The only problem is that it added one more wrinkle: Every rebel knows the base is on Yavin IV. The Empire must be extremely incompetent if they haven’t found it out yet.
I liked it quite a lot and think it’s perhaps the second-best of the Star Wars films after ESB. Definitely more satisfying than Force Awakens which was a decent film except that the main plot was pretty much a re-hash.
I am impressed that they were willing to kill off all the main characters and it definitely gave the film more emotional heft than the typical blockbuster.
Like a lot of blockbusters I think it would have been a better film with 15 minutes less action and more character development. I still liked most of the characters and I admit I teared up when Zatoichi bit the dust.
About halfway through I realized that the lead actress also played Steven Hawking’s wife in Theory of Everything Not sure she was properly cast here; she was perhaps a bit too earnest for the character.
The film looked spectacular especially in 3d Imax. It’s been a great year for visual spectacle with Dr. Strange, Moana,Jungle Book and in a different way La La Land.
Mon Mothma. Sad. Make the rebellion great again!
[quote=“MeanJoe, post:336, topic:774722”]
[ul][li]Vader’s “choke on your ambitions” line was the most groan worthy moment of the film.[/ul][/li][/quote]
The line was “choke on your aspirations,” not “choke on your ambitions.” Makes it slightly more humorous…but not much.
[quote]
[ul][li]Was that Porkins’ brother who bit it in the space battle? What are the odds the Alliance has two significantly overweight fighter pilots? I want to join the Alliance, it’s the only place a guy as big as me could fly a fighter! (And I’m no where near the size of Porkins)[/ul][/li][/quote]
That guy was Asian, and Porkins was not.
Pedantically speaking, neither of them are Asian unless Asia is a planet in a Galaxy Far Far Away. 
[quote=“MeanJoe, post:336, topic:774722”]
[li]Was that Porkins’ brother who bit it in the space battle? What are the odds the Alliance has two significantly overweight fighter pilots? I want to join the Alliance, it’s the only place a guy as big as me could fly a fighter! (And I’m no where near the size of Porkins)[/li][/QUOTE]
One of the advantages of there being no weight in space, I guess.
Now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading the whole thread, I’ll say that I liked it a lot. It was pretty much exactly what I wanted, though I wouldn’t have been upset if it had had a little more heist to it.
I barely noticed that Tarkin looked Uncanny Valley. I knew Cushing was long dead, but I was just so excited to see him it didn’t matter how good or bad he looked. Leia, on the other hand, made me cringe. Maybe she’ll look better at a second viewing. I saw the movie on Christmas Day, so Carrie Fisher was still reportedly in stable condition, but there had been no updates on her in about 24 hours and I knew that wasn’t a good sign. Seeing her face (plastic and vague-looking or not) probably hit me harder than it would have if I’d gotten to the theater two days earlier, and I didn’t know if the tears in my eyes were sad or hopeful.
I did like the fact that this movie made so many deliberate choices to set it apart from the “Skywalker Saga”. No opening crawl, geographic labeling captions, etc.
I had mostly avoided spoilers (though I was pretty sure how it had to end), and I remember thinking somewhere early on “Oh hey, they could put Jimmy Smits in this and not have it look weird!” He showed up on screen approximately two minutes later.
Loved the mention of the Whills, which has always been kind of a Star Wars meta-mystery for me. I would very much like to see a New-EU (NewU?) history of what the hell Whills are.
I yelled out loud when I saw the OT pilots, but luckily, I wasn’t the only person in my theater to do so.
In all, I really, really liked it. I was surprised to discover when it was over that I wasn’t pissed that “my” characters weren’t there.
The lack of an opening crawl threw me for quite the loop. My theater for whatever reason doesn’t throw up the “Feature Presentation” titlecard, so I thought it was another trailer at first. Served to have me off balance for the prologue, which I think actually worked rather well for the prologue.
That said, I’m accustomed to the title crawl setting the stage for me, and I feel like the crawl could have cut out about 5-10 minutes of stagesetting and just let us jump in right at the prison break. The Erso Family flashback was either too long or too short to flow smoothly, and left the impression that we had a lot more of Jyn’s early life that got left on the cutting room floor.
Given the number of reshoots and scene reworking this film evidently had since the trailers were made (assuming they didn’t shoot decoy footage specifically for the trailers), this film has the potential for a lot of very interesting deleted scenes when it comes out on home video.
