About Rogue One ...

Go see it.

To analogize: If the original Star Wars movie* was The Dam Busters, then Rogue One is The Dirty Dozen. While the morality in original trilogy might have been black-and-white, in this joint it's very, very, gray.

I liked it better than The Force Awakens. Compared to that film, Rogue One doesn't feel like it's trying so hard to be a Star Wars movie. From a wargaming perspective, I'm sure you'll get plenty of scenario ideas from the many battles.

Like I said, go see it.

*A New Hope to all you kids who should get off my lawn!

Disney and the Death Star

Image from the blog void/two.

Why all the angst over Disney buying Lucasfilm?  Are people worried the Star Wars franchise will get dumbed down?  Well, that already happened, first with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi and then with Jar-Jar in The Phantom Menace.  Whenever people bitch about the "Disneyfication" of their favorite film franchise, they need to realize that the Mouse has a pretty long history of delivering entertainment, and leveraging its various franchises into all kinds of merchandising. 

I don't think we're gonna see Donald Duck next to Darth Vader in the next Star Wars movie (although I think it would be pretty funny).  Instead, I imagine they're gonna give the folks in now charge of Lucasfilm plenty of room to make quality movies that will pull in grownups as well as kids, and casual viewers as well as rabid fanboys.  And they're gonna market the hell out of those new flicks.  After all, Disney now owns Marvel Comics, and that's what they did with the Avengers movie.

One blogger complained that the next movie (Episode VII, whatever it ends up being called) won't be based on any of the post-original trilogy novels, and therefore "destroy the post-movie canon."  So what?  Who cares, as long as they come up with a great flick?  The vast majority of moviegoers are unaware of those books anyway.  To them, the only "canon" is what happened in the first six films--and they probably don't remember all the details. 

The new heads of the Star Wars franchise shouldn't let a bloated mass of marketing limit them from making a good movie.  Despite attempting a reboot, J.J. Adams still threw a canon bone to the trekkies, and the film, to its detriment, couldn't escape its own overwritten past.  That's another example of a law of literary relativity I like to call the canon singularity theory:

Whenever an entertainment franchise generates a certain amount of television episodes, movies, novels, games, and toys, that mass of fiction becomes so self-referential it collapses in upon itself, creating a singularity so dense that not even plot can escape.

Hopefully Lucasfilm's new owners can manage to avoid falling into that literary event horizon and come up with some decent sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy (but even if they don't, we're all gonna go see them anyway).  May the Force be with them.

Cloud Atlas

We saw the movie Cloud Atlas tonight, and I really enjoyed it.  I hadn't seen more than a couple of short commercials for the film, so going in I had no idea what it was about.  Basically, it jumps between six different stories, separated by time.  By the end of the film, however, the separate vignettes are linked structurally and thematically. 

I really enjoyed it, and everything came to a satisfying conclusion.  In fact, this movie reminded me of the move The Fountain.  No real ideas for gaming that spring to mind, although there are some good action sequences, but Cloud Atlas is worth seeing.

Oh, and the makeup artists did a great job in  this one--all the featured actors play several roles throughout the feature, and you'll have to look carefully to see who's playing which character in which scene.  My favorite is Hugo Weaving.