Dogfish wrote: ↑1 year ago
I think it makes Rogue One much better. It does the thing that a prequel really ought to do in terms of fleshing stuff out, but does it extremely well. Like Saw being on Jedha, and what his deal is with his crew, and his relationship with Jyn. Rewatching it afterwards with the almost seamless continuity from the end of the series into the movie is great.
The Vader thing in Rogue One ties in with the lethality of Andor too. It's a bit horrifying for a regular Star War, but off the back of Ghorman and seeing the droids go to work, I think it's fitting. From a combat perspective Andor/Rogue One are about normal people in this world and just how fragile they are.
I do agree that I think it makes Rogue One better. EVEN if solely by nature of helping us to care about some of the characters involved, that alone solves just a small part... of one of R1's biggest flaws.
The Vader thing, for me, requires a lot of shifting around for it to A: Matter to the story that's being told and B: be thematically principled with the story being told... and that's highlighted now especially by Andor's absolutely condemning depiction of the Empire. For starters, the framing of the Vader scene needs to not make him look so 'awesome'. We should ONLY be scared of Vader in that Scene, we shouldn't be giggling 'Yeah! That's VADER!!!!!' MANY of the villains in Andor are plenty competent (and I think that Vader is meant to be seen as competent in R1 anyway) but their rewards aren't glorious or awe striking, and their victories aren't framed for us as a thing to root for. Neither should Vader's casual mass murder of a group of men resisting tyranny be framed the way it is... especially AFTER the movie is effectively already over. Darth Vader is the climax of a movie that's not about him... and the fanboys squealed for him... but it spoils the themes of a film already buckling under Gareth Edwards nonsense. (If nothing else, Andor PROVES to us that whatever Tony Gilroy did in the editing room of Rogue One is probably the only reason the film has anything good in it at all... unsurprisingly, Edwards was responsible for the direction of the Vader scene... afterall it has some real Godzilla V Kong energy)
....
Anyway the best way to have accomplished that scene... TASTEFULLY... I think would have been if his death walk was going through the actual main character rebels of the story. The climax of R1, ESPECIALLY, since they all died anyway, would have been a lot more impactful if it was people we, theoretically, actually care about that Vader is killing, which makes him out as a LOT scarier, and a lot less of the focal point of the sequence. I guess my point is, the Vader scene is ABOUT Vader... after the entire principle cast is already dead, so it's HIS scene, and the way it's framed glorifies him... it's like closing out a film about scrappy rebels resisting the Reich... they chose to have a scene of Heinrich Himmler whupping ass, framed as him whupping ass, to appease the fanboys... as opposed to framing the situation so that the audience condemns what Vader is doing instead of cheering him on. Vader should NOT have been our 'hero' in that moment, nor should he have been 'the villain we love to hate' even... in a film like Rogue One, highlighted especially by Andor's flawless execution of the themes involved, Vader needed to be much darker... they ought to have tried to make us HATE him rather than just giving the fans what they love... which is really all that 'villains we love to hate' are anyway.