Which is a double pun! Not sure if that is better or worse.
Someone needs to take his hallway scene, and dub in Anakin Skywalker from Episode III saying “This is where the fun begins!”
At the end of “Return of the Jedi” you see the Imperial fleet, or part of it, and it’s a LOT of ships.
At the beginning of “Star Wars” (not “A New Hope,” please, guys) when the Millennium Falcon leaves Tattooine, there’s two Star Destroyers there already. There was one before - the one that caught Princess Leia - but presumably it left, because Vader needed a lift back to the Death Star. So they have enough to have two at this shitty little backwater planet.
It’s clear the idea behind the Death Star is sheer terror. The Rebels can slip and slide and hide their fleet; you can’t hide your planet. If the Death Star couldn’t be destroyed the Rebel Alliance would have withered on the vine because no one would have helped them.
As to “Rogue One,” it was very good. Some of the bit prior to meeting Forrest Whittaker in the temple city could have been shortened and better edited, but the movie worked well, and the price paid in the end was poignant and gave the story weight.
The artificial Tarkin and Leia, however, just didn’t do it for me. Tarkin was impressively close to looking like the real Peter Cushing… but it didn’t. It looked like a video game. A really good one, but a video game all the same. Humans are just so good at catching that stuff, and you can’t unsee it. The young Leia was worse.
BE CAREFUL YOU DO NOT *CHOKE *ON YOUR ASPIRATIONS.
:leaves
:comes back
YOU SEE, BECAUSE ASPIRATIONS MEANS AMBITION, BUT IT ALSO MEANS BREATHING.
…
AND I MADE YOU *CHOKE *ON YOUR BREATHING, BUT I WAS TELLING YOU NOT TO BE SO *AMBITIOUS *THAT YOU *DIED *FROM AMBITION.
…
IT WAS A DOUBLE PUN.
…
OH, COME ON, IT WAS FUNNY! WHY ARE YOU NOT LAUGHING!
That sounds like some great dialogue for Spaceballs II: The Quest for More Money. 
Also, I was thinking more about Krennic’s totally incompetent murder of the engineers who built the Death Star. It actually makes sense to me, in a universe with Dork Vader in charge.
The Empire is staffed by incompetent project managers, just like nearly every other major organization in history. Krennic is a pointy-haired boss. Like all pointy-haired boss, he doesn’t really understand his organization’s managerial theories, but he tries to follow them anyway.
In his case, “Managers murder the henchmen who fail them as a morale boost for surviving henchmen” is one of the Emperor’s managerial dictates. Krennic knows that. In this situation, he figured he needed to murder someone to live up to Imperial managerial theory. The fact that he executed this theory in the least competent way possible is how it always goes down.
Which one was responsible for developing the long open aired tube that a giant green ray travels down, complete with control station set on a non shielded platform? No green ray proof windows or railings on the staircase or anything.
He probably deserved to be shot.
That was so gratuitous, I think it was a wink to fans. No ledge, no radiation shielding, no nothing. There’s no logical reason for that other then to say to fans, “why no, the Empire doesn’t have an OSHA.”
Honestly, in those scenes (original and new), I sort of wanted to see one of the technicians fall into the beam and get vaporized. This is a world where karma (or something much like it) is real, and powerful enough to levitate spaceships. You use a weapon that destructive, and it will kill some of your own.
If it brings you any comfort, a beam powerful enough to destroy a planet is probably powerful enough to shatter atoms of the air it passes through, so all those technicians would probably have died from radiation sickness if the Death Star hadn’t been blown up first.
For some reason, the visual I have is Krennic, still kneeling on the floor and visibly choking, motioning towards his throat before Vader realizes he’s still choking him and quickly lets him go.
“Shit! I’m so sorry, you’re fine, you’re fine! Please don’t tell the Emperor!”
I mean, if they gave them railings, they’d just lean all day.
The Empire has a vastly larger fleet, but it also has way more things it needs to do with it’s fleet. They’ve got to hold on to control of thousands of worlds, most of which it rules by naked force - pulling every single SD for the ambush means native insurrections on hundreds of worlds. Plus there’s all the legitimate stuff that navies would do in that universe, like anti-piracy and anti-smuggling operations. Meanwhile, the Rebel fleet only has one purpose: kill Imperials.