Monday, January 2, 2017

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Movie Review - Felicity Jones' Film Fits In Neatly

  • Genre:
    Fantasy, Sci-Fi
  • Cast:
    Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Mads Mikkelsen, Donnie Yen
  • Director:
    Gareth Edwards
A movie has been made for Star Wars fans that finally answers many of the questions they've long been asking, having to do with the tensile strength of a franchise that has experienced its share of strain over 40 years, and the ability of artists with new, perhaps iconoclastic visions to bring a faraway galaxy from long ago into a bold new future.

That movie is Star Wars: Episode VIII and will be in theatres roughly a year from now.

In the meantime, we have Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards's perfectly serviceable, if undistinguished, placeholder. This is a movie that, technically, doesn't need to exist, apart from abject fan service, the minting of some easy money and mindshare maintenance at a time when attention spans ping from one sci-fi spectacle to the next with brazen promiscuity. So many images in Rogue One conjure recent films - from Mad Max: Fury Road to Arrival - that it's easy to forget that it was that first Star Wars installment, back in 1977, that started it all.

To its credit, and like last year's The Force AwakensRogue One pays homage to the imaginative and physical world that George Lucas and his collaborators built four decades ago. Hewed from the same "used future" aesthetic Lucas so cleverly perfected, the movie has a scruffy, tarnished patina, staging that harks back to wartime classics from the World War II and Vietnam eras, and video-game-like visual flourishes. It fits neatly with the Star Wars mythos, especially during its rousing third act and immensely satisfying final moment.

What Rogue One doesn't have is much joy, although viewers can't say they weren't warned. Edwards and Disney executives have made much of the fact that they wanted this stand-alone venture to be "dark," and is it ever: As Star Wars movies go, this one may have the highest body count of them all, above and beyond the Imperial stormtroopers who can be relied on to go out with a desperate Wilhelm scream at least once in a production.

That reassuring callback, as well as several others, is present and accounted for in Rogue One, which centers on the story of Jyn (Felicity Jones), a young woman pressed into service by a militant splinter group of the Rebel Alliance to perform crucial espionage against the tyrannical Galactic Empire, which is in the process of inventing a superweapon called the Death Star.

Because this is Star Wars, you know that Jyn's efforts ultimately will involve some kind of ragtag team of plucky misfits. In Rogue One, that merry band consists of a rebel intelligence officer named Cassian (Diego Luna), a disaffected Empire pilot named Bodhi (Riz Ahmed) and a snippily sarcastic droid named K-2SO. Voiced by Alan Tudyk, this angular, spider-like creature provides precious comic relief in a film that is otherwise grim and unsmiling, as Jyn and her brothers in arms do battle with the Empire's diabolical weapons director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn).


Image courtesy: Film Frame ILM-Lucasfilm-Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures


Sturdily executed by Edwards, whose previous credits include Monsters and GodzillaRogue One is nonetheless a relatively rote affair, enlivened by some impressive visuals and Michael Giacchino's stirring musical score, but lacking the warmth and humor of the previous films. By no stretch is this a disaster on a par with Lucas' misbegotten prequel trilogy. Still, at least until its final section, Rogue One lacks the zip, zing and exhilarating sense of return to form that "The Force Awakens" conveyed so lightly.


Courtesy: Jonathan Olley, Lucasfilm-Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures


Jones presents a convincing, if monotonously self-serious, heroine in Rogue One, and her uncanny physical resemblance to Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey in the new installments, invites intriguing speculation as to whether and how they may be related. But few of her fellow actors make as vivid an impression, and the fey, soft-spoken Luna is particularly ill-suited to play a rakish man of adventure. Chinese actor Donnie Yen, as a mystical warrior, is underused in a role that feels perfunctory and shoehorned in.

Too often, Rogue One seems to be checking boxes as it goes about its plotty business, which ultimately has to do with the retrieval of documents, the closing of a shield gate and locating the master switch on a communications control tower. It's simplistic stuff, and bluntly effective at ginning up the idea of action and stakes, which take on increased heft as Rogue One finally reaches its busy, startlingly apocalyptic conclusion. (At two hours and 13 minutes, the film is at least 15 minutes too long).

Graced with the first appearance of some of the Star Wars series' most iconic characters - at least in the chronological sense - Rogue One represents an unobjectionable exercise in franchise extension. It's fine. It'll do. For now.

Watch the trailer:



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Rated PG-13. Opens Thursday night. Contains extended sequences of sci-fi action and violence. 133 minutes.

Dangal Movie Review: Behold The Glory Of Aamir Khan

  • Cast:
    Aamir Khan, Sakshi Tanwar, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Zaira Wasim, Suhani Bhatnagar, Vivan Bhatena, Aparshakti Khurrana
  • Director:
    Nitesh Tiwari
SPOILERS AHEAD

A Bollywood sports biopic that gets nearly all its moves absolutely right, Dangal draws its strength from a blindingly luminous lead performance from a shape-shifting Aamir Khan. 

But over and above his physical transformation, compete with wobbly gait and scraggly stubble, so impressively measured is the actor in the guise of national wrestling champion-turned-coach Mahavir Singh Phogat that he completely erases the boundary that separates the star from the role.

Rarely has a Bollywood actor sunk his teeth into a meaty character with such gumption and glory. 

