I liked Rogue One - it was a reasonable shot at a war movie in the Star Wars universe. I do have some complaints, though …
Instantaneous hyperdrive:
ANH establishes that hyperdrive to anywhere takes time (even in a fast Correlian freighter like the Millenium Falcon, Kessel run notwithstanding). So the landing party on Scarif pop off a comm message to Yavin, and suddenly the entire fleet is loading up and popping out above the shield gate in a matter of minutes to add to the chaos.
Good war movies don’t do that: they establish a timeline - the advance party gets in, have a bunch of tasks to do (which never go to plan), and the hard deadline is when the bombers roll over and obliterate the target, or the defenders blow scuttling charges, or something like that.
Once the Rogue One team was on it’s way, someone in the Alliance should have done the strategic analysis, made the call, and sent the fleet to follow up and provide distraction for the ground team to allow them the chance to succeed. That would be logical, not this “get message, cross half a galaxy in a few minutes, fight a pitched battle” lark.
Swarms of Imperial fighters:
This bugged me about Independence Day II, as well. Small teams of fighters (either rebel X-Wings/Y-Wings or those IDII hybrid jets) attack the enemy and swarms of fighters come out. They have so many defenders the attacking force should be completely swamped and annihilated. Either the good guys have some game-changing weaponry/tactics that obviously counter the sheer numerical advantage, or have better matched numbers so it feels like an evenly matched battle.
As I recall, the Alliance decided to send their fleet to Scarif shortly after Rogue One took off without authorization. Rogue One didn’t try to send a message off until they were about to send the plans and needed to make sure the fleet was ready to receive. Unless I’m misremembering.
And yeah, the swarms of TIEs seemed excessive for how few Rebel fighters we saw. Maybe if there were a few more chromatic squadrons shown. We can only assume the Imperial pilots are very green to fare so poorly against the Rebel pilots.
Mr. Plinkett, aka Mike Stoklasa of the incisive but prolonged prequels reviews, has released a very short review of Rogue One that echoes some of the complaints about the lack of characterization/character development and thin motivations.
And this being the internet, quickly released a video responding to his own review’s youtube comments.
I’d never heard of Plinkett, but he lost me as soon as it was clear he liked *TFA *better than Rogue One. Can. Not. Relate.
Your points are definitely fair. I don’t know why they did the hyperdrive that way when we saw in the original Star Wars that during the flight to Alderaan (or, unbenownst to them, the field of rubble where Alderaan had been) they had time to talk about the Force, train with a light saber and mask covering Luke’s eyes, etc. (I even had the impression they might have spent days getting there and just didn’t show most of it; but that might have been erroneous on my part.) Some people have noted that Rogue One seems to be influenced by the BSG reboot; I didn’t notice a whole lot of that, but the way the ships came out of hyperdrive was a definite exception.
As for the swarms of fighters, you’re certainly correct but this will never get better, and most likely will get worse. I think of it kind of like how stores have gone more and more nuts with “percentage off” sales, to where you can’t remotely hope to impress the customer with a 20% off sale any more. Similarly, a realistic but formidable force of enemy fighters will just look like a puny group, and not very exciting. More and more, the baseline expectation is impossible odds and all escapes occurring at the last possible second. That toothpaste is not going back in the tube.
Raguleader is right about the timing of the final battle. Rogue One took off with a bullshit callsign. Rebel Command figures out what’s going on pretty quickly, and the fleet scrambles to follow them within the hour. Rogue One comes out of hyperspace over Scarif and bluffs their way to the surface of the planet. They start their infiltration of the Imperial facility, and set off some diversionary attacks. The Rebel fleet pops out of hyperspace and starts shooting. Both Rogue One and the fleet were in hyperspace at the same time, which could be anything up to a couple days. (Rogue One doesn’t look big enough to support that many people for longer than that.) There’s also lots of other scenes in the movie that take place while a ship is in hyperspace - Cassian calling back to the base after they escape Jedha, and deciding to continue on with the mission to assassinate Erso took place while they were in hyperspace, for example, and I think at least one other. So it’s clearly not instantaneous, like in BSG.
