Perhaps if they knew about him it would. He’s not a Jedi, and at the time of the Purge he was probably just a kid, begging on the streets of Jedha City. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of galactic census of Force-sensitives, seeing as Anakin went unnoticed until Obi-Won happened to wind up on Tattooine.
I’ve been meaning to pick these up. I’ve heard great things, thanks for the reminder. Perhaps some Christmas money will be spent at the comic book store.
Donnie Yen is in his mid-fifties. Assuming his character is roughly the same age, he’d have been in his thirties when the Jedi fell. The film also hints pretty strongly that he was affiliated with the Jedi in someway - the whole “Keeper of the Whills” thing discussed upthread, plus he seems pretty intimately familiar with the Jedi philosophy, which he’s unlikely to have developed after the Jedi were wiped out.
That said, he’s not an actual Jedi, and the purge wasn’t about eliminating force users, it was about eliminating the Jedi as a religious/political force in the Galaxy. My guess is that Chirrut was identified as Force sensitive by the Jedi order, but turned out not to be strong enough to become an actual Jedi - which I’d imagine would be pretty common. It’s also fitting with Sith arrogance to view someone like Chirrut - a little bit of Force ability, but not enough to make it as a Jedi - as too weak to bother with. It’s also fitting with Sith assholishness that they’d deliberately let someone like Chirrut live, just so he could be reminded on a daily basis how totally everything he loved and cherished has been destroyed.
It’s also possible that he was blinded relatively recently, and his blindness was tied to an increase in his Force sensitivity. Perhaps when the purge happened, he was sighted, but didn’t have any noticeable Force ability - and was later blinded, causing a nascent Force sensitivity to blossom in compensation.
Or he could have just been hiding out. Obi Wan hid out for nearly two decades on Darth Vader’s home planet, after all.
[YODA]Heh, What know you of Jedi[/YODA]
**Looks at Moderator Tag **
If I made that joke two days ago…I wouldn’t be nearly as scared as I am now. Damn they made Vader vicious again.
Donnie Yen’s in his fifties? I would’ve pegged him in his thirties at the latest. The guy looks good for his age.
The impression I got of Jedha is that it was a very significant place in the early history of the Jedi, but that it was all-but-forgotten long ago in favor of the Temples on Coruscant and Tython. The ruined statues in the desert look like they’re been broken since long before the Empire was a thing - I get the impression that even the Jedi forgot about the Whills a long time ago, and if not for the other deposits the Empire wouldn’t even have cared about the place.
Boys and I went tonight and we give it 6 thumbs up. Our little hometown theatre only showed it in 3d today, witch I’m not a huge fan of but it worked in this case. Loved the flow, went very fast. This movie is exactly what I would have imagined a movie from the expanded universe would have been and that makes me happy!
Maybe. On the other hand, the place had enough lightsaber crystals lying around to power a planet-destroying laser canon. Which I’d guess would be a lot? Seems odd that the Jedi would lose track of such a valuable resource.
Tragically, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get a tediously detailed backstory for the planet of Jedha.
When that light saber kicked on, I think I literally sat up and made an “O” face.
Perhaps it’s because the Jedi forgot Jedha so long ago that it has such vast reserves of kyber, as compared to the caves on Ilum where the Jedi got their crystals in the decades before the Empire.
There’ll likely be some new EU material to address this in a few years.
They’ll likely be a movie on it.
Jyn was female, the rest were all male. No female redshirts, no female sidekicks. They tried to not be sexist by having a female protagonist but forgot about making the rest of the crew non-sexist. Compare the film with Sigourney Weaver and Aliens: there were both male and female redshirts and two of the principal sidekicks - Newt and Vasquez - were female.
There was at least one female X-Wing pilot and the U-Wing pilot during the assault on Scarif was a woman.
I don’t understand how that comes “by virtue of trying to not be sexist”, I guess. If Jyn’s a male character, or they made Jyn a female character for non-trying-not-to-be-sexist reasons, that doesn’t seem to make a difference to all the rest of the characters. If having fewer female major characters (does Mon Mothma count?) is sexist, that seems like a problem coming from… well, sexism, not of trying not to be sexist.
Speaking of, when I was booking my ticket I checked out what the difference in seats taken for 3D and 2D showings was. 3D seems… not popular here. I am very biased because 3D doesn’t work for me, but that’s pleasing.
Thinking about this this morning, I had a sudden epiphany: The Death Star main weapon is, in actual fact, a planet-sized lightsaber!
Think about it. People have complained for years about how the individual beams “combining” to make the main beam isn’t how a laser would work. But, it’s entirely in keeping with what we’ve seen of how lightsabers work, with the crystals not only providing power, but focus and control of the blade as well. The designer of the Death Star simply expanded on that control, while scaling the whole thing up to the size of a planet.
A few assorted thoughts:
Tarkin’s and Leia’s appearances dipped into the Uncanny Valley. For Tarkin, it really actually worked because it’s Tarkin. You probably should feel a bit offput by the man. Leia’s CGI wasn’t really any better, but they kept it to a minimum. For a few moments I was worried they were going to shoot the entire scene from over her shoulder, so I was pretty pleased when she turned to the camera at the end.
