Hahahaha, that’s right! Awesome scene in an awesomely funny movie, and you’re right: this is totally of a piece with that. It’s basically videogame thinking. Oh well.
Oh wow, great find! I had forgotten the “first victory” part of that. Awesome.
That’s funny, because I thought just the opposite. While watching the movie, I understood them to have been saying (as **SciFiSam **said) that it was supposed to be 15 years since the Director came to take her father. I didn’t know how old Felicity Jones was, but I was quite sure it was significantly more than 15 years older than the girl who played her younger self, hiding in that hole. And sure enough, as Arrogance Ex Machina notes, she is 33. She’s a lovely 33 year old, but she doesn’t look remotely like a 22 year old to me. Here, for comparison, is what Felicity Jones looked like at that age. I guess people have gotten so used to 22 year old actors playing high school girls, they think a 22 year old *character *should be played by a 33 year old? Maybe it’s because I live in a college town, but I know what 22 year olds actually look like.
That’s a good scene from a really good movie, and until 2008 it was the only scene in which Pacino and DeNiro played off each other (they were both in The Godfather Part II, but DeNiro appeared only in flashbacks as the young Don Corleone). But the best scene in Heat? C’mon: that’s got to be the bank robbery getaway scene, a very non-quiet one to say the least. That’s the all-time greatest scene of gunplay in any movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen many.
If you don’t mind working for Saw Gerrera
It’s a FINE LIFE (It’s a fine life!)
Though there’s an evil Empire to beware a’
It’s a FINE LIFE (It’s a fine life!)
If you stand in defiance
With the Rebel Alliance
Though you may get your ass kicked
There’ll be a toy of you in plastic
It’s a FINE, FINE LIFE!!!
Everybody seems to like the space battle at the end, am I the only one that thinks the movie would have been better without it? It was done well for what it was, but was still just copying an earlier Star Wars film and filled with computer game style checkpoints.
Rogue 1 could really have set itself apart if it had went full on “heist” movie with a small group infiltrating a base or ship and escaping with the plans. Give the characters something to do by having them all play a part in pulling off the heist, and then ramp up the tension by having them try to escape with Darth Vader on their trail. Imagine the last twenty minutes is Vader being a badass by personally hunting down and picking off the crew one by one, an unstoppable menace that the crew are desperate to evade, ending with the last badly injured rebel stumbling onto the one ship that answered their distress call…
I don’t know this for certain, but from what I have seen claimed or speculated on, that’s almost what the original storyline was before they changed it. I guess they felt that didn’t work as well as they’d hoped.
That could have been good, for sure. But it would contradict, as noted upthread, the crawl at the beginning of the original 1977 movie–which reads, in its entirety (emphasis mine):
It wouldn’t take much to write around that if the will was there, something as simple as a squad of X-wings attacking the base or ship as a diversion. The Tantive 4 was originally known as a blockade runner after all, imagine it and 12 X-wings breaking through a blockade and racing to try and meet the Rogue one cre.
The Rogue one crew getting picked off one by one inside the base, the X-wings getting picked off one by one outside, the smaller scale would have been far tenser and more fitting in my opinion.
Am I the only one who was laughing my ass off at K-2SO because he’s basically a takeoff of Marvin? I kept waiting for him to say “Brain the size of a planet and you won’t even give me a blaster” or some such line. Loved it.
I thought it was kind of funny that his specialty was strategic analysis, and they never seemed to let him do that. Also, given the relative casualness of him walking around the Rebel base in Imperial colors, I wonder how Imperial defectors just hang out in their bad guy uniforms when dealing with the other Rebels. Kind of half-expect to see a guy in Storm Trooper armor sitting down for a cup of coffee with a couple of X-Wing pilots.
His specialty was strategic analysis, but remember, he’s been reprogrammed. I sort of suspect that he lost that skillset in the process of reprogramming, and nobody’s had the heart to tell him.
I think I missed something regarding Jyn’s blaster. In one scene, when they’re taking off to find her father, Cassian is surprised at her having one, which she claims to have ‘found’ somewhere, or something like that; then, in a fight scene, she quickly modifies it a little, and uses it as a melee weapon—again accompanied, I think, with a suspicious/meaningful look by Cassian. So was this her weapon, which was somehow concealable? Where did it come from?
But it seems he got some excellent combat skills for a trade in the reprogramming—the droids we’ve seen the Empire employ so far didn’t seem anywhere near as capable; in fact, K2’s skills make the ineptness of the droid soldiers in the prequels that much more jarring. Even a small squad of those guys could blaze right through a garrison of human fighter…
I missed the second scene you describe. First time I saw the movie, I was expecting some sort of payoff for the “Where did you get that?” “I found it,” exchange - that there’d be some sort of reveal about how she got a hold of it. On my second viewing, I think the point is simply that she’s a good thief: she’s under guard on a secret military base, and she somehow still manages to steal a weapon from somewhere.
Even compared to the other Imperial droids, K2SO is pretty hardy, but do note that there’s one or two little details that set them apart. For one thing, he’s got gold “braid” on his shoulder joints, while the Imperial droids have red braid, so it’s possible that he’s a different, tougher design based on the same base while the red braided droids are meant more as cheap redshirt type units, lending some extra capability without much extra cost. Just churn them out of the assembly line and ship them out as needed.
IIRC, Jyn supposedly “found” the gun in Cassian’s bag, according to some other materials, hence the reactions to Cassian and K2 about her having it.
As for her melee weapon, I thought that was something different she was carrying. But yeah, the impact on characterization is the same, she’s very crafty and skilled at both thievery and fighting. It’s not that she’s incapable, it’s that when the story starts out, she doesn’t think there’s a point in the long run.
So Rogue One is sitting at $789MM after less than 3 weeks, it’s been number one for three straight weekends…and it hasn’t opened in China yet.
Is it possible it’ll outearn The Force Awakens? Boxofficemojo already has it as the second highest grossing movie under ‘Action Heroine’ - with TFA as #1 - and it needs less than $200MM to go to pass it.
