>My experience with watching the Star Wars franchise as an adult could be summed up during a key moment, in Return of the Jedi, that fans of the series consider a turning point in Western narrative tradition: Incredulous, I turned to a friend and commented, “I can’t believe we’re watching a puppet die.” The difference between adult and child reactions to Star Wars is central to comprehending the new installment, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which adds to the Western economic tradition by commercializing the franchise’s fantasy appeal to post–Baby Boomer and Millennial generations.
>The brand-name consumerist practice continues in Rogue One’s tale — another flashback to the very, very beginning — about efforts, headed by the Rebellion’s Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Endor (Diego Luna), to steal the Empire’s plans for the Death Star. This latest “origin story” features no storytelling development but simply repeats Star Wars formulae as did last year’s The Force Awakens (and just like the indistinguishable episodes of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter). Rogue One, a huckster’s tale, confirms the Disney Corporation’s routine indoctrination of its captive audience.
>When movie brat George Lucas began the Star Wars series, it was possible to imagine that he was working out his own adolescent fascination with serial narrative and space-age adventure, which eventually led to the complexities and abstracted, visionary effects of the often ridiculed Revenge of the Sith. Critic Gregory Solman shrewdly assessed the momentary backlash (remember all that fake outrage over Jar Jar Binks?) as an indication of the consumer appetite of the Star Wars generation. “Fickle,” Solman put it. But the temporarily bored children soon came back to the discarded toy set and, in the new millennium, the media-political complex joined in by celebrating The Force Awakens as though it were something new, nearly patriotic.
>It would take a social psychologist on the order of Bruno Bettelheim (author of the fairy-tale study The Uses of Enchantment) to parse Rogue One’s repetitive story and characters as recurring dream figures. Certainly, abandoned child Jyn and rascal Cassian represent Hansel and Gretel adventurers seeking to repair their damaged family and community relations while contending with fearful social forces (Darth Vader, Saw Gerrera, Grand Moff Tarkin). This traumatic condition fits the obsessive pattern of behavior that defines contemporary cultural habits.
>Pop art rarely expresses common spiritual and psychological needs so much as it repeatedly connects consumers to the process of cultural indoctrination ensuring their safe place in the group-think society. It’s the Pixar, Apple condition: Conforming becomes its own reward. Even if it’s called “rebellion,” it means you belong.
>So, while Jyn Erso fulfills the new feminist mandate, Jones’s bucktooth charm is juvenile without quite fitting the gung-ho manner required. Luna’s Cassian Endor suffers the fate of Hollywood’s usual multicultural gestures; he stands in for diversity yet hasn’t been given a personality beyond representing the now-diminished masculine principle. (As for the new robot sidekick K-2SO, I can’t believe we’re watching mechanical comic relief.) If Luke, Leia, and Han Solo were already tired pop archetypes, these types feel degraded. They are, to quote a prominent pop propagandist, the JV team.Rogue One works on this basic, familiar level by distracting from it. Like Star Wars back in 1977 (when it offered a childish diversion from the social and personal inquiries that distinguish the ’70s films of the American Renaissance), Rogue One flatters the moral and political distance felt by today’s audiences.
Adrian Garcia
>But this form of escapism is tricky. It depends on the reassuring recognition of well-known characters (the intergalactic menagerie of alien creatures, stormtroopers, and robots) and customary details (sci-fi surplus space ships) with slight variations (machinery painted in worn khaki colors, and iterations of that good old lightsaber).
>The JV aspect of Rogue One reflects Gareth Edwards’s uninspired direction. The first 90 minutes of Jyn and Cassian and the ragtag Rebellion traversing distant planets occurs in drab, shadowy places with monotonous dialogue repeating Star Wars cant. When the Rebellion finally arrives at Scarif, a tropical planet housing the Death Star, the bright sky, blue atmosphere, and unexpected palm trees are a real relief from aesthetic tedium. Suddenly, the toys appear: from the walking dinosaur tanks to space crafts in origami shapes. It’s like the March of Wooden Soldiers from Babes in Toyland, set at cliché warp speed.
