Most recently I've watched two movies. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and La La Land (2017). They're both popular movies so I won't be reviewing them in detail here, but I want to write about their similarities. The topic concerns their endings so be warned that things are going to get SPOILERIFIC up in here.
My main point in this write-up is how these two movies, which flirted with mediocrity by the halfway point, were saved by their downer endings, and improved my opinion of them by the time the credits rolled.
Rogue One
I'm not really a Star Wars fan. I always thought of them as soaps, as family drama in space, a reputation that George Lucas made worse (at least to me) with the prequel trilogy. But somehow I've always managed to catch them in the cinema when a new one comes out. I am a child of capitalism, after all. I watched The Force Awakens when it came out in 2015, and was left underwhelmed by it. It was more of the same, with plot points practically ripped from the pages of A New Hope script.
I still decided to go watch Rogue One when it came out, and by the halfway point I found it not too dissimilar from the previous ones. Another family saga, another abandoned child, Stormtroopers who can't shoot for shit while they get picked off by the protagonists. Yawn.
But then the ending came, and it completely changed my mind! Why? Because almost all of the main characters died, blown to smithereens by the Death Star on that beach planet!
That's honestly very refreshing! For so long we've seen the heroes surviving battles and assaults in the previous movies, and for once they decided to go with a downer ending!
And it's not just a matter of my cynicism being satisfied, I like it because it shows the cost of war and the sacrifices that the grunts, these practically expendable Force-less, non-Jedi grunts, have to make in order to assist the Rebellion. There's no medal presentation ceremony and big smiles at the end, only the grim acceptance that the job was completed at a massive loss of lives.
And no other scene showed this better than the one towards the very end. Darth Vader himself boarded an escaping Rebel ship that was carrying the blueprint of the Death Star, and he mowed down a dozen of officers who could do nothing but hope that the time he would take to hack all of them down to death would be just long enough for the data to be smuggled to safety.
It was a brilliant effort by English director Gareth Edwards, who last directed Godzilla (2014), which I enjoyed immensely, although the receptions to it were split down the middle.
It also scored bonus points with me as it achieved one other thing; explain a major plot hole in A New Hope. How could a major weapon of mass destruction, the crown jewel of the Empire, be designed in such a way that a critical flaw can be accessed externally? As it turned out, the flaw was included by its reluctant chief engineer, the father of the movie's protagonist. Brilliant.
La La Land
I've been wanting to watch this musical ever since the first time I heard that catchy song in its trailer. It also stars my favourite actor and actress, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as two star-crossed lovers.
But boy was I in for a surprise. I had expected something of a more conventional, costume-and-choreography, song-and-dance Broadway-style musical. I was let down as early as the first song, despite it being perhaps the most conventional number in the musical.
First of all, it's the music that turned me off. Gosling's character is a jazz musician, and almost all of the tunes are jazz ones. And while most stage musicals, and those adapted to the screen, are set in exotic historical settings, La La Land is set in the present time (I had thought it was set in the 1950's or 60's Hollywood from the trailer).
I suppose this is a more of a European/French-style musical? Think Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which I actually haven't seen at all.
Honestly, I would have left the cinema halfway through, if not for the fact that I was there with a girlfriend, and she was leaning against my shoulder asleep. And Gosling and Stone's singing, they have not been classically-trained which I expected from actors in movie musicals.
But just like Rogue One, La La Land's ending turned my opinion on its head. Simply put, the two lovers do not end up together, which is shown in a bittersweet revelation. I respect that commitment to showing what is most likely to happen in real life, that there is no happy ending, even when there are two or three scenes preceding the ending that tease the audience into believing that they both will end up together again.
And when the movie ended, it turned out that the two songs I heard in the trailer were literally the only songs I like from the whole movie. Cheeky bastards.
My VERDICT: Rogue One gets a 7.5 from me, while La La Land has landed itself a 7/10 rating.
On an unrelated note, I should really look into talking to a therapist.