As for the “hordes of fighters” trops, it’s a subset of the “hordes of mooks” trope that’s a pulp staple. It’s not a proper Indiana Jones movie if he doesn’t punch out a dozen Nazis. It’s not a proper Star Wars movie if your heroes can’t shoot down a dozen TIE fighters. There’s lots of sci-fi that’s avoided it: Babylon 5, most Star Trek, probably The Expanse. BSG subverted it, in that the Cylon’s numerical superiority was consistently represented as an overwhelming advantage that the humans couldn’t possibly face head-on.
The dogfight in the miniseries also had scads of Colonials getting blown away, making the fight seem pretty evenly matched (aside from the fact that the Colonials weren’t getting any more Colonials any time soon). That dogfight, by nature of the setting, featured lots of pilots with little or no combat experience, and every dogfight for the duration of the series would involve veteran pilots who had survived their first few fights and the pilots they trained.
But yeah, the fact that they couldn’t put into another depot to pick up spares and replenish their consumables was something that occurred to me in the pilot. Over the long term, I just don’t see how Galactica could afford very many battles before they ran out of ammo if nothing else. In comparison, neither the Empire nor the Rebel Alliance have that to worry about at least.
I like Red Letter Media, but their review of Rogue one was inconsistent bullshit full of very specious reasoning. It was the review of people who had decided their review was going to be negative and it would not surprise me at all to find that it didn’t really reflect their true thoughts.
No one from Rogue One ever contacted the Yavin Base after they took off. The scenes at the Rebel base after the battle had already started showed that the Rebel Base intercepted the Imperial request for Reinforcements because rebels were attacking Scarif.
This is when Mon Mothma said she needed to talk to Ackbar’s predecessor (can’t recall his name) and he had already left to join the battle.
You’re right about the intercepted message, I had forgotten the sequence.
But I thought the fighters left after the intercepted message, and arrived at Scarif just after the main fleet. It still took me out of the moment.
Oh, I think I remember the scene you’re talking about. The one with the cameos by R2 and C3PO, where C3PO says something like, “Now everyone’s going to Scarif?” as a bunch of X-Wings take off in the background?
Yeah, that shot is kind of out of place, and I think might have been an artifact from before the reshoots. The ‘droids have to end up on Leia’s corvette by the start of the original film, and the first time we see Leia’s corvette in this movie, it’s docked with Admiral Raddus’ flagship. But Raddus’s ship had already left by the time we see the 'droid cameo, so that’s a little awkward for the movie’s continuity. I can think of a couple fanwanks around it, but it still feels like a mistake.
For times like this, I just try to figure out the simplest explanation and run with that. In this case, Leia left after Raddus did, and docked with his ship for one reason or another. Maybe to recover the Death Star plans after his ship was disabled, although that would be a supremely ballsy move with Darth Vader’s flagship literally right on top of them.
Although, as mentioned earlier in the thread, from what we see of her in the OT, “supremely ballsy” isn’t a bad description for Princess Leia.
You can see the Tantive 4 jumping in along with all the other Rebel ships, unless its a different ship that happens to look exactly the same. So they would indeed have docked after their arrival instead of always being attached to the bigger ship.
You can see multiple ships that look just like the Tantive 4 jumping in. So we can’t pin down which one of them was Leia’s, and thus can’t pin down when she arrived.
If you guys think Vader’s pun was bad, you should read the novelization of Episode III. While murdering the separatists on Mustafar, he makes a Bond One-Liner for every death.
“We were told we’d be handsomely rewarded!”
“I am your reward. You don’t find me handsome?”
I don’t know, Bayle said “I trust her with my life,” obviously referencing his daughter. It’s not hard to imagine that he recalled her from Alderaan and she stopped by Yavin IV, got a briefing, picked up the droids, and joined Raddus’ expedition en route.
