Menu
What's new
Troll Kingdom

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Always apt:

a2abe9a478fa91409c8af447e54750ad379f674f0653d1dfd3835dee7462b6f0.jpg
 
Some more thoughts:

Just to elaborate on my first point, that Jyn being the designer's father had no purpose to the story, and indeed made no sense, you could cut out the opening scenes and cut out the initial mission where Jyn's father was killed and not affect the story. The chief designer had no real purpose in any of it, other than having sabotaged the design. But that plot element undercuts the plot of Episode IV, that the rebels got the plans and found a flaw. So his character was completely unnecessary. His daughter was even more unnecessary because Jyn being the chief designer's daughter had absolutely nothing to do with what she did, other than the completely useless waste of time they spent on the raid where she saw him die - right before he was going to be executed anyway.

It didn't matter how the rebels found out there was a Death Star (which of course must have plans somewhere or the contractors wouldn't know what to build). In fact, it's pretty much impossible to keep a project that large a secret from the Senate that's paying for it. They didn't need any cryptic message from the project's chief designer. A cryptic message from any one of the 300,000 construction personnel over the 15-year period would have done just fine to set up the reason for a raid to steal the plans.

And of course the chief designer's "critical role" conflicts with episode III, where the trade federation showed a little hologram of the Death Star, a hologram they wouldn't have unless they already had the design pretty much done, at least to the level of knowing how all the key components were going to work. Once they had that, the rest of the design work is toilets, lights, and hatchways.

So instead of having an elite team of agents steal the plans in a brilliantly conceived and executed mission, the story sinks to having a random gaggle of poorly developed characters stealing them on a lark because the Rebel leaders wouldn't approve such a mission.

And of course stealing the plans wouldn't have been necessary if the chief designer had simply told the transport pilot how to destroy the Death Star by hitting it in an exhaust port at coordinate latitude X/longitude Y with a torpedo launched from a small fighter. Whew. That would avoid the need for the entire movie.

So if they went with the chief designer story, they didn't need the raid to steal the plans, and if they wanted to go with a raid to steal the plans, the story didn't need to include the chief designer.

And how did Lord Vader know the rebels stole plans? They might have been stealing the budget requests or internal audits or evidence that the Emperor was involved in a murder. The Imperials could have figured out exactly what the rebels stole from the data core - except that they blew the data core up with a blast from the Death Star before any investigators could take a look.

And on a final note, if it only takes a few seconds to transmit the plans from one computer to another, across orbital distances, why is anybody even searching for a data disk of some sort? Why didn't the rebels transmit the plans to all their ships and have everyone scatter, to transmit the plans to all sorts of different planets until nobody in the Empire could visit their favorite porn site without seeing "We have the Death Star plans! Click here to read!"?
 
I'm late to the party! I saw it yesterday. I was surprised (a little) about how many others were there considering I saw it at 1 p.m. Anyways, I liked it, alot. I think it was one of the better Star Wars movies. Definitely better than the prequels. Not hard to accomplish, I know. It dared to be different. A suicide mission that actually leads to everyone dying, definitely a first for Star Wars. Some of the best Darth Vader moments from any of the movies. One gripe, I thought the CGI was pretty bad. Grand Marf Tarkin looked more like a passenger on the Polar Express than the Death Star at times.

If they can make more of these "filler" movies, and pull them off like this, I'd be satisfied. I'm holding out hope for a Vader movie that takes place between New Hope, and Empire. Darth Vader lands on some distant planet following the destruction of the Death Star. The whole movie consists of him kicking ass on his way back to space. I'm definitely more hopeful now when it comes to the Han Solo flick.
 
I saw it today. I have NUANCED VIEWS.

So it was kind of the opposite of The Force Awakens as that started really well then got kind of bad in the second half (in my opinion!) whereas with this the second half was a lot better than the choppy first half. The worst thing comes early and that was Saw Gerrera. I'm really struggling to see what the point of him was. Everyone talks about him a lot, he gets so much build up as this rebel who's too much of a rebel for the Rebellion. He raised Jyn so she has a history with him. It seems like he's going to be important. And then when he appears...he does literally nothing. Except commit suicide for some reason? He's only there to give Jyn the hologram of Galen and they could have just had Bodhi give it to them directly and skipped Saw completely. There's a whole thing where Jyn has two dads with different approaches to rebelling but it's not explored at all. He's part machine which made me think maybe he was supposed to be like the Rebellion's version of Darth Vader, but that wasn't a thing that was explored either. It didn't help that Forest Whitaker seemed to be in a completely different, much more hammy movie than everyone else.