Dangal is the story of a Haryana man who dared to do the unthinkable. It is just as much the tale of a pugnacious girl who went where nobody from her tradition-bound village had ever gone. 


Dangal blends humour with intensity


But above all, Dangal is a hugely entertaining sporting saga that works simply as a piece of good old storytelling leavened with rousing, crowd-pleasing ingredients. 

Cinematic sagas of real-life sporting icons have to inevitably contend with one obvious drawback: the stories they tell are well-documented and, therefore, devoid of any mystery. 

The element of collective familiarity, especially when the film is about a popular discipline, is more often than not aggravated by Bollywood's tendency to go for broke in terms of melodramatic flourish. 

Dangal gives no cause for worry on that score. Until one rather gratuitous 'Bharat mata ki jai' moment in the climax, restraint is the film's strongest suit.

Although the film does harp on 'desh ke liye medal', it refrains from demonstrative chest-thumping and flag-waving until the ill-advised BKMJ slogan that rents the air at the end of the national anthem played at a medal presentation ceremony. 


Dangal is a hugely entertaining sporting saga


The screenplay weaves tempered doses of fiction into the film's essentially realistic tapestry (which is accentuated by the way director of photography Setu lenses the village scenes). 

The result is a film that springs many a delightful surprise. Dangal blends humour with intensity, and intimacy with spectacle, to perfection.

On every parameter, Dangal matches, if not surpasses, Chak De! India and Iqbal, the two Mumbai films that did justice to the sport that they took up for dramatization. 

Dangal is, however, more than just a film about a popular contact sport. It is also more than just an Aamir Khan filmDangal smells of the soil of a village and the mud of a wrestling pit as it does of the blood and sweat that goes into the making of champions.

Mahavir, forced by circumstances to call time prematurely on his thriving wrestling career, trains two of his daughters with the aim of fulfilling his thwarted dream of winning an international medal for India.

The heroism that it celebrates is not of the infallible kind. Both Mahavir and his first-born Geeta are given to acts that place them at odds with each other and with the national wrestling establishment.

The battles that duo fights are on two levels - personal and social. While the girl must learn to control her mind and channel her aggression on the mat, the old man is required to subdue his tendency to bite off too much in the single-minded pursuit of his goal. 

Among the high points of this well-crafted film are the nail-biting wrestling sequences. They are so believable and convincing that there are times that, despite the obtrusive, over-simplified commentary on the soundtrack, they come across as the real deal.

All credit to Fatima Sana Shaikh for fleshing out the character of Geeta Kumari Phogat, Mahavir's eldest daughter, without any false steps and miscues, and for pulling off the 'action' scenes with such aplomb. 

She serves the film's cause very well because it is Geeta who emerges as the focal point of Dangal as it hurtles towards its climax. 


Dangal review: Fatima fleshes out Geeta's character without any false steps


The young wrestler takes on grapplers more fancied than her in the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi on her way to the gold medal in the 55 kg category.

In the film's overall scheme, Babita Kumari (Sanya Malhotra), who won the silver at the same event, takes a backseat, serving merely as an involved cheerleader in the climactic scenes. 


Dangal review: Sanya Malhotra, who plays Babita, takes a backseat


Director and co-screenwriter Nitesh Tiwari does not shy away from resorting to touches of sentimentality, but he keeps a tight rein on the flow of emotions as a tenacious father and his daughters navigate a treacherous social terrain steeped in deep-rooted patriarchy, gender prejudice and rural orthodoxy. 

What the audience sees in the film is that the visible weight around the male protagonist's paunchy waist is nothing compared to the massive burden of ambition and obsession that he carries in an ultra-conservative rural society.

But what Dangal does best is in not falling for the temptation to give Mahavir Phogat a halo. He isn't by any means perfect. 

Driven by a personal agenda, he is guilty of robbing his daughters of their childhood and pushing them into the wrestling pit before they are old enough to decide for themselves.


Dangal Review: Mahavir Phogat is guilty of robbing his daughters of their childhood


The protests of the two girls and his wife Daya (Sakshi Tanwar, subdued but effective) fall on deaf ears. 

He also takes no note of the sneers and sniggers that he faces for letting his daughters wrestle with boys in order to hone their skills and shore up their confidence. 


Dangal review: Sakshi Tanwar's role is subdued but effective


Mahavir's obstinacy stems from his unwavering determination to turn his girls into the boys that he doesn't have. The daughters Geeta and Babita want to opt out, but they aren't allowed their own agency. 

But as time elapses and Geeta and Babita see in their father's medal fixation an opportunity to escape the plight of the other girls in their sleepy Haryana hamlet - Balali, Bhiwani district - who are pushed into dead-end domesticity as soon as they step into their teens. 

The main conflict point in the film - rooted father who believes in traditional coaching methods versus daughter who flies the coop to be exposed to the more modern ways of the national sports academy - are delineated with remarkable poise and efficacy.

Watch the trailer of Dangal


The least convincing part of Dangal is the character of the myopic, manipulative national coach who sees in Mahavir Phogat an impediment to his plans for Geeta Phogat. 

But thanks to the way the gifted Girish Kulkarni plays the role, the man does not stick out too much. 

Dangal is the kind of sports film that usually eludes Bollywood. It knows the rules inside and out and meticulously plays by them without ever succumbing to dreary predictability.

Dangal is an outright winner - a film that will pin you down and keep you in its grip all the way through.