>In a tired attempt at making this Death Star battle a quasi-political allegory, Disney’s screenplay hacks (including Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy) cajole the Occupy generation with the phrase “Rebellion is built on hope” — uttered twice, as if Star Wars had not been appropriated by Reagan’s defense department but was now in sync with contemporary student protest.
Aaron Richardson
>ut it’s a deceptive, Machiavellian mantra. Rogue One isn’t sophisticated enough to see past the phrase’s falsehood or adult enough to dramatize the current administration’s betrayal of “hope and change” and how its media sycophants eventually lost public trust in hope or change. Rogue One’s juvenile politics recall how, in Revenge of the Sith (2005), Princess Amidala (Natalie Portman) whimpered, “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.” Liberal reviewers hailed the line as a rebuke of George W. Bush’s reelection.
>But there’s no need to ascribe fake significance to the Star Wars franchise when there are other great space movies, from Altman’s Countdown and Kubrick’s 2001 to Spielberg’s Close Encounters and Walter Hill’s Supernova. These films make Rogue One look like the JV team indeed.
I'm just jumping in here to let you know I didn't make it past >my experience
Jeremiah Martinez
this is Plinkett-levels of SW deconstructed rape. Lucas felt his ass tighten when that was published and he's not sure what happened
Cooper Cook
HE DID IT
when did this go up, i was browsing armod reviews earlier today?
Liam Morris
The King of Sup Forums has spoken
Carter Young
BASED
Nathaniel Mitchell
So does Armond hate every Star Wars movie except for A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith?
Julian Mitchell
I don't even need to ask, he really is /ourguy/
Aiden Torres
Need more negative reviews, including low grade fan video reviews.
I've heard enough unintelligent praise, i need to wash my mind
Ethan Watson
Isn't this the same guy who gave Norm of The North and Jack and Jill positive reviews?
Jaxson Peterson
Yeah.
Isaiah Reyes
How based can one man be?
Asher Gomez
Armond started the prequel love that you see posted about on Sup Forums
Grayson Myers
And he's actually taken seriously? How?
Nolan Nguyen
No he didn't. You're confusing him with that kike Richard Brody.
Jaxson Rodriguez
How and Why?
Adrian Richardson
Fake Armond review, he didn't mention Obama.
Daniel Hall
you realize this is Sup Forums right?
Matthew Johnson
>Jones’s bucktooth charm How do you expect to be taken seriously when you resort to those kind of personal attacks?
Carter Sanchez
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of someone else. Armond hates The Phantom Menace and doesn't like Attack of the Clones.
Hunter Kelly
He's a fucking airhead who's just eloquent enough to fool the retards who frequent this shitty board into thinking that he's an intellectual.
Dominic Jackson
t. pleb
Wyatt Johnson
He was Chairman of the New York Film Critic Circle three times and has been a juror at Sundance. Dude's legit.
Michael Gonzalez
you could just read the review and judge it on its merits. might be too much effort though.
Luke Adams
>ad hominem
NOT
AN
ARGUMENT
Juan Sullivan
That's not ad hominem any more than me calling you a fuckhead in this post is. You fuckhead.
Charles Barnes
He doesn't criticize the movie at all though. He just makes a bunch of attacks without touching any elements of the film.
Robert Nelson
Yes he did. Learn how to read.
Matthew Sullivan
Anyone who tries so hard to sound eloquent and use low frequency words is a pseudo intellectual
Adrian Gonzalez
>other great space movies >Walter Hill’s Supernova Wat
Brody Powell
>tfw to smart for Almond
Tyler King
what?
>This latest “origin story” features no storytelling development but simply repeats Star Wars formulae as did last year’s The Force Awakens
>Rogue One’s repetitive story and characters as recurring dream figures. Certainly, abandoned child Jyn and rascal Cassian represent Hansel and Gretel adventurers seeking to repair their damaged family and community relations while contending with fearful social forces (Darth Vader, Saw Gerrera, Grand Moff Tarkin). This traumatic condition fits the obsessive pattern of behavior that defines contemporary cultural habits.
>Jones’s bucktooth charm is juvenile without quite fitting the gung-ho manner required. Luna’s Cassian Endor suffers the fate of Hollywood’s usual multicultural gestures; he stands in for diversity yet hasn’t been given a personality beyond representing the now-diminished masculine principle
>As for the new robot sidekick K-2SO, I can’t believe we’re watching mechanical comic relief.
i could go on. the majority of the piece is direct criticism.
