sounds extremely odd since he knows for certain she has the plans and she knows he knows.

And letting the droids go is even more inexcusable.

8 is at least the 4th-best Star Wars movie. Rogue one is distantly at 5th. All the rest are quite bad.

[edit] though 8’s quality is kinda useless, being in the middle of a trilogy. It’s hard to recommend.

No way. The Last Jedi is the second-worst Star Wars movie, only outdone (somehow) by its sequel. It was terrible.

I liked it better than the force awakens but I think we could both agree they’re all safely in the “not worth watching” bucket so the order we stack them in there doesn’t matter. (9 definitely is on the bottom though)

And that is including the Holiday Special.

TLJ is better than episode 2 by a massive margin. That film is absolute garbage. The only decent part is the battle of Geonosis. To place that ahead of it absurd lol.

I’d say it’s better than ep 3 too. Phantom Menace is the only respectable film in the prequels - and that’s if we can forgive the gungan nonsense.

I liked the prequels overall (despite their flaws), but I can say you're definitely not alone here. I have seen a lot of discourse online where the sequel trilogy made people appreciate that at least the prequels had a coherent creative vision behind them. Lucas made plenty of mistakes in realizing his vision, of course. But he had one. By contrast, the sequel trilogy is painful to watch because they feel like they were designed by a committee (and the difference in creative leads hurts a lot too). Episode 7 in particular feels like they consciously tried to make a by-the-numbers Star Wars which passed muster with focus groups, but it had no soul at all.

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