Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.01.2017, Qupperneq 42

Saturday January 28
Concerts:
Suð, Stroff, Puffin Island
22:00 Gaukurinn
Dark Music Days: Töfrahurð
12:00 Harpa
Dark Music Days: Shasta
Ellenbogen and Yngvild Haaland
Ruud
Dark Music Days: Caput
17:00 Harpa
Dark Music Days: Cikada
19:00 Harpa
Dark Music Days: Stelkur
20:00 Harpa
Dark Music Days: Kammersveit
Reykjavíkur
21:00 Harpa
Undurfagra Ævintýr
20:00 Harpa
DJs:
21:00 DJ Helgi Már (PZ) Bravó
21:00 DJ Simon FKNHNDSM Húrra
21:00 Karítas / Kocoon Prikið
22:00 Candyfloss Tívolí
21:00 Lamp Vader Stofan
21:00 Extreme Chill DJ Hverfisgata 12
20:00 DJ Helgi Már KEX Hostel
Sunday January 29
Concerts:
Jazz
20:00 Bryggjan Brugghús
Icelandic Sagas: The Greatest Hits
20:15 Harpa
DJs:
21:00 DJ Ísar Logi Vinyl Sunday Bravó
Monday January 30
Concerts:
Monday Jazz
21:00 Húrra
Tuesday January 31
Concerts:
Karaoke Night
22:00 Gaukurinn
Listen to Icelandic Folk Songs
20:00 Iðno
Listen to Icelandic Folk Songs
21:15 Iðno
KEX Jazz
20:30 KEX Hostel
DJs:
21:00 Dj Fusion Groove Húrra
21:00 John Brnlv Kaffibarinn
21:00 Nærvera Prikið
Wednesday February 1
Concerts:
Blues Jam Session
21:00 Dillon
Kriki
20:00 Húrra
Don Lockwood Band
21:00 Slippbarinn
Thursday February 2
Concerts:
Refur
21:00 Café Rosenberg
Iceland Symphony Orchestra: Open
Rehearsal
9:30 Harpa
Iceland Symphony Orchestra:
Stravinsky and Britten
19:30 Harpa
Axel Flóvent
20:00 Húrra
South-Korean artist Kwon Song
Hee
21:00 Mengi
DJs:
21:00 DJ Óli Dóri Bravó
Friday February 3
Concerts:
Omotrack & support
22:00 Gaukurinn
Iceland Symphony Orchestra: Open
Rehearsal
9:30 Harpa
American musician / sound-artist
Stephen Dorocke
21:00 Mengi
Movies 42The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 01 — 2017Logi & Lilja & Svarthöfði & Óbí Van
Gareth Edwards’s ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’
By SINDRI ELDON
‘Rogue One’ fully and complete-
ly understands what it means to
be a Star Wars movie.
It means retreading familiar
ground not with hesitation, fear,
and blind adherence to form, but
with bold surety and the strength
to break and bend the rules where
applicable. It means daring to
venture slightly off the beaten
path while keeping key elements
within sight at all times, embrac-
ing the full scope of the universe
it inhabits while still taking time
to tell a strong new story. ‘Rogue
One’ understands these things,
and, most important of all, it un-
derstands that the key to being a
great Star Wars movie is a willing-
ness to redefine what a great Star
Wars movie is in the first place.
Rather than being a pallid re-
tread of inedibly stale cliches,
‘Rogue One’ forges a new path
toward its own frontier, which
is ironic in light of the movie’s
place in the Star Wars timeline.
Set mere days before the events
depicted in the original 1977 Star
Wars movie, ‘Rogue One’ could
easily have devolved into two
hours of pointless fan service and
disappeared into the foothills of
the great mountain that is ‘Star
Wars: A New Hope’, but instead,
it gloriously enriches and actually
improves the older film, comple-
menting it and intersecting with
it so cohesively that they could al-
most be seen as two halves of the
same production. It does all this
while never losing its own identity
and feel, proudly infused with the
spirit of Star Wars without ever
feeling cheap or derivative. This is
also a noteworthy feat considering
that as a standalone spinoff with-
out an episode number or place in
the grander Star Wars saga, it did
not have any particular obliga-
tion to be anything more than a
stopgap addendum to already es-
tablished events, and yet it brings
more fresh vigor and original-
ity to the table than any recent
franchise film I can think of. It’s
a great movie, and it doesn’t even
have to be.
From Godzilla to the
Death Star
It achieves these things largely
due to the confident strokes of
its director, Gareth Edwards.