Luke Carter
so all you have is ad hominem, which means you have no argument
Blake Phillips
No, you literally don't know what ad hominem is because you learnt it on fucking Sup Forums.
Noah White
Those are attacks. He doesn't explain why. He just says it.
He calls Jone's bucktooth and Luna a token white hispanic (?).
Terrible review. He spends more time complaining about non-existent political themes then addressing actual issues like the film's pacing and lack of character development. He's reddit.
Carson Moore
>The only honest review one can give Attack of the Clones is to say that it is the least boring Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. But Empire was enjoyable?at times, even rousing?while Clones passes painlessly before one's eyes. The storyline brings Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) to adolescence, revealing his romantic attachment to Queen?now Senator?Amidala (Natalie Portman), and shows the first stirring of his moral conflict. But the narrative feels reticent, as if staving off its inevitable darkening. Lucas (who cowrote the script with Jonathan Hales) seems to be in a holding pattern before he's figured out exactly how to shape the humanity of his myth's great villain. That's what gives Clones the air of insignificance. The story doesn't move forward emotionally?the Jedi knights are still fighting the Federation, Darth Vader's persona is still waiting in the wings, Luke and Leia have yet to be born. Unless you're one of the non-thinking Star Wars completists, it's hard to find any excuse for Clones' bait-and-switch?I mean, bait-and-stall?except to demonstrate Lucas' marketing temerity.
>After the unfair drubbing Lucas took for the magisterial if leaden The Phantom Menace, I'd like to see him keep his imaginative promise. And I don't mean bringing back Kermit's cousin Yoda. ("Begun, the clone war has," Yoda burps.) But perhaps because the production of Clones has been complicated by techie infatuation with digital-video photography and projection, Lucas has not fulfilled his story's great potential.
>Maybe he's afraid of it. Having pandered to the kiddie audience like the rest of Hollywood, Lucas seems to have lost the courage to educate it, as Anakin must also be educated morally. I'm not talking about cheerleading the digital-video change-over?that's a delusion that only seems progressive.
Armond's Star Wars rankings are: IV, V & III > II > VI & I > VII & RO
John Stewart
So he's responsible for the III > VI meme. Great.
Lincoln Morgan
>Armond's Star Wars rankings are: IV, V & III > II > VI & I > VII & RO So he is always right.
Benjamin Reyes
>I > VII & RO >II > VI Shit taste fucking confirmed.
>The only honest review one can give Attack of the Clones is to say that it is the least boring Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back.
Jordan Young
>II ranked higher than VI >always right Kek, Return of the Jedi has a ton of flaws but it's a 10/10 back compared to Attack of the Clones.
Cooper Lee
>II above anything
HAHAHAH what a joke
Michael Garcia
>Edwards’s >Jones’s
Henry Jones
Why do you guys think Denzel Washington's opinions are so important?
Jaxson Brown
Just accept that the Big Black Man and his Big Black Brain has overpowered your puny, little white intellect. The man is a genius, unlike you - he knows what he's talking about.
Asher Hall
I liked the movie and none of what this literal who says will change that
Jack Gray
This desu
David Cruz
>plebnproud.jpg
Levi Morales
Do you know what board you're on waifu faggot?
Jacob Nelson
Star Wars is
D E A D E A D
Jose Gray
> This is the film critic that Sup Forums's contrarian pseudo-intellectuals think is based
Sup Forums just gets asshurt that someone dares to criticise the last popular film they saw, and dismisses anything Armond says because "hurr he liked Jack & Jill, ergo every other film review he does must be irredeemably flawed"
Luis Morgan
even just namedropping 2001 in a sw review is blasphemous
Andrew Williams
two days ago
White doesn't really hate Star Wars outside of the Disney garbage. He doesn't buy into the cult of 'CLASSIC CINEMA EMPIRE STRIKES BACK IS GODFATHER TIER' worship but he doesn't think it's below him either. I liked in his Rogue one review where he summed up his perception of the series.
