ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY Is EPISODE 3½: AN OLD HOPE

Opening this week at every multiplex from here to a galaxy far, far away:

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

(Dir. Gareth Edwards, 2016)

WARNING: This review contains Spoilers.

This is the first live action STAR WARS movie to not have a crawl, you know, the expository yellow text that ascends to a vanishing point in space, at the beginning.

That is pretty fitting because this film is based on part of the crawl from the original 1977 STAR WARS (still not calling it A NEW HOPE, dammit!), which stated: “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR…”

So it would seem weird to have text giving us any more background to this STAR WARS STORY, a denotation that means this is a stand-alone tale set in the same galaxy far, far away, but not part of the “Skywalker Saga” – i.e. the biggest sci-fi franchise in the history of cinema that I'm betting you've heard of.

Still, ROGUE ONE may be touted as a stand-alone story, but it’s entirely tied to the events in the first film with tons of call backs (call forwards?), reprised characters, and familiar elements that show that director Edwards and his crew know the “Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary” from front to back and beyond.

This entry is set between the end of the prequels and the beginning of the original, and I mean the very beginning of the original as it ends mere moments before Episode IV begins. I won’t spoil it, but the very last shot of this film is going to be put through the ringer by fans – forget the iconic shot of Luke Skywalker at the end of THE FORCE AWAKENS, this moment will be the stuff of a million memes.

But let’s go back to the start of this film, which opens with a stellar scene involving a family of farmers living on yet another desert planet (there are captions stating the names of a bunch of planets throughout the movie, but I have forgotten all of them). We learn that farmer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) used to work for the Empire as a scientist who helped design the Death Star, but was conflicted about it so he deserted the project.

An Imperior Officer named Orson Krennic played with terrific Australian smarm by Ben Mendelsohn shows up with a squad of Death Troopers to try to coax Galen back to work, but he refuses so they kill his wife Lyra (Valene Kane), while his daughter Jyn (Beau Gadsdon) goes into hiding.

Jyn, who grows up to be Felicity Jones, is the heroine here who gets arrested by the Rebel Alliance because of her father’s crimes, and is forced to track down her former mentor/father figure Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). She learns from Gerrera, via a hologram of her father that he deliberately placed a flaw in the Death Star * so that it could be easily blown up (that explains that!), but she can’t convince the Rebellion to go after the plans.

Jyn rebels against the Rebellion with a team made up of Diego Luna as the rebel captain Cassian Andor, a wise-cracking robot named K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk, who seems to be the film's sole source of comic relief), a Force believing warrior named Chirrut Îmwe played by Donnie Yen, and Jiang Wen as Chirrut’s partner, the heavily armed assassin Baze Malbus to travel to the tropical planet Scarif (okay, I had to look that one up), where the Death Star was constructed, and steal the movie’s MacGuffin.

Of course, the adventure is augmented with the expected blaster battles that result in piles of dead Stormtroopers, dogfights between old school X-Wings and Tie Fighters, and the sure to be fanboy-gasm inducing return of the AT-AT Walkers, you know – the giant four-legged combat vehicles from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Jones carries the caper with a strong determined performance, and she has chemistry with her co-star Luna, but I really didn't connect with them or any of the other characters enough to be genuinely invested in their fates. They were mainly just pretty, young cogs caught up in story mechanics that I watched like I'd watch avatars in a video game that someone else was playing.

One of the most surprising choices made here is that they brought Peter Cushing back from the dead through CGI to once again embody the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin with his voice provided by a superb sound alike. This digital effects works in brief instances, but they rely on it a bit too much in this film so there are glaring moments in which it looks like grotesque animation instead of a convincing Cushing.

They should of stayed more with Mendelsohn, who really sinks his teeth into his role, being the central villain of the piece with Tarkin sparingly hovering in the background.

But despite that and a few other distractions, overall the visuals in this film are largely eye-poppingly spectacular particularly in the climax which juggles a few scenerios deftly without clutter. There are some brilliant moments in which the vast ILM computer graphics department succeed in making mass destruction cinematically poetic. Star destroyers crash together in a more realistic looking way these days too.

On another spoilery front, folks wanting to spend a little time with Darth Vader (thankfully again voiced by James Earl Jones) will likely be satisfied with his appearance as well.

