Although I am amused by the idea of an Imperial data storage facility being treated like a Vegas casino with Krennic, Vader, and Tarkin as various movers and shakers in a Vegas mafia organization. Krennic is the ambitious up-and-coming Made Man, Galen Erso is the guy who tried to get out but got dragged back in, who wants to testify against the Palpatine family if the Alliance can get him out and into the Rebel Protection Program. Tarkin and Vader are rival Capos and Palpatine is the Godfather.
Did we talk about the music earlier?? How i would rank this and his Trek music is:
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Trek’s hook. It’s motif.
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Rogue One’s score. It was very good especially use of Williams cues.
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The Trek general scores. Bluh.
Yeah, you’re right–we just saw A New Hope tonight again, and the crawl pretty well summarizes Rogue 1 instead of the movie I was hoping for :).
Seriously, y’all, tell me you wouldn’t watch the hell out of that.
Well, given that a lot of my problems with the movie were all the small ways the plot didn’t hold together, yeah, I find the idea of a tightly plotted movie to be pretty appealing. I disagree that heists always require brilliant intelligence (in the sense of “perfect information”): heist movies are at their best when the intel they have turns out to be very faulty. See the Mission Impossible movies (which are only borderline heist, but then what I’m talking about is only borderline heist anyway). The movie could still involve desperate characters winging it, but if the movie had emphasized their chops at sneaking and bluffing, rather than their chops at punching and blasting and piloting, I think it would’ve been more fun.
They did some of that anyway. I just would’ve enjoyed a lot more focus on that.
Oh, I remembered another possible Spaceballs connection: “Hand print identification please.” That one seems a lot more likely to be intentional, given how the fact that the handprint was necessary was completely irrelevant to the plot, whereas the circumstances with the planetary shield could easily be coincidence and convergent evolution. (I’m not the only one to make this connection - there’s a few other scattered people on the internet mentioning it)
Another Spaceballs connection: Disney didn’t just do this for money.
Why would a handprint be a reference to Spaceballs, and not a reference to the very common practice of using a handprint for security authentication? I don’t even remember there being a handprint scene in Spaceballs, precisely because it’s so routine as to not being worth remembering.
The thing is with doing a heist movie, which could be great no disagreement there, is that from Disney’s perspective it is very risky this early in owning the franchise. Star Wars movies, to date, have been action heavy. Could they be sure that a heist style movie would work? If a heist ‘Rogue One’ fails, what does that do to the franchise? This was a good experiment for them because it shows they can mess with the formula a bit and still be successful. The success of ‘Rogue One’ will hopefully encourage them to continue to branch the franchise out into other genres.
Where are those famed sith precog powers now??? Up yours Sith!!
Not sure if it has been mentioned, but I like how the film sets up a very weak Alliance going into ANH, especially in regards to the Battle of Yavin. It didn’t look like too much of their Fleet made it out of Scarif.
Only a couple of under strength squadrons were available to take on the Death Star. Really improves the tone of ‘last desperate stand’ at the end of ANH, IMHO.
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Something that no one has mentioned so far is to what an extent the Star Wars movies aren’t American films anymore. Go through the cast list of both The Force Awakens and Rogue One and notice how few American actors there are in the films other than the ones from the earlier Star Wars movies who thus couldn’t be recast. The actors are from various other countries, but in particular most of them are British. Yes, it’s partly because the scenes shot on a set in those two movies are done in a British studio, but it’s still surprising how few of the actors are Americans. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it’s interesting that it’s hardly ever mentioned in discussions of these films.
The cast of “Thor” nods and then has some tea.
Is that much of a change from the original trilogy though? I seem to recall that much of the supporting cast was British, with many of the Rebels getting either dubbed over in American English or using fake accents (IIRC, Wedge Antilles was dubbed in the first film, used a fake Yank accent in the second, and finally became Scottish in the third).
Various aspects of this have gotten a mention. In particular, the Alliance is still pretty unsteady during Rogue One, with nobody really able to agree on taking action, and having to deal with other rebel factions that they disagree greatly with like Saw Guerrera’s men. It brings to mind the quote about hanging together or hanging separately.
And yeah, after Scarif, the Rebel’s forces seem to have taken a hammering, with most of their fleet either destroyed, badly damaged, or scattered after the battle. I do seem to recall that in A New Hope, they specifically state that the Death Star’s defenses are designed around the assumption of fighting off capital ships, so they might have just been keeping their big ships back given that their strategy was based entirely around small fighters exploiting a critical weakness.