>When movie brat George Lucas began the Star Wars series, it was possible to imagine that he was working out his own adolescent fascination with serial narrative and space-age adventure, which eventually led to the complexities and abstracted, visionary effects of the often ridiculed Revenge of the Sith That's what it is.
Now watch as he's shit on by people who hear that he 'praised' Transformers 2 and consider themselves smarter than him for it but will never actually look at the review in their lives, meaning they'll never realize they're wrong.
Blake Robinson
He likes movies that other reviewers have said are bad.
Conversely, he doesn't like movies other reviewers say are good.
He's completely contrarian.
Leo Hill
Threadly reminder that /our guy/'s review of /our movie/ is the greatest piece of criticism-kino ever written.
>He likes movies that other reviewers have said are bad.
>Conversely, he doesn't like movies other reviewers say are good.
And have you read even a fraction of those reviews? Also there's plenty of critically well-received films that he's also given positive reviews.
His film criticism is more than just checking what the trending Tomatometer/IMDB score says and writing a review that argues the complete opposite
Andrew Green
if he's talking about vader's death scene he's probably saying it with admiration. not many villains could completely cross the line from good to bad the way vader did. he wasn't an anti-hero, he was the main antagonist of the franchise until that moment, then he was portrayed as a puppet of the true villain and chose to side with his son, becoming the hero
Noah Wilson
He means Yoda. He means that it's kind of ridiculous that a major part of serious American cultural phenomenon is a muppet samurai master's death scene.
Alexander Taylor
Not that I have an opinion on the guy but can you name one where he agrees with other critics?
Bentley Harris
I have read what he says. And as others have pointed out, it's pseduo-intellectualism masked with overly-verbose gibberish. It does a great job of sounding smart. But when you pick apart his words, you realize he isn't saying much.
Pain & Gain > The Wolf of Wall Street Man of Steel > Gravity
Seriously?
Bad Grandpa > Nebraska
Really?
I wouldn't be surprised if he's a con-man exploiting clickbait and contrarian faggots like you into his following so he can literally sit on his ass and write pretentious crap for a living. What a schmuk!
Ryan Flores
why does he hate obama so much
Jordan Thomas
Rogue One is a great movie and he is wrong, end of story.
Joseph Brown
Pain & Gain was an ingenious attack on American excess. It was too subtle for most people to pick up on despite having all the tact of a roided up fist to the jaw but that just makes it even better. Wolf of Wall Street was just Scorcese's tired 'assholes work their way up to the top then do too many drugs' trick that was boring as hell by the time he made Casino.
There, I did one. Now you try to explain why Nebraska is better than Bad Grandpa, is possible while at the same time pointing out why White's views on the subject are wrong. You make big posts with fancy words like 'verbose' and 'pseudo-intellectualism' so this should be no problem for you. I bet in your spare time you watch super-intelligent movies like Oldboy and Snowpiercer.
He writes for a political site, so he has to make his reviews relevant by referring to a film's relationship to our current political climate whenever it's relevant, which it often is despite what plebs tell you. I don't think he hates the man, but he doesn't strike me as a fan either.
Rogue One is a legitimately bad movie for 90 minutes then the ending is barely on par with The Force Awakens.
Gabriel Bennett
bc he campaigned and marketed himself as the change this country needed and in actuality was a moderate that is hard to differentiate in many ways from his predecessors.
Colton Gonzalez
>Rogue One is a legitimately bad movie for 90 minutes then the ending is barely on par with The Force Awakens.
Well that is the lovely thing about opinions, you have your own regardless of what other people's are.
You guys focus way too much on "But my hero said it was bad instead of forming my own opinion, lol BTFO, yay memes!"
If you legit thought it was a bad movie, fine. But other people didn't, which is also fine. Some Star Wars fans for years and years (even those that started with the OT) loved it, some didn't. Again, end of story.
Andrew Powell
Why is a drama centered on the dying mid-west filled with great characterization and scenery better than a flick centered around perverted jokes and teenaged humor?
You would blindly believe anything this man wrote because he uses words you have to look up the meaning to.
Carter Jackson
hiding this post
Connor Nelson
>Why is a drama centered on the dying mid-west filled with great characterization and scenery better than a flick centered around perverted jokes and teenaged humor? Yes. Why?
