Spoiler free review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

A year is a long wait. Seriously. Today I saw Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first show at 10 o'clock in the morning. The story begins with a flashback from Jyn Erso's (Felicity Jones)somewhat traumatic childhood. We are then thrown immediately into the action and it almost hasn't a dead second during the entire duration of the movie.


Gareth Edwards has managed to make a war movie, with emphasis on the war. It's kind of raw, a little dark, sentimental and very exciting even though most fans already can imagine the end of the film. Despite this, there is the feeling of Star Wars there, perhaps even more than in The Force Awakens.
 
Although this film is set just before A New Hope and the characters are such as we had never seen before, so we get our fill of old familiar faces, incorporated very nicely in the story.

Everybody knows Darth Vader does an appearance, not a big part but makes a big impact. K-2SO, the re-programmed imperial droid, played by Alan Tudyk, is really good. The delivery of lines is fun and smart. The CGI is awesome. You don't even think about it as a CGI carachter. There are also a couple of more CGI moments that are breathtaking. You'll see for yourselves.

Disappointments? Hardly. However, I can feel that the character Orson Krennic makes a little pale impression, no shadow over Ben Mendelsohn's performance, but on the other hand, Director Krennic is nothing more than a pencilpushing bureaucrat. In my opinion, this show a little clearer in the book Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel by James Luceno, which story takes place about 10-15 years before the events of the film.

This is a short review, I don't want to go deep and it is more a few of my thoughts around the movie. I'm not even going to score this one. I loved it though and had a lot of fun through the whole movie. Lot's of action, likable carachters, new interesting locations that expands the universe and so on.

Go see it and enjoy the ride!


Later, awesome nerds!

Inferno review

As mentioned earlier, I have seen all the film adaptations of Dan Brown's books with Professor Robert Langdon, and I have not been completely satisfied with either The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. The first thought I was too short and could well have been an epic three-hour movie, while Angels and Demons was more or less a messy movie in my taste.

Basic plot if you did not read the book - Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florece, Italy, with a gunshot grace to the head and memory loss. He has no idea how he even got to Italy. A female assasin, Vayentha (Ana Ularu), show up at the hospital and try to kill him and Langdon flees with his doctor Sienna Brooks, played by Felicity Jones. The odd couple end up in Sienna's apartment where Langdon finds a biohazard capsule in his jacket. They open it and find a hi-tech projector that shows and image of Dante's inferno from which Langdon continously had visions of during his trauma. Somehow it seems to be connected to a billionair named Bertrand Zobrist, played by Ben Foster, an eccentric tyrant with a vision of killing of half the world to save it from overpopulätion.

This movie starts off quickly with Langdons trauma and memory loss. He also suffers from visions, really creepy ones from the Dante's inferno which makes you squirm in you chair. The pace is constant through out the movie with people always chasing our heroes, and they trying to stop the maniac Zobrist and the secret organization he has behind him, lead by Irrfan Khan beautifully played by Harry Sims.

I think the movie holds up pretty good, read the book or not, it feels tighter than the previous movies and outshines them even if I atleast liked the tone of The Da Vinci Code. Ron Howard made a decent movie that I really enjoyed. Good performance from the lead actors and a thrilling story. It is not a materpiece but still...

Rating (out of 5): 

Another Dan Brown movie....and other things

Tonight I'm going to the cinema to see the new Dan Brown adaptation Inferno with Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones.

I can say right away that I like Dan Browns novels, and I have read most of them. The film adaptations on the other hand has been, well...a little meh! Actually I liked the tone of The Da Vinci Code, I also think Tom Hanks is the perfect Robert Langdon. Many of the actor/actress choices for the characters in this movie was spot on. But the movie itself? Not so much. 

The tone of mentioned film is good I think, but the storys about Robert Langdon is packed with a lot of information and subtletys, like Dan Brown intended when he wrote the novels. To cram this much information in to a two hours film is hard, hence the waste amount of good stuff that was left out in The Da Vinci Code. In my opinion, these films should be epic three hour long moviefests similar to types of movies like The Green Mile, Saving Private Ryan and such.

Inferno is also only around two hours in length, but I have hope for this since it is a more of an action packed story than some of the previous ones.



The second full length trailer for Rogue One - A Star Wars Story has been out  for a while and many have reacted and reviewed it before me. I'm not going deep on this but as a super Star Wars-nerd I think I may have to atleast say something about it.

I liked the first teaser that came during Star Wars Celebration 2016 in London, and I think Gareth Edwards made a perfect tone for this movie. That is just it, it's feels like a Star Wars film ofcourse, but it also feels like a really good movie that anyone can like - SW fan or not. From the last trailer we got a little more about the story and the characters seems interesting. Will this be the movie of the year? Well the potential is there.

There have been a lot of talk about the re-shoots Disney made Gareth Edwards do, but I think that is just blown out of proportions. Have you ever had your boss come to you and say "I'm not completely satisfied with your work, can you do a little better?" Probably happens to anyone in there worklife one time or another. The photography, tone, story and the exciting sequences in the full length trailer shows that this is going to be a great film. I also am a fan of many of the actors in this film, like Felicity Jones, Forest Whitaker, Ben Mendelsohn and Mads Mikkelsen.

See for yourself below if you haven't already.



 Lucky me I live in Europe....because we get to see this movie already on December 14th!

Well, I will be posting a few word about Inferno tonight or tomorrow!

Later, awsome nerds!