Nope (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Boring. The slow-boil build-up goes on for way too long, a huge amount of narrative energy is given to a pointless character backstory, and the twist about the nature of the UFO is briefly interesting but ultimately turns this into a movie about people trying to get a photo of a big sky-horse. All the characters are fairly irritating and seem to emote and act at random, for example getting annoyed at electric equipment turning off when they knew it was going to do that, or wordlessly coming up with plans on the fly which are so arbitrary as to be unfollowable. This, combined with the fact that the UFO's thought processes are intentionally fairly unpredictable and unknowable, and that other basic and crucial information like 'did they get the shot? Is the film safe?' is left ambiguous (possibly intentionally, but if so it's a bad choice), means that the action scenes are rather uninvolving.

It does look nice, the performances are all strong (even if they do mostly fall into the camps of 'annoying idiot' or 'emotionally closed off') and the creature design (and the slow reveal of all its elements) is cool, but this stuff can't rescue it from its flaws.

Rating: Meh.

Kate (2021)

Utterly unoriginal and predictable, but looks good, great action and Winstead and Martineau are great.

Rating: Good.

Lightyear (2022)

It looks quite nice and the action is well-directed and everything but I just did not give a shit about the story or the characters the entire way through - the script feels like a wiki plot summary for some franchise's pointless origin novel.

Rating: Meh.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Didn't enjoy it very much. It never gets around the fact that it's a prequel based on a single goal which we know from New Hope is achieved, and it also makes the same mistake as Force Awakens of being far too complicated - too many characters, too many locations, too many things going on in a single sequence so things have to be constantly explained throughout - he has to press this button and they have to shoot that shield and we have to get that disc and then broadcast it from that dish. Films like New Hope and Back To The Future know that you need this shit set out beforehand so when stuff goes wrong the viewer immediately understands with no explanation.

It reminds me of the Marvel movies that want to be a spy thriller or war movie or whatever but don't have the balls to step away from the standard franchise beats, so everything gets diluted. Here we have to watch the same rebels vs star destroyers battle that we've seen so many times, and the stuff like the Empire bureaucratic wranglings, Alliance politics and team-gathering don't have any time to breath and end up feeling very mechanical.

Also, too much Tarkin and Vader (and their voices are both way off, it's very odd). That last scene with Vader was fucking magnificent and pointed to the movie I was hoping for - Rebels scrabbling around in the face of this terrifying and brutal regime, snatching small victories by the skin of their teeth. Too much fan service in general, same as the Ghostbusters cameos - stopping for 10 seconds to gaze at the droids or Ponda Baba and Dr Evazan does not serve the film at all, and they wouldn't do it for unknown characters. No restraint.

Rating: Meh.