Juan Johnson
I agree that Pain + Gain does a better job of attacking American excess than "Wolf of Wall Street" does. All WoWS does is ultimately glorify a hedonistic lifestyle that aggresively and remorselessly screws over hard working people while Pain and Gain ends with Ed Harris' character happily going back to his quiet life with his loving wife.
Noah Richardson
>Same premise, different result. Jackass auteur Jeff Tremaine’s road movie found common, if derisive humanity while Alexander Payne merely derided unsophisticated Middle Americans on his road to Hatersville. To dumb it down for you:
Road trip with crude humanity > rural middle americans on a road trip.
It's impossible for me to point out any error in his logic because he has no argument. He simply says a > b and fails to explain why. People like you lap it up because the verbosity confuses you into think he said something smart.
As for my own opinion, Nebraska has great characters, story-telling, beautiful pictures, thoughtful dialogue and just the right amount of comedy to drama ratio while Dirty Grandpa has fart humor that failed to make me laugh once.
Easton Scott
Will manchildren ever recover from this?
Julian Allen
Something wrong?
Asher White
>Armond gives a popular highly rated movie a bad review
Oh gee, didn't see this coming at all. This nigger is the most predictable film critic ever, and I hate star wars.
Brandon Perez
Reading a selection of this guy's articles has made it abundantly clear to me that he hates popular culture and gets offended that movies have a target audience that isn't sophisticated philosophers.
What an awful mindset.
Jaxson Thompson
pathetic moralizing. could've just wrote "violence is bad :(((" and spared us some bandwidth
Asher Baker
>>Pop art rarely expresses common spiritual and psychological needs so much as it repeatedly connects consumers to the process of cultural indoctrination ensuring their safe place in the group-think society. It’s the Pixar, Apple condition: Conforming becomes its own reward. Even if it’s called “rebellion,” it means you belong.
He's damn right on that point, though
Jaxon Phillips
And I thought English was a mandatory class in schools nowadays!
Liam Ross
Don't even use an exclamation mark in your post again, you dumb manchild.
Edwards' or Edwards's are both acceptable grammar, you piece of shit.
Asher Harris
Yes.
Gabriel Green
> He didn't take basic English in highschool > Calls me a dumb manchild
Never change
Dominic Martinez
To a point, but when reviewing a movie about rebellion vs. a tyrannical Empire who doesn't think twice about killing billions of people to support its cause...
That's a pretty fucking stupid complaint to say about the movie. It isn't group think at all. Nobody would want to live under the Empire except autists who think it'd unlock their hidden potential.
Luke Cooper
Pretty based. I'm surprised that they continue to allow him to write this is a major publication.
Jack Davis
>mfw this poster ACTUALLY thinks it should be "Edward's"
Parker Lee
If you were never really into Star Wars, I would still implore you to give Rogue One a chance if an opportunity comes up this Christmas. Look, don't get me wrong, it's still a sci-fi blockbuster. And while you're watching it *in the cinema*, you could probably call the way it plays out. However, when you get to the credits, it really sinks in just how many established genre tropes they had to bench in order to commit to telling a story of rebellion. Kudos to Gareth Edwards, Disney, and whoever had the idea to re-film half of it. I've been listening to Do You Hear the People Sing? since I got home (even if the Les Mis link begins and ends with the world "rebellion").
Kayden Myers
Reported.
No matter how hard you shill, it's still not making $1b.
Parker Sanders
Not him, but but Jones', for example, is usually viewed as superior to Jones's.
John Robinson
>reporting someone for giving their opinion on a movie. The movie's already hit 300M, you're delusional if you don't think it's going to hit $1b. I'm screencapping this btw.
Henry Davis
>sees words he doesn't understand it's the writer that's stupid not me!
Alexander Lopez
Confirmed for being too dumb to understand the review.
Adrian Lopez
>Has Armond ever enjoyed a movie and given a positive review?
LITERALLY any movie that's universally hated and has gotten nothing but bad reviews, he rates positively.
Xavier Rodriguez
Jesus Christ, I hope you're baiting. If a name ends with an s, you put the fucking apostrophe after the s. It's" Edwards' ", you dumb piece of shit.