The Tantine IV being at the battle raises a few questions, especially since C3PO and R2 are still on the ground when the fleet is taking off. Presumably Leia’s ship took off later. And I agree that her joining in the battle on a whim is perfectly in character not only for her, but for the Alliance as we see it in this film, since literally the entire battle kicked off because some of the Rebels went all Leeroy Jenkins and others used that as an impetus to jump in after them.
I’m guessing her corvette was docked with the flagship at the end specifically to offload the plans after the ship was disabled. Really they could have just transmitted them to her en route, but the scene of the plans escaping (getting passed along by a chain of Rebels who live just long enough to keep it moving, nice touch there in regards to the theme of self-sacrifice for the greater good)
And yes, Darth Vader’s scene was amazing. We’ve seen plenty of scenes with our heroes cutting through Imperial and Seperatist troops like a chainsaw through hot butter, but this time we get to see a Dark Lord of the Sith doing the same to a bunch of good guys. The one guy banging on the stuck door and desperately screaming for help perfectly sums the mood of that scene up.
The two guys Luke ran into at Mos Eisley would have had to have been on their way off Jeddha when we saw them here, but as Captain Mustache noted, the place was a powder keg with a lit fuse. They were likely booking it for exactly that reason.
I also liked how the Empire and the Rebel Alliance weren’t the black and white monolithic opposing forces we saw in the OT. Our main character is the daughter of an important Imperial engineer, with her whole family having the appropriate Galactic Imperial English accents and even an implied long relationship with Krennic which seemed to include social wine drinking visits. Presumably there are quite a few Imperials who are generally decent people who either don’t realize the full scope of how bad things are, or simply lack the courage or inspiration to do anything about it.
The Rebels, meanwhile, bicker and argue in their council meeting, with no less than three strategies suggested for what to do about the Death Star (open rebellion, scatter the fleets and hope for the best, surrender and hope for mercy) and no consensus. Another faction of Rebels are indicated to be such extremists that the Alliance will have nothing to do with them. Quite a few of the Rebels are stated to be right bastards, and it’s likely that many of them have quite a bit in common with more Imperials than they’d like to think about.
I loved the cameos from Gold and Red leaders. I actually cheered when they showed up. Also glad that Gold Squadron took down a Star Destroyer, after they got slaughtered almost to a man against the Death Star in the original film.
I think Alan Tudyk is in danger of getting cast as a sassy robot. They should make a film where he and David Spader play robot buddies.
Speaking of, the bit where K2 is taking the information he needs from an Imperial K2 droid made me a bit uncomfortable. It was probably supposed to.
And what others have said about Leia and Vader’s confrontation at the start of ANH make a lot of sense if you assume she’s been a bit of a troublemaker that the Empire could never quite pin anything on. Vader’s outburst at her about being a rebel and a traitor could basically be him pouncing having finally caught her red-handed. As for her bold-faced lie, at this point she’s straight up just stalling for time. She doesn’t have the plans any more. She might even be trying to troll him into killing her so that he won’t get anything useful from her.
And I’m sure I’ll think of other stuff, but the Alliance being so disjointed here when they seemed to be one big happy rebellion in the later films makes sense. Here they’ve been lurking in the shadows, trying to sabotage the Empire and restore the Republic without risking open confrontation because they don’t think they can win in a stand-up fight. The Death Star forces their hand, and with the battle seen in this film, the lid’s been blown off and there’s no getting it back on. The Rebels have no choice but to fight now, and with the Emperor dissolving the Senate (likely in response to this), there’s no pretending that the Empire is anything but what it is. They’re much more unified from this point on because they’re all backed into the corner with no way out but through the Empire.
Also, I really liked the battle at the end. It was quite interesting with the different stuff going on, to include the space battle, the aerial battle, the surface battle, and the heist itself.
That actually makes perfect sense. For the size of the thing, the Death Star is basically just getting into melee range with the planet anyways, so it makes sense that it is just a giant lightsaber which is skewering the planet.
On that topic, one of the Imperial projects mentioned in the archives was “Black Saber”, which made me think of the Legends novel “Darksaber”, which was about Yet Another Plot to build a Death Star, in this case a cheap knock-off many-corners-cut Huttese version which consists of the superlaser and little else. It could be something else entirely, of course, and the scene gives the impression that the Death Star is unique only in it’s scale, that the Empire has all manner of nasty super weapons and secret projects in store.
Yeah… that’s about a 1 to 20, maybe 1 to 10 ratio. While casting a female lead, the movie still made it look that women aren’t exceptionally fit to be either soldiers or pilots.
Yes, it was definitely in the movie. I giggled a bit with glee when I heard it.
The movie felt like it lacked heart. Andor’s speech about how he and the other volunteers have done horrible things in the name of the Rebellion and if they surrendered now, it would have all been for nothing seemed hollow and out of place. There hasn’t been any real suggestion in the other movies that the Rebellion was an “ends justify the means” type of group, even given their sometimes-guerilla insurgency, sometimes-uniformed opposing army nature. It seems like they just tried to cram in a Han Solo-like person into a mid-level Rebel fighter.
Did Obi-Wan serve Senator Organa though? Maybe this is featured in the Clone Wars show that I haven’t seen. Senator Organa never seemed to have an official military role and during his scenes in both Ep II and Ep III only seemed to have strictly political role.