Edwards, who first gained inter-
national attention with his deft
and understated full-length de-
but ‘Monsters’, and popped his
blockbuster cherry with the 2014
reboot of ‘Godzilla’, is seemingly
building a career with his natural
feel for convincingly placing the
viewer amid unlikely events that
are taking place on an enormous
scale. He is, in other words, the
perfect man to believably depict
the Death Star as it ominously
stalks whole planets. The destruc-
tion it brings is always carefully
choreographed to show its impact
on things whose size we already
know and understand; the mas-
sive fallen statues and crumbling
temples of Jedha are methodically
overturned and shattered, rather
than simply annihilated, with
the resulting explosions shown
from multiple angles and vantage
points so we can better under-
stand the terror and devastation.
And his artistry doesn’t end
there. Nearly everything in the
film is similarly tactile and tan-
gible; Edwards understands that
the Star Wars universe is a real
place, but rather than try to rec-
reate that reality by duplicating
the feel of previous films, he sees
the potential in modernizing its
individual elements and making
them real to a contemporary au-
dience. The gunfights in ‘Rogue
One’ echo the pacing of those
in the original films, but still
bring the grit and weight one has
come to expect from modern ac-
tion movies. An X-wing fighter
emerges from hyperspace into a
set-piece space battle, but we see
it from a distinctly modern-feel-
ing ship-mounted camera. Darth
Vader mows down hapless Alli-
ance troops with sanguine flair
aplenty, but it never feels wanton
and unjustified; in fact, it is a le-
gitimately terrifying scene, so
skilled is Edwards at making even
something as overexposed and
fantastical as Darth Vader seem
fresh and real.
No chase scene or space battle
occurs without the audience first
being made to visually understand
the layout and dimensions of the
players and the setting, meaning
that the ensuing special effects
orgies never feel gratuitous, but
simply satisfying payoffs that fol-
low diligent setups. A two-legged
scout walker turns the tide in a
gunfight in what would have been
a flagrant deus ex machina, had
the walker not first been glimpsed
through the townscape minutes
earlier. Rebel starfighters zip and
weave through space station su-
perstructure, but only after the
station’s shape and purpose has
been thoroughly established. And
those same fighters also spec-
tacularly take down a four-legged
walker, but only after the walker’s
humongous size and apparent im-
pregnability have been depicted in
the previous scene. Setup, payoff.
Setup, payoff. It’s not complicated,
JJ.
Painting outside the
lines
‘Rogue One’ is masterfully paced,
opening with simple but striking
compositions and character in-
troductions conveyed with sparse
conversation and bountiful reac-
tion shots. One by one, the char-
acters are established and the plot
moves forward, in scenes that nev-
er feel offhand or obligated, but
finely theatrical and, for want of a
better word, loved. And when the
time comes for Edwards to wring
out the drama during the film’s
dazzling climax, it doesn’t feel
forced or color-by-numbers, sim-
ply because the preparatory work
has been done. He even makes the
wobbly closeups and muted, rever-
berating explosions that now lit-
ter all sci-fi and fantasy films feel
rewarding and warranted. This is
competent filmmaking done by a
man who understands his craft,
who knows how to mix modernity
with classicism, and how to con-
vey complexity by hinting at the
spaces between his simple lines.
The cast is similarly selective
with their brushes, with veteran
character actors Forest Whita-
ker and Ben Mendelsohn set-
ting their scenery-chewing dials
at exactly the right levels, while
relative newcomers Felicity Jones
and Riz Ahmed find real people
within their admittedly bare-
bones story arcs. Jones’s authen-
ticity is especially important and
difficult to achieve, as she has
some fairly hammy speeches and
overwrought confrontations to
sell, but she rises to the challenge
quite beautifully. Her character’s
entire arc essentially rests on her
reaction to a recorded message,
but what a reaction it is; she falls
to her knees, devastated, and the
audience falls with her. Edwards
has enough faith in his actors’
performances to not saddle them
with trite expositional explana-
tions of how they feel or why.
Their motivations are tastefully
and convincingly written onto
their faces, from Donnie Yen’s
beatific smile and Diego Luna’s
skeptical scowl, to Riz Ahmed’s
flighty glances and Forest Whita-
ker’s desperately sorrowful stares.
It seems amazing that ‘Rogue
One’ finds time and space for all
these human emotions amid the
rises and falls of a full-on space
opera, but that is what the genre
was originally meant to achieve,
and the film stands as a testament
to the fact that it takes more than
box-checking self-service and
special effects wizardry to do the
Star Wars franchise justice. And
it does all these things while still
delivering a product that is fun,
fresh, valid and relevant, and far
superior in every way to the fran-
chise entry that came before it. It
is a film worthy of its place among
the stars, and I want to watch it
again right now.
“ It does all this while never losing its own identity and
feel, proudly infused with the spirit of Star Wars without
ever feeling cheap or derivative.”
One-To-One Scale