I enjoyed large chunks of ROGUE ONE, but I didn’t have as much fun with it as I did THE FORCE AWAKENS. Sure, many validly dissed Episode VII for being little more than a loving retread of the original ’77 formula, but it had such a great gusto going in bringing back the tone, and ole timey space opera magic that was severely lacking in the prequels (plus I loved running around with Han Solo through Imperior corridors one last time).

This prequel though is a lot better than any of the trilogy of prequels that George Lucas made (and it's a lot better than Edwards' GODZILLA), owing to it having much sharper writing (courtesy of Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy who wrote ABOUT A BOY, and MICHAEL CLAYTON), and it’s a fine sci-fi action film in most regards, but I can’t really say that it contains a story that was necessary to tell.

A lot of critics don’t feel that most sequels or prequels are necessary at all, but there can be worthy ones (the aforementioned THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK immediately comes to mind as it’s considered by many people, myself included, to be the best in the series), so I still go into just about every new entry, episode, or chapter of just about every movie series with hope.

But with how overwhelmingly devoted to every pre-existing detail this film is, I bet in the future I'll think of this STAR WARS STORY as nothing more than EPISODE 3½: AN OLD HOPE.

* So if this explains the original Death Star’s weakness – i.e. why it had a flaw in which one torpedo in the small thermal exhaust port hole would cause the whole station to explode – what explains why the super-sized Death Star, Starkiller Base, in THE FORCE AWAKENS was built with the same flaw? (Han Solo: “Okay, how do we blow it up? There’s always a way to do that”).

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INFERNO: David S. Pumpkins Was More Profoundly Puzzling

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

INFERNO (Dir. Ron Howard, 2016)

It’s a damn shame that Tom Hanks only has one live action franchise and it’s this one. At least he’s has still got a primo animated franchise going with Pixar’s TOY STORY series (the fourth one due in 2019).

Here, Hanks teams with Ron Howard again for the third chapter in the Robert Langdon film series, based on Dan Brown’s bestselling novels, which began ten years ago with THE DA VINCI CODE, followed by 2009’s ANGELS & DEMONS.

This time, Hanks’ Harvard Professor of Symbology Langdon awakens in a hospital in Florence, Italy with a head wound and no memory of how he got there. He’s also haunted by apocalyptic visions involving fire, serpents, people with faces on the backs of their head, rivers of blood, and all sorts of chaotic hellish imagery.

Langdon is being tended to by Felicity Jones as Dr. Sienna Brooks, an admirer of his work, of course, and they discover that in his jacket pocket he has the film’s first McGuffin, a mysterious cylinder, with a biohazard sign on it.

Then a black clad assassin (Ana Ularu) starts shooting at them, killing another doctor in the hallway, and Langdon and Brooks are on the run. Back at Brooks’ apartment, the duo find in his belongings a Faraday pointer, which projects Sandro Boticelli’s the famous “Map of Hell,” based on Dante’s Inferno. In the painting they find the name of billionaire Bertrand Zobrist, whose evil plan they find is wipe out 95% of the world’s population via a world wide virus.

The police, associates from the World Health Organization headed by Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a sketchy security firm, and the aforementioned assassin narrow in on Langdon and Brooks and we’re off on another chase then museum stop for more clues then another chase. One of these chases, involving a drone chasing our heroes through a Renaissance garden, is actually fairly fun!

Despite that the stakes have to do with Langdon saving most of the population of earth, they don’t feel like they’re that high, mainly because he’s able to too easily get out of close scrapes and the many shadowy folks that are chasing him and his new much younger partner (don’t worry there’s no forced romance here) sure take a long time to catch up.

There’s also not much to the villain Zobrist played by Ben Foster, who’s been way more effectively sinister in such films as 3:10 To YUMA, 30 DAYS TO NIGHT, and ALPHA DOG, and there’s a twist involving him that has very little impact.

This is just Hanks and Howard going through the motions of another Dan Brown formula, adapted in a workman like manner by screenwriter David Koepp (JURRASIC PARK, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE LOST SKULL, SPIDER-MAN). Hanks has charm a plenty, and Howard keeps the pace moving, but it can’t help but feel like a tired exercise. By the time we get to the climax set at the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul I was so beyond caring.

