toadvines

I have not seen the original Magnificent Seven so I can only judge this version on its own merits. And with that in mind, I thought this was excellent.

The good: Kylo Ren Harrison Ford John Boyega Daisy Ridley BB 8 Starkiller Base Imperial graveyard John Williams The not so good: Maps with missing pieces Rathtars Snoke Still undecided on: Maz Kanata The First Order

This made a refreshing change from the usual sort of stuff I watch. I thought it could have been a heck of a lot better though – the song and dance routines were a bit bland and uninspiring if you ask me. The choreography in the opening number seemed a bit ‘loose’. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not. The songs ****’s hard to really know after one listen. I have been humming the ‘City of Stars’ song all day though. Gosling and Stone are delightful. They really carry the film. Emma Stone is the best young actress around and she has a lovely singing voice. However the acting from John Legend is diabolical. He really is terrible every time he speaks. I don’t know why they gave him a speaking part in this film. But overall, I enjoyed my time with this movie and this would encourage me to go and see more musicals. I think musicals work much better in the movie theatre than at home.

Awesome job by Gareth Edwards and Lucasfilm. Honestly, ehen I heard that this was subject to re-shoots I expected the worst. Actually, I was expecting something along the lines of Suicide Squad – fragments of good material stitched together to create an incoherent mess. But not so with Rogue One. The movie is entirely coherent and if the reshoots hadn’t been reported I think this would have looked like the product of a singular vision. It’s very dour. It has an authentic war feel to it. It doesn’t feel like this has been made to appeal to chil;dren, rather to adults who have grown up with Star Wars. And that’s great. Rogue One proves that Star Wars can cover many bases successfully. There are a few standout moments here, holy s*** moments that are among the best in the entire series. It starts off slow but compelling, and the film builds and builds to a mind blowing climax. The scenes on the beaches are unlike anything we’ve seen before in Star Wars and bring to mind Saving Private Ryan and the space battle is full of inventive action. This bodes well for future standalone entries.

So much good stuff in this, but as usual with QT there's a lot of self indulgence that could do with being cut - for example, his own acting role towards the end of the film. He is a terrible actor and he just totally sticks out like a sore thumb among so many other good actors. As I said in my Hateful 8 review, some harsh editing is in order.

This could have done with some SERIOUS editing. Tarantino needs to use an editor who can keep his worst self indulgences in check. Cut away half an hour of pointless dialogue from this and you've got a great film.

43/100 from critics? WOW! I wouldn't want to know anybody who doesn't think this film is funny. It's the greatest comedy of all time. The Farrelly's were on fire in the mid to late 90s and this was their best.

Plot holes! THOUSANDS OF ‘EM! There are many moments in TDKR which will leave you confused and these have all been very well documented. I think Chris Nolan expects either suspension of disbelief from the audience, or expects that the audience doesn’t need every last thing spelled out to them, ie. he doesn’t need to waste valuable screen time showing us how Bruce Wayne gets back to Gotham City after being imprisoned by Bane – I mean, he’s Batman, you just need to assume that this wouldn’t be a problem for him! But this seems to enrage certain members of the audience, you know the RLM/Cinema Sins crew. And I guess that lot enjoy picking holes and acting clever so this is good for them. The plot holes do not make the film bad if the overall experience is still satisfying, which it is with TDKR.

A somewhat disappointing effort from Chris Nolan that features plenty of his trademark lapses of logic and plot holes but doesn’t deliver the satisfactory overall story that normally makes up for this. The Prestige, Inception and TDKR all had plenty of WTF moments (such as the crew formulating plans on board the ship rather than preparing in advance), sure, but you can forgive them because the rest is so good. Not so here. The story absolutely fell apart at the end for me and those moments I refer to can’t be redeemed. The film could still have been saved if it looked spectacular – but to me it just looked really, really bland! The two planets they visit are feature the dullest looking vistas imaginable – endless sea and endless snow. The space exterior scenes were completely lacking in awe or majesty. The camera always seemed to cut away too quick. On the plus side, I enjoyed MMs performance and I really enjoyed the time bending aspects of the story when they visit the first planet. Overall this was a wasted opportunity.