I wasn't really sure why the Rebellion still wanted to assassinate Galen even after Jedha had been destroyed. They knew the weapon was finished and already worked so why was it priority to kill the guy who'd already successfully completeed it? Mads Mikkelson was good in all his scenes (I think he was in it even less than he was in Doctor Strange) and managed to convince me that he cared about Jyn but it could have used more.

Jyn was a pretty good character but I wasn't really sure of her motivations or somethimg? Like I thought was she already in the Rebellion at the start (she was in an Imperial jail?) but apparently not? She seemed to not care about the Rebellion at all when she talked to Saw, and of course the famous "I rebel" line wasn't in the movie so it seemed like she was just someone who was living on her own and got roped into the Rebellion for this one and only mission? (So why was she in prsion?) I actually thought Cassian got a better story arc than her.

Some of the other character stuff was a bit wonky too, like when they go on their big mission at the end I guess they're all supposed to be friends and care about each other but I didn't feel it? I'm thinking of the bit where The Big Guy With The Gun called Jyn "little sister" as if they had some friendly relationship but actually it was the first time they talked to each other in the movie.

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy watching it. There was a lot of Star Wars stuff in it! A great space battle and ground battle. An amazing sense of scale (something I thought Starkiller Base lacked.) I liked Admiral Rhaddish (the blue Ackbar) or whatever he was called. I liked Bail Organa's cape. K-2 was a blast and made me laugh quite a few times (his line like "oh, there's one" when Cassian called him when the imperials asked if he'd seen any rebels or whatever it was...that was a good line.) Krennick felt different from an over the top imperial which was appreciated. The blind guy fight scenes were good (wish there'd been more.) I liked how the spaceships looked like models even though they were CGI. Tarkin didn't look as bad as I thought he'd look considering how everyone on the internet's been talking about him, but his eyes did look weird. Leia looked pretty good but her mouth was off?

Everyone dying was good as it put faces on all those who fought for the Rebellion so that Luke and Han could eventually do cool things and take all the glory. Though really I would have been fine with Jyn and Cassian surviving as their story didn't quite feel over.

I remember many years ago we all though we'd eventually get to see Darth Vader killing Jedi in Episode 3, but we never really got that (aside from him murdering some kids off scree) so the part with him slaughtering the rebels definitely filled that desire. I liked how it showed the heroics of the nameless rebel grunts as they kept passing the Death Star plans along like a baton and sacrificing themselves in the face of this unstoppable evil. But the Leia ending did feel pretty abrupt like Tomtrek said. In fact the last few minutes felt more like a prologue to Episode 4 than an epilogue to this movie. I know the whole thing was a prequel (obviously I know that!) but the rest of it felt like a story in its own right until the ending where it switched to "forget all those new characters and watch A New Hope now!"
 
Jyn wasn't an actual member of the Rebel Alliance (ever since she left Saw's cell when she was 16) but rather just a general troublemaker, which is why she was in jail.

But her arc really doesn't make sense since she goes from "That was a REBEL BOMB that killed my father!!!" to giving all the Rebels a big speech about how they should all join together in about 10 minutes.
 
I loved the movie, as much as any of the films form the original trilogy. It had the perfect ending of sacrifice, excellent characterisation throughout.

The last few days, I've been seeing some backlash about the CGI characters - firstly a pathetic "ain't we cool' piece from a 3-man talking panel on IGN, from twats in leather jackets trying to get pity-likes from people half their age. Today, a snotty piece from a worthless hackette at the Guardian saying dead actors should be left to be dead.

When Tarkin appeared on screen, I looked and wondered who the hell they got to play him because it was spot on. Only by looking at the mouth did I twig it was CG. It's easy to be snooty at something, and pretend you're an expert as IGN Twotwaffles are wont to do. But it WAS good. Damned good. It's come on so far in the last 3-4 years it's frightening how realistic it looked.

Other than this gripe - I'll be going back to watch it again pretty soon.
 
Hope Carrie pulls through.

Fuddlemiff said:
Interesting little video.

Click to expand...