That sequence and the rest of the film, including a visit to Venice, all look quite exquisite thanks to the eye of cinematographer Salvatore Totino, so maybe the movie makes for a mildly intriguing travelogue rather than the intense mystery adventure it was aiming to be.

It’s funny that a week before the opening of INFERNO, Hanks made more notable news when he hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in ten years. I predict that his absurd appearance as the immediately iconic David S. Pumpkins will go down as a more profoundly puzzling piece of pop culture than this. That’s a good thing, especially because INFERNO lost out to being #1 at the box office to BOO! A MADEA HALLOWEEN. So Hanks had at least one definite win this season, even if it wasn’t on the big screen. Any questions?

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Ralph Fiennes' Wispy THE INVISIBLE WOMAN Doesn't Do Dickens Justice

Now playing in the Triangle at the Raleigh Grande in Raleigh and the Chelsea Theatre in Chapel Hill:
 
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN 
(Dir. Ralph Fiennes, 2013) 

In Ralph Fiennes’ follow-up to his directorial debut, the little seen but acclaimed 2011 Shakespeare adaptation CORIOLANUS, the English actor casts himself as literary legend Charles Dickens in this star-crossed Victorian era love story.

Fiennes’ film, adapted by Abi Morgan (THE IRON LADY) from Claire Tomalin’s 1991 bio “The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens,” is an artsy attempt to shed light on the young actress who Dickens left his wife of 22 years for in 1858.

The story is told through the eyes of Nelly Ternan, portrayed by Felicity Jones, who captured many critics’ hearts in Drake Doremus’ 2011 college romance drama LIKE CRAZY.

In 1885, 15 years after Dickens’ death, Jones’ Ternan is the wife of a stuffy British school headmaster (Tom Burke) directing students in a production of one of Dicken’s plays.

This causes her to reminiscence, in cinematic flashback form, about when she was an 18-year old aspiring actress who became the object of Dicken’s affections three decades earlier.

That was when Ternan was part of an acting family with her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters (Perdita Weeks and Amanda Hale). Fiennes’ Dickens has been estranged for some time from his indifferent overweight spouse (Joanna Scanlan keeping poise in an especially especially unflattering role) as we see them walking on egg shells around each other as they sleep in separtate chambers.

When noticing that Ternan is harboring a crush, Mrs. Dickens dismissingly tells her that her husband’s work is merely “designed to be entertainment.” Ternan affectionately counters: “Surely it’s more than that – it changes us.”

We see what a superstar Dickens was when he’s mobbed when recognized at a racetrack (mostly by middle aged men, mind you), but when he dissolves his marriage in order to be with Ternan there is only the mildest talk of a scandal; no real damage appears to be done to Dickens’ reputation.

Cinematographer Tom Hardy gives the film a lush look, and Michael O’Connor’s immaculate costume designs definitely deserve the Oscar nomination (the film’s only nod) it got last week, but the romance between Fiennes and Jones is severely lacking.

Jones, who Hardy’s camera appears to adore in a series of soft focus close-ups, too quickly goes from being smitten with the man behind such works as “Great Expectations,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “David Copperfield,” to seming like she’d rather be anywhere else. This is especially notable in their awkward sex scene.

Seemingly out of respect, Fiennes does what he can to make Dickens more charming than creepy, but the end result is a dull detachment to the character. We never get the feeling that Dickens was madly in love with this woman; in fact the impression is that he’s just slightly happier to be with somebody younger and prettier than his wife of two decades.

Maybe the absence of chemistry can be attributed to Fiennes and Jones having played father and daughter in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s CEMETARY JUNCTION in 2010. That may have gotten in the way of them putting their all into the May-December love story conventions here.

It is also a waste that Scott Thomas, who also acted previously with Fiennes in the Oscar winning Best Picture THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996), doesn’t have much to do as Jones’ mother. One scene even has Scott Thomas asleep on a couch while the leads are making moony-eyes at each other.

While its well acted and shot, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN is too wispy a film to be engaging.  When first telling the world about Dickens’ mistress, Tomalin wrote of Ternan as having been “someone who almost wasn’t there,” someone “who vanished into thin air.” This all too restrained and uninspired costume drama most likely will have the same fate.

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