I saw it a couple of hours ago, and I wasn't too impressed. It's an alright experience and not a bad film, but it didn't offer much aside from pulling some nostalgia strings.
Darth Vader, cinematography and CGI were impeccable, but that's just about the only praise I can give it. The plot was coherent and therefore OK, I guess?
Everything else, not so much, with one of the biggest offenders being sound. I get that this is an anthology film that takes place just before A New Hope, but boy did it heavily lean on the original trilogy soundtracks. I don't feel this film had its own sonic identity, and that mixed with a total lack of screen wipes between scene transitions, the use of a different font and lack of opening crawl - I dunno, it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like a real Star Wars film.
The cast is great on paper but they were absolutely wasted on poor dialogue and their performances suffered rather badly. Whittaker and Yen in particular were pretty much nothing characters that only had cool superficial peculiarities going for them but were otherwise wasted. Felicity Jones's character didn't even feel like a protagonist - which I normally wouldn't hold against a film, but given it's a Star Wars film, I feel like I almost have to. Mendelsohn just kind of withered as the film went on and really hammed it up by the end with some prequels territory level of bad dialogue. Tudyk's K2SO was pretty much C3PO as battle droid so that was interesting, though I could have done with less quips. I'm not even going to pretend I gave a fuck about Jiang Wen's character (I think he plays a Mandalorian, which could've been interesting), who had a really nonsensical scene toward the end, or Riz Ahmed in the film just in general.
Battles scenes were long, repetitive and boring as well. The only good one was Jones' earlier on the film. From there the film just kind of devolves into a high budget Apocalypse Now inspired fan film. There is one particular bad ass scene involving Vader at the end though, that was fantastic.
I really wanted to this movie to be great, I wanted to love it, but as much as I kinda liked it, ultimately I didn't really care for it all that much, and that's disappointing. I think what really does this film in for me is that there is nothing in it that makes me care. I wasn't given any reason to care about the story, or character, and this combined with everything else just contributed to my total indifference. There we no stakes in it for me on a personal level to care, so the film simply didn't reach me.
That's all I got for now. It's only been a couple of hours so I'm sure I'll have more thoughts on it later.
Is he maybe in Rebels?