I know trailers often contain shots that aren't in the movie, but it seems this one more than most! When Jyn was walking along the walkway near the end I was thinking "oh the TIE is going to fly up now that will be cool" but instead Krennick just jumped out from behind a post or something.
 
Last edited:
Engineers always put the master switch in the middle of the beach. I mean, where else would you put it, in some kind of master control room or something? You always want to put critical controls in places where corrosion, sand, and weather will render them inoperable.
 
I had a bizarre dream where I was trying to find a magazine article that discussed the self-defeating nature of the tight monetary policy of the Galactic Empire, backed up with the quote "Hard to get Galactic credits are."

The authors were a pair of PhD economists who held that the Empires monetary policy and tax policy were at odds with its massive military building programs. Then I woke up and wondered if I'd dreamed up such an article or whether I'd read it somewhere on the web.
 
1) In my head canon, getting the plans was a lot stealthier than in Rogue 1. So imagine my surprise, in the pre-1996 crawl, that it talks about a big battle with the rebel fleet, where the plans were stolen. Well done.

My 2 nitpicks about Rogue 1 are: 1) All the first half Forrest Whitaker stuff is clunky and ugly. 2) Darth Vader is way too much of a pimp at the end. Look at the beginning of Star Wars. The Stormtroopers do all the work. Vader doesn't show up until things are under control. In a perfect world, we'd have gotten Stormtroopers blowing the hatch and killing everyone while Vader strides through and grabs the last man standing by the throat and dramatically hoists him off the ground while we see his boots in the air. But I can see why they went with all Vader, all the time. It sells more action figures.
 
Oh. The other thing. What was the other thing?

Oh, yeah. The location cards and the lack of the crawl were jarring. BUT...and I only say this because I feel the odds of George Lucas and/or his lawyers being her are sufficiently low that I'll risk it (And I have faith in Disney's lawyers) they can easily strip out the location cards and put an opening crawl in after Lucas dies and make this "STAR WARS: Episode 3: Rogue One"

I really, really hope Disney is sneakily decanonizing 1-3. The only problem I have with that is deciding which one this replaces. At first blush it replaces "Return of the Shit." But later I realized it can replace any of them. So it is much better to get rid of "The Phantom Menace" (which I can't think of a snarky title for).

And if we get a movie that sets up Han and Chewie, then we need to figure out what the last movie is. Do we need Ben and/or Anakin? Or should we find out about Forrest Whitaker? I dunno. I have faith Mike the Rat has a plan. And if George Lucas winds up tits-up with a bellyfull of polonium, well, I won't bitch.

PS: Asimov would be pissed about Washbot blowing away all those stormtroopers in his Butch and Sundance finale. Laws of Robotics and all.
 
I guess you could argue that Vader was so pissed off that the Rebels were about to getaway with the Death Star plans that he decided to personally slaughter them this time, whereas in ANH he had the Tantive IV captive inside his own ship and there was nowhere for them to run so he let his stormtroopers handle it.

Volpone said:
I really, really hope Disney is sneakily decanonizing 1-3
Click to expand...

They're clearly not (considering a prequel character was in this very movie) and never will.
 
Volpone said:
I really, really hope Disney is sneakily decanonizing 1-3. The only problem I have with that is deciding which one this replaces. At first blush it replaces "Return of the Shit." But later I realized it can replace any of them. So it is much better to get rid of "The Phantom Menace" (which I can't think of a snarky title for).
Click to expand...

This is literally never going to happen. There's a show running right now that has characters from the prequel-era in it. The comics and books released since Disney took over have all had subtle-to-very obvious Prequel references - including some being set during the prequels. Heck, this film has a character from the prequels in it played by the same actor in order to keep continuity.

Luckily, they did go and fix a lot of the problems with the prequels in the best possible way: By making a TV series that took it's concepts and expanded them out into a weekly show, allowing for various plot and character arcs to have more subtlety and depth than they ever could in a film series. This was all done while Lucas was still in charge, by the way.

Also don't forget that despite what popular nerd opinion would tell you, a lot of people don't hate the prequels, including a lot of people currently working at Lucasfilm. Don't be surprised if in 5-10 years Disney starts to shift the demographic it's targeting from people who are nostalgic about the Original Trilogy to people who are nostalgic about the Prequels, because by then the kids who watched them (and liked them!) when they were growing up will be of consumer age, and Disney wants their money just as much as they want everyone else's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top