"Never Tell Me the" Reviews
/Like Han Solo who never wanted to be told the odds, for something like a new Star Wars film I work very hard to void the reviews until after I've watched the movie myself. Even before the age of the Internet where SPOILER! became a thing, I saved reviews from magazines and newspapers, and waited until after seeing the movie, reading the book, or listening to the album before I dug into what others thought. I tend to have the dissenting opinion on things and kind of like the idea of carefully cultivating that, so I don't want others' ideas muddying up my own unique candy-colored waters.
But obviously, given my tastes, reviews of the latest Star Wars film Rogue One keep popping up all over my RSS and Twitter feeds. Unwilling to completely take a vacation from all news like I did in the aftermath of a certain election this Fall, I'm getting the click-bait headlines tickling my eyeballs, and, out of weakness to be sure, dipping into a few lead paragraphs.
I'm pleased that so far the buzz I've seen has been positive.
Harry Knowles, from Ain't It Cool News tweeted:
#RogueOne is so great, it actually enhances and makes #StarWars #ANewHope better than it already was. Just perfectly complimentary! So Cool.
That is exactly what I want from this movie. I want Rogue One to be complimentary to the first Star Wars movie, but that doesn't have the bad taste to try to redefine it, or worse, diminish it.
I have collected at least one negative review that will be waiting for me in Pocket to read once I've seen the movie. Here's the lead from the New Yorker review by Richard Brody:
Lobotomized and depersonalized, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the latest entry in the film franchise, is a pure and perfect product that makes last year’s flavor, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” feel like an exemplar of hands-on humanistic warmth and dramatic intimacy.
And that is exactly what I'm afraid Rogue One will be. What I'm afraid the Star Wars movies will become under Disney, and churned out yearly. I don't want them to be the Marvel movies, all spectacle and no substance.
It will be fun to read the reviews after seeing Rogue One, to see where my own thoughts land on the spectrum of geek and non-geek opinion. No matter what, there will always be Empire...
