Turns out Gareth Edwards is just an okay director, and an absolutely terrible writer. I'm glad he only directed Rogue One, here's hoping he's putting down the pen and staying behind the camera in the future! To be fair, I see his vision, I understand it, but the execution is a mess of decent ideas at best, borderline moronic at worst. We notice first the superficiality of the characters, even though the lead characters do what they can (Madeleine Yuna Voyles especially, channelling exceptional levels of emotion for such a young actress). Next comes the level of AI cliches and the boring and basic script. Finally, and perhaps most enervating, is the amount of questions that go unanswered, questions that apparently aren't important to Edward's plot, although they should be. I started to take note of all these, but eventually I gave up, being able to recognize a moot point when I see one. Suffice it to say, there are a lot, and it's as if Edwards knowingly ignores all of them, jumping from one seemingly unrelated, slick (I'll give him that) moment to another, all the while providing us with unnecessary exposition like "Josh you're a hero, you killed Nirmata and got the weapon", instead of actually expanding on his mythology and paying more attention to the world his movie is set in. The movie even tries to be funny at times, but stops that cold at about the one hour mark, almost as if it heard the silence in the theaters and decided to quit trying!
Oh, and if you guessed that Alphie is Joshua's daughter about a minute after you saw her, the minuscule twist to the reveal (that she kinda is but kinda isn't) isn't enough to make you think you weren't right all along! What almost made me turn the thing off, however, was when Alphie was able to run straight through the NOMAD, all the way to the control center, without the slightest interruption. I wonder if Edwards actually has a valid explanation for the lack of security in this, the most important vessel in the American army, their only hope of winning the war, but I suspect not. At this point, the plot just needed the thing to be empty, and we, the dim witted viewers, are just supposed to accept it and, as such, accept that we've been played for fools by giving our time away to this drag of a film.
Oh, and if you guessed that Alphie is Joshua's daughter about a minute after you saw her, the minuscule twist to the reveal (that she kinda is but kinda isn't) isn't enough to make you think you weren't right all along! What almost made me turn the thing off, however, was when Alphie was able to run straight through the NOMAD, all the way to the control center, without the slightest interruption. I wonder if Edwards actually has a valid explanation for the lack of security in this, the most important vessel in the American army, their only hope of winning the war, but I suspect not. At this point, the plot just needed the thing to be empty, and we, the dim witted viewers, are just supposed to accept it and, as such, accept that we've been played for fools by giving our time away to this drag of a film.
