Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Rogue One

I watched this on Netflix.  If you saw the first Star Wars movie (as I did in 1977 in a theater on Wilshire Blvd. just east of Westwood) you will find yourself wondering why they needed to recycle the plot of that first movie and many of the risk schemes intended to heighten audience excitement.  Almost every component from the original movie appears here: breaking into a secure facility; a tower with thousands of feet of drop (never a railing, of course; the Empire lacks OSHA); vigorous dogfights; ATATs collapsing; the Jedi killed in heroic defense of his colleagues.

The weapons are even more obviously modeled on today's weapons than in the original: H&K 91 or FN FAL; belt fed machine gun; pump action shotgun (one character even pumps it to fire next projectile).

I heard criticism when it came out of being too obviously PC in the diversity of human races.  It did not seem particularly over the top to me; thank heavens none of the black actors were speaking Ebonics.  Considering the first movie opens with "In a galaxy far, far away, a long time ago," the humans are too obviously intended as a college administration's preferred faculty mix, or a Democratic Party convention.  It  seems a bit odd that one Hispanic has a Mexican accent  But as science fiction, Star Wars has always been closer to a space Western.  Never analyze the assumptions and you can enjoy it; otherwise, you just laugh too much.

The blind Zen Asian Jedi immediately brought to mind the blind teacher in the 1970s classically bad TV show Kung Fu (which yes, I enjoyed).

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