I’ve also got a pet theory that there are substantial rebel forces that didn’t commit to Scarif, either due to bugging out after learning of the Death Star, or not having fully signed on yet. Also, note that the Alliance is shown to consistently build in strength throughout the original trilogy. Even Empire Strikes Back’s famous downer ending is capped by the appearance of the Rebel fleet, the biggest show of Good Guy™ force in the franchise up to that point, in the epilogue.
I think that basically, the Rebels got stronger each time they beat the Empire (Scarif, Yavin), and the Empire got weaker each time they didn’t stop the Rebels from escaping (Yavin, Hoth) and more folks were emboldened by the Empire’s failure to stop the Rebellion quickly despite their overwhelming force. The Rebels were winning for as long as they continued to exist, and I think in-universe, the entire original trilogy takes place over the course of a couple of years tops, with the Rebel strength snowballing steadily until they’re able to take on the Empire force-to-force at Endor.
They really tried for authenticity with Rogue One, to the point of filming in London, using the exact same aircraft hangar for the Yavin Base, and even the guy who played Vader has a remarkably similar background career to David Prowse. It’s almost uncanny.
So I think they chose actors who not only represented the Star Wars we know from the original trilogy, but from the prequels too. There were more ethnicities and genders on display than A New Hope, but that matches the mix you saw in Revenge of the Sith, and the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series. Having a lot of British actors just makes sense, and adds an air of authority to the Rebel leaders (many of whom are likely to be defectors from the Empire, so there’s that too).
:dubious:
Alec Guinness
Peter Cushing
David Prowse
Shelagh Fraser
Peter Mayhew
Denis Lawson
Kenny Baker
Antony Daniels
And thats just the first film.
ETA: Per LucasFilm, the OT lasts about 4-5 years.
Its 3 years between ANH and ESB (the real world time period between the films). Its a little over a year between ESB and ROTJ.
Well, only force-to-force for that small fraction of the Empire’s forces. Recall that line from Solo, “There are a lot of command ships.” He was referring to the Super Stardestroyer Executor. Had the Empire had more of its fleet present - 10 Super Stardestroyers with accompanying fleet ships there would have been no need for the Death Star to destroy the rebel fleet.
AK84 writes:
> Alec Guinness
> Peter Cushing
> David Prowse
> Shelagh Fraser
> Peter Mayhew
> Denis Lawson
> Kenny Baker
> Antony Daniels
True, but David Prowse and Kenny Baker were just the people who wore the costumes. Look at the Americans who were the leads in the first movie. The habit of casting Brits in minor roles has always been there, but it’s accelerated as the series has gone along. There are less and less Americans in the lead roles. Richard Marquand and now Gareth Edwards, both Brits, have now been the directors of Star Wars films. I’m talking about a trend, not a sudden change, so, yes, there were always Brits in the films and are still Americans in the films. Also, note the number of people from other countries.
The Star Wars films were all produced by American companies (20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, and Bad Robot Productions), even though they were filmed in the US, UK (with lots of British extras), Tunisia and other locations. So I believe that technically makes them “American” films.
From various literature and canon, it’s hard to tell if the Executor represents a single oddball giant warship, the first of a class of giant warships or just one of many of a class of giant warship (variously / colloquially called “super star destroyers”, “command ships”, or “dreadnaughts”).
Another thing that isn’t clear from the films is the size of the Imperial and Alliance fleets. One would think that the Empire would need thousands of ships of all sizes and classes to patrol the entire galaxy. Obviously even then, that wouldn’t be enough, hence the Death Star program.
It’s implied, however, that the Rebel fleet at Endor is pretty much it. Or at least it’s the bulk of the capital ships. And at most, it only looks like a dozen or so ships.
So even without a functioning Death Star, it seems to me that the Empire should have more than enough star destroyers and super star destroyers to just throw at the Rebel fleet after drawing them to Endor.
Another thing I liked is that it really felt that a lot of the Alliance didn’t feel like they were fully at “war” yet. They still thought they could resolve this just by showing the Death Star plans to Senate.
I very much enjoyed it. I managed to avoid knowing that Vader was in it at all, so that was nice, as were his red lenses. Probably my favorite tiny bit was when he was mowing down rebel soldiers, and he had one held up on the ceiling and as he walked past him he sliced him in half up there backhanded.
One thing that I thought was kinda strange - Vader ordered Krennic to go to Scarif and make sure there were no weaknesses in the Death Star. So he does. Then the rebels attack. Then like ten minutes later someone mentioned to him that there was a security breach in the Data Tower and he was all “Whaaaat?” and headed over there with his two guards. Kinda slow on the uptake there…