There’s a reason I have an intense emotional reaction to Rey force-pulling the Lightsaber while the Force Theme plays. There’s a reason why I had no emotional reaction to Jyn’s father dying. It has everything to do with soundtrack.
It sounded to me like one of Rym’s conclusions in the episode was that he liked the soundtrack and it worked for him. If you’re going to make the claim that a work is objectively bad, you have to do more than providing a few (frankly vague and hand-wavy) rationalizations. The five reviews I mentioned also provide plenty of detailed “reasons” why the sountrack doesn’t suck.
If you’re going to say “I didn’t like this thing”, I’m 100% fine and have no nits to pick with that. What I take issue with is people taking the poo-pooing a step further to say “This thing [objectively] sucks”. If you’re going to take that step, I think you need to work pretty hard to justify the assertion, especially when many prominent reviews make detailed cases to the opposite effect.
For me, there were many moments in the movie that had strong emotional resonance having everything to do with soundtrack. The movie wasn’t really focused on Jyn’s personal story, and we’re not meant to fixate on the death of her father (in many ways he was already gone, being locked away in secret empire engineer land for basically her whole life). The salient emotional pallet of RO is more about celebrating hope and defiance in the face of a vast, better-organized, entrenched power structure, and the soundtrack nailed those themes where it counted most.
You’re just going to have to read back through the many pages of discussion on this very topic here on the forum.
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This movie was definitely focused on Jyn’s personal story, since it opens with her and follows primarily her for most of the film.
It was focused on her role in galactic events, but not really on her emotional journey in any non-cursory way.
It’s like Mads Mikkelsen is trying to get his card punched with every franchise.
Other than wanting to see the robot again, I don’t think Rogue One has the rewatchability that The Force Awakens does, so I rank TFA slightly over RO.
Anybody that missed it, the ground hog day video is back.
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