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I feel like even on this very forum, people who loved it then despise it now.
Does anyone else find Toy Story 2 (1999) to be really overrated and easily the weak link of the Toy Story Trilogy? I love 1 and 3, but 2 is just average for me.
Toy Story 2 I think is easily the best. One of my favourite animations ever. I think Toy Story 3 was the letdown.
While there is enough evidence to give weight to the theory that Walker dies on Alcatraz, I would like to think that it is a straight forward tale of revenge. After being left for dead, Walkers will to live kicks in, he gets off Alcatraz, goes to ground for a couple of weeks to heal/let the dust settle, then he begins his one man demolition job against The Organisation.
A cracking slice of tough 60s cinema. Never get bored of watching it.
A Charlie Brown Christmas (my favorite)
Christmas Vacation (likely her favorite)
Die hard
And as she falls asleep I will creep into the living room and watch the pre title sequence of the only James Bond Christmas film On Her Majesties Secret Service.
Like Die Another Day, the movies have gotten better as time has passed. Okay, unlike DAD, I liked these movies at first, then the flaws became too evident. Now I can look past the flaws. Even the bad acting in episode 2. Ewan was good in all three and felt like younger version of Alec Guinnes's character.
Revenge of the Sith is still the best from those three films. Everyone, including Hayden upped their came.
One of those films that is still terrific after multiple viewings.
Also my favourite performances from Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey.
"Do you hear me Detective!? I'm trying to tell you how much I admire you...and your pretty wife"
It's become one of my favorite movies, and I'm due for a re-watch. Lee Marvin is the grandaddy of tough older men on the cinema screen.
It is really good!
I also rather liked this one.
Decent film
Excellent film.
"What's in the boxx!!"
Morgan Freeman did not appear to like his gift ;))
I personally have loved that one for a long time. Never gets enough appreciation it seems like.
I also love Sleepy Hollow It's a masterpiece of mood and is Burtons "Love Letter" to Hammer films.
I pop this on in every Halloween season.
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (2016)
What the hell was that?
First, what a stupid title. Honestly, that is so, so, so, so bad. "A Star Wars Story"? This isn't Y&R! And to prove my point, at no point on the reel itself does it read "A Star Wars Story"! Not even "Star Wars: Rogue One!" When the title card comes up, it is "ROGUE ONE" and nothing else! And give me just a moment to get back to this point.
Second, as tempted as I am to spoil the film just to piss people off but simultaneously save them from wasting two hours of their life... THERE WILL NOT BE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW. I will be talking about characters who appear in the Original Trilogy who reappear here despite their actors having aged or even passed away - again, more on that later - and if that counts as a spoiler then shoot me. I'm sorry, but you've seen the Death Star in every piece of promo, every trailer, every poster, since this film was announced. Am I really going to ruin your day by telling you that Grand Moff Tarkin appears in Rogue One?
Anyway. Wow. What a goddamn insult. I say this as someone who approached Rogue One with an open mind, or at least without the mind of a 12-year old: the reviews are wrong. Your friends telling you this movie was incredible are wrong. If you have seen Rogue One, and you are reading this, and you believe that what you just watched was a good Star Wars movie, you are delusional. This movie was a slap in the face to anyone who has called themselves a fan of Star Wars. It was a Star Wars film in name and in fanservice cameos only. That is my polite take.
Ok. Good. That's out of my system. So. I called the cold open. I called it the second this movie was announced that there would be no text crawl. Yes, there's "A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away...", but then right away it's the usual establishing shot of a planet or colony or ship or what have you. In this case, it's a shot of Saturn. No, seriously. It's just Saturn. Rings and all. At least Avatar, when they copied and pasted Jupiter for their planet, went to the lengths of tinting it blue. Rogue One, on the other hand? Some special effects supervisor seriously went "let's just slap Saturn on the screen and call it a day", and everyone up the chain of command said "yeah cool". This is the most minor of gripes... but it is foreboding of the thought process that apparently went into the rest of the movie, too.
The cold open is pretty emblematic of the film's problems, too. It's dull and lifeless. The issues I raised watching the trailers about how "this just looks like some devoted fan's project rather than an actual Star Wars film" are only made even worse with the finished product. Visually, from first to final reel, this film looks like it was made by people who know nothing about Star Wars. If anything, it has the look and feel of the recent Star Trek movies... which brings me back to that title card yet again, and to perhaps the worst individual element of the film.
As soon as I heard the piece of music over the title card - the awful, awful main theme of this movie - I knew it was Giacchino. And I almost puked. Right at my seat in the theater. This score is horrible. It is uninspiring and unimaginative and - we've found a recurring theme here - so NOT Star Wars. At all. It is an insult to the man who built the symphonic legacies of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and, of course, Star Wars. And it is an outright slap in the face to the man that they would dare sandwich his brilliant, legendary pieces of music in-between boring, forgettable, generic Hollywood shit cues.
Let's talk exposition for a moment. Those location titles. Why? Why do I have to have information conveyed to me through text on screen rather than dialogue? Oh, what's that? Half the time these things come up immediately after a character has already said the name of whatever planet/colony we're about to visit? Honestly, i wanted to stand up in my seat and yell "listen, asshole, we've all seen a Star Wars movie before, we KNOW that's Yavin IV". Oh that's right. They use the number 4 instead of Roman numerals. Like I said. The people who made this movie have never seen a Star Wars film. It's the little things like that.
