It seems when Bayle called for Leia he didn’t know Raddus had taken off, so he couldn’t tell her to immediately join his command ship. So, she must have made an intermediate stop on Yavin IV, and, while there, the rebels found out Raddus joined the battle, and Leia was then dispatched.
Or…she arrived on Yavin IV before Raddus took off, and, conspiratorially, she was attached with him at takeoff. In any instance, she could have plausibly been on Yavin IV to pick up the droids before the final events of Rogue 1.
The droids don’t know who Leia is at this point. They’re assigned to Captain Antilles, who is in charge of the Tantive IV.
Well, according to the prequels, R2-D2 knows *exactly *who she is.
Sure. But by “…she picked them up,” I mean they were loaded onto the ship she was in charge of, not that she signed the work order. If she didn’t know about R2, she surely learned pretty quickly to download the plans (and messaged to Obi Wan) into his OS.
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe C-3PO did know Leia and was lying to Luke as part of his protocol programming. One of Threepio’s first lines is “there’ll be no escape for the Princess this time” which implies a lot of previous association or knowledge of her involvement in the Rebellion.
Personally I only count the humans or the aliens where their gender is explicitly stated or very heavily implied. The rest of the aliens could be male, female, or something else altogether - they generally are rather alien aliens in SW; can’t imagine much successful interbreeding like in Trek (bet it happened in the EU books but it’s not going to be common).
TFA had the same problem, but I guess perhaps they were trying to be in line with the OT.
Yeah, compare that line to his line to Luke that the woman in R2D2’s message was “a person of some importance” on their last voyage, but he wasn’t quite sure who he was. Seems clear to me that he was telling a half-truth to Luke.
Well, discretion in such details is probably an important thing for protocol droids.
If that’s how things really went down, then I’m doubly disappointed with that scene. Having the hero and villain confront each other at the top of a tall tower is a horribly overused movie cliché. And, of course, Krennic has to have a conversation with Jyn, instead of just shooting her on the spot!
At least Krennic didn’t fall off the tower, which is how those scenes generally end. But he WAS shot at the last possible moment by someone offscreen—another cliché I’ve seen far too many times.
I’m also baffled that a film that includes things like faster-than-light space travel and planetary force fields was so weirdly low-tech. We see wheeled vehicles, big movie-style toggle switches, and an entire scene organized around an extension cord. There’s even something that looks like a present-day automated tape library, but it isn’t even automated!
Overall I enjoyed the film; it was a huge improvement over The Force Awakens, and I liked the modest efforts to “build out” the Star Wars universe. But the way the film constantly resorts to recycled action-movie tropes and contrivances doesn’t have me feeling optimistic about the future of the franchise.
Mind you, a lot of the low-tech aspects of the setting owes to a couple of things:
- This movie takes place at the same time as the original late 70’s film, so the aesthetics of the setting need to more or less match up with how sci-fi films looked 40 years ago. That means lots of monochrome monitors, interfaces requiring a direct physical connection (seriously, you’re telling me R2 doesn’t even have Bluetooth?), and storage media that looks like a big external HDD or tape backup.
Although I’m still not clear on what exactly the point of the extension cord was, practically speaking. I guess they were hooking the shuttle’s comm system up to the base’s transmitter to get through the shield or something? If so, I’m not sure why Bohdi couldn’t just leave the shuttle to use the base’s comm system directly, aside from needing to ostensibly stay with the ship to be their wheelman when everyone makes their daring escape after succeeding.
- It is worth noting that Star Wars isn’t strictly science fiction in the traditional sense, but rather space fantasy. Hence the knights and the swords and the mooks in all-covering plate armor and magic by any other name. Expecting it to act like Blade Runner or Stargate SG1 or even Star Trek is a bit off target.
Star Wars has always owed a lot more to Edgar Rice Burroughs that to Robert E. Heinlein.
I can accept the need to conform to the aesthetic of the first film. My problem is mainly with low-tech things that are clearly contrivances to drive the plot or make scenes more exciting—such as the extension cord business, or Chirrut exposing himself to enemy fire to reach a toggle switch, or Jyn having to go to another workstation on an extended platform to “align the antenna.”
To be fair, this kind of thing has always turned up in Star Wars (Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam, for example) but I thought it was all too obvious in Rogue One. The moment that tower appeared on the screen, I knew where the film was going.
I have to admit that the second Jyn crept out to that tiny, suspended platform to access what would appear to be a critical control (which you’d think would be a BIT more accessible if it’s that crucial), my first thought was “Ah…standard Imperial architecture…”
Yup - and the force is essentially magic, so it’s easy to handwave things away.
Although I do still notice plotholes too and like my film makers to avoid them, I have to say I’m a lot more tolerant of them since the brilliant “plot holes in WWII” thread. Even the worst plotholes in movies are generally less than the ones in real life.