But, oh boy, do they ever screw up the big things. This film is a mess of bad performances. I'm very upset that, days after heaping praise on Forest Whitaker - one of the greatest actors who has ever breathed in oxygen - for his understated, pitch perfect role in Arrival, that I must denigrate his turn here. It is horrible. I don't know who he was trying to channel, what he was trying to achieve... but it is so ham-fisted and insincere that I have to believe somebody else posessed his body. I have even less kind things to say about Diego Luna. I don't want to be cruel, I understand English is not his first language, but... the guy is not a world-class actor regardless. They may as well have gotten Tommy Wiseau on board for this role. Seriously; it's that bad. Anyone who trashes Hayden Christensen has about as much leg to stand on as the Black Knight in Holy Grail if they compliment Luna for this movie.
Mads Mikkelsen is one of the best parts of this cast, but then Mads Mikkelsen is one of the best actors who has ever been put in Star Wars so that is not surprising. Donnie Yen is the highlight for me, however, giving not just the best performance of the film (Mikkelsen isn't given enough screentime) but also portraying the sole character I managed to actually build a proper attachment to. I think Felicity Jones is okay, but she doesn't sell any of the important or emotional scenes for her character except for perhaps the climactic ones. Ben Mendelsohn's Krennic is boring, just another generic Imperial officer typical of Star Wars, only they decided to make him the main villain. It doesn't work. Riz Ahmed is solid and perhaps even gives the most emotionally dynamic performance of the film. I just didn't become attached to any of these people. That is a failure of either the actors or the filmmakers; I haven't decided yet. But it is a failure.
And that brings me to K-2SO. The poor man's C-3PO. Oh, I hate that I am writing this paragraph. I love Alan Tudyk. I really do. But, man... I do not get it. The audience in the theater burst into laughter at almost every line this droid spoke. I did not laugh once. I don't know if it was Tudyk's delivery, or the editing and pacing, but the comic relief they attempt to bring with this character just falls flat on its' face. They give K-2SO a big moment later on, and it works, sure; but like most things in this film, they work great on paper, but as far as execution goes, they are not at all earned.
Speaking of climaxes, the film does admittedly get better as it goes on, though that is is a much slighter compliment than I am letting on. Act three and the big battle teased in all the trailers are the one bright spot in a very dark, cynical, nihilistic film. I say that both in terms of atmosphere and in terms of quality.
Darth Vader is back, and he is awesome, and he gets to do some lightsaber play here, but as I said before; it takes more than fanservice to make a franchise film actually be at home within said franchise. I was stunned at the insertion of Peter Cushing through the use of state-of-the-art CGI, but this was wrecked for me by the filmmakers' need to make CGI cameos for seemingly every character in A New Hope short of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. I'm not kidding, even Red Leader and Gold Leader make appearances in the climax and it is just footage and audio from the 1977 film cleaned up and edited to match the battle from this movie. It just gets ridiculous. Like I said earlier; this movie has the look of some half rate fan movie, and as a consequence it comes to not represent Star Wars at all. "Let's make 2/3 of the movie random shout-outs" does not a Star Wars movie make.
Now people will fire back "oh but Zach, it's just different!" Okay. Yes. Exactly right, it IS different. Precisely the issue, so let's address it. One of my favourite Bond movies is Licence to Kill, a film which is so frequently derided for being too "different". This is the film where Bond's best friend is maimed by a Central American drug dealer, and Bond goes on a quest for revenge. The film succeeds firstly because Timothy Dalton is electric and Robert Davi makes for the best, most cerebral Bond villain of them all, and secondly - but perhaps more importantly - because it is organically different and a unique entry in the franchise. It does not attempt to be different just for the sake of turning heads in the theater; it just gradually becomes a subversive Bond film, and it works. Rogue One is just different for the sake of BEING different, and that is the most fatal mistake you can make when creating a franchise film.
So, when the credits rolled, I sat there for a bit. Unimpresed. Indifferent. But then I walked out, and started to really think about the film I just watched. And the more I thought about it the more my indifference turned to distaste. And then distaste into hatred. I hated this movie. Absolutely hated it. I feel absolutely no need to ever watch it again. It adds nothing to an already dense saga, fills in gaps and blanks that nobody asked to have filled. I feared from the beginning that this film would just be a meaningless cash grab, and from the announcement of reshoots that it would be a disappointment. My expectations were incredibly low, and I still had no idea how bad it would be. And this is factoring in the elements above that I DID like.
So... is this the worst Star Wars movie? Well, I dunno. From a purely cinematic perspective, is it as bad as, say, Attack of the Clones? Or, even moreso, the awful Clone Wars film? Well... no. Not quite. But as a Star Wars film? It fails on nearly every level. I think the kindest appraisal I can give, the absolute best case scenario, is that Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace now have a movie in-between them as far as my ranking goes. My score for Rogue One is very appropos as well.
3.5/10
For MI-6: thank you, Birdleson. I was beginning to think the world was filled with nutcases. Well, I still think that... but at least now I know that there's at least one person out there who sees this film for as bad as it truly is.
In all serious Freeman's reaction shot is fantastic. Love how we never see the head itself, just the box with the open lid flapping in the wind.
People getting personal opinion confused with fact is one of the long running issues with many forums. Movies are pieces or art. Nothing more..nothing less.
I was a bit confused at times as i was mixing a few names up, but they tied it solidly up at the end. The film looked great aswell. So i would give it a thumbs up.
And I prefer van Gogh over Paul Gaugain even if he had more naked ladies in his paintings. That does not make him a better painter because I like him better.
And any opinion on facebook is suspect these days.
If Marvin is the grandaddy, would Mitchum be the great-grandaddy (Mitchum had no trouble playing a tough old bastard in Thompson's Last Run c.1986 when he was just shy of 70)?