Not exactly. C-3PO and R2-D2 appear in Season 1, Episode 1 of Star Wars Rebels, on a secret mission. They were returned to Bail Organa at the end of the episode for a small reward, but not told who he was. They find out later, of course.
Saw this last week. I’m sure it’s been commented on sometime in the past many pages, but Galen Erso is maybe not the genius that he’s made out to be. What kind of cunning plan is it to engineer a weakness in a super weapon and then say “If you want to exploit it, go to a highly guarded Imperial facility and steal the plans”? That just makes no sense. It makes even less sense when you consider he addressed the message to his possibly dead daughter. Who, if she was alive, would have to take on the task of infiltrating the Imperial equivalent of the Pentagon.
Sadly, they could have written their way around this easily; the location of the weak point could have been in the hologram that got destroyed on Jedha. It would have taken two seconds of script tweaking to have Erso say “…the blueprints for the Death Star are on Scarif, but I smuggled out a copy and the weak spot is…” boom Jedha gets destroyed, rocks fall on the hologram player, and what’s her name has to go to Scarif.
He wasn’t expecting to be dead when it was completed. The convoluted part was necessary after that unexpectedly happened (and was caused by the Rebels own misstep).
Again, we don’t know if he included a copy of the plans or not (as you mentioned, the message got destroyed along with everything within a few hundred miles of it). I thought it was Bohdi’s idea to grab a copy of the plans from Scarif so they could find the weakness.
As it is, IIRC, his message did include that he’d left the reactor vulnerable (I don’t think the exhaust shaft was necessarily his idea so much as a means the Rebels found to exploit that vulnerability he designed, presumably they could have come up with any other number of approaches depending on their resources, which included diminishing values of manpower and time as the plot progressed)
I was very happy to see The Force Awakens, but this movie made it look like crap.
One of the things I loved was the fact that the ships were small and rickety. There wasn’t sitting room, there was leaning room. And they could see hyperspace out the window while the ship was rattling through it. Made the whole thing seem excitingly perilous, like the old maritime and early aviation adventures that Space Opera patterned itself after. But I don’t like the implications of such travel being so nearly instantaneous.
I’m looking at the explanation of hyperspace travel in the Age of Empires RPG. As an article on EnWorld recently pointed out, much of what became cannon in the Star Wars universe came originally from the West End RPG, so I don’t dismiss the value of the RPG as source material. According to the book, the following guidelines apply to a Class 1 hyperdrive travel times:
Within a sector - 10 to 24 hours
Within a region - 10 to 72 hours
Between regions - 3 days to a week
Across the galaxy - 1-3 weeks
And for each class above first that your hyperdrive is, add the same amount of time again. Of course, reading further it turns out that ‘sector’ and ‘region’ are as much political divisions as they are spatial. And also these are not indicated on the galactic map provided. But if we take two points on the opposite ends of the galaxy, say Mon Calamari and Red Nebula and assume that travel takes the max of 3 weeks for a class 1 hyperdrive, that’s a hypotenuse of 24 map units, each taking 21 hours to travel (rounding to 2 significant digits). Between Tatooine and Alderaan expect 164 hours of travel time. Between Yavin and Scarif, 122 hours.
Sigh.
I agree that the character development could have been improved, but I was moved with the pathos and the valor of the deaths nonetheless. As the battle raged on, I assumed that I was going to end up complaining about them not having the balls to just kill off the entire raiding party. When they established that the plans would be transmitted and not delivered by hand I realized that by God they really might just let the whole crew die. And when the Death Star showed up, that was all she wrote.
I’ll tell you whose death hit me the hardest: K-250. His characterization was not as vivid as that of the monk pals, but his brooding resentment of his own servitude underlay everything he said. He wasn’t against the rebels, but he resented not having a choice. He resented having to violate another droid to get them the information they needed. And he was touched when one person, Jynn, trusted him enough to hand him a blaster. That small gesture gave his acceptance of his own death in order to give the humans a slim chance to complete the mission an emotional valence. It happened so fast, but it haunted me much more than the slow deaths of the monks (or one monk and heavy weapons guy) or the [Protagonist, Female] and [Protagonist, Male]. The movies don’t deal much with the troubling implications of droid sentience, and I was glad they put in some nod to that issue.
I thought schlepping their asses down off the tower for no reason other than to meet the shockwave on the beach instead of the tower was long and pointless. I also don’t quite buy that they fired the death beam at the top of the tower instead of just in the center of the area. Sure, I like the characters coming to terms with the unstoppable death wave. But setting that scene up was just too contrived for me. And the irony that the beam hit Peter Principle directly was not worth putting up with such contrivance.
My next favorite character was Admiral FishBalls. His only regret is he didn’t go all Leeeroy Jenkins first. I could have used more scenes of people having to make room for his balls.
I appreciate your resume for a writing job on Robot Chicken, but I think it’s been canceled.