I was thinking about how the end of the movie recontextualizes the first scene between Leia and Vader in Star Wars, and I realized there’s been a bit of a plot hole in the original movie right from the beginning that I’d never noticed before. Star Wars opens with the iconic shot of Leia’s ship in a running battle with a Star Destroyer. They get boarded, and try to violently repel the boarders, killing a few Stormtroopers before being overrun. When Vader finally gets his hands on Leia, she’s all “We’re on a peaceful mission!” Lady, if you’re on such a peaceful mission, why were you shooting at the cops? Vader represents the legitimate legal authority in the galaxy, however badly the concept of “legitimate legal authority” may have decayed in the galactic society at that point. If she genuinely wanted to trick Vader into thinking she was on a normal, non-plan-stealing ambassadorial mission, she’d have cut engines as soon as the Star Destroyer showed up and peacefully allowed him to search the ship. Really, the only way that interaction ever made any sense was as Leia just brazenly bullshitting Vader, like a thief caught crawling out a broken window with a sack full of jewels trying to convince the cop that he just forgot his keys.
Or a daughter with one leg still out her bedroom window telling her father she didn’t just sneak in from being out past curfew?
It also explains how Vader is a lot more out-and-out angry rather than his trademark approach of calmly choking out those who have failed him. He literally watched Leia’s ship sail off with the stolen data, right in front of him. And she’s telling him to his face that that didn’t just happen, as if she thinks he’s actually stupid enough to fall for such an obvious lie. He’s not mad because she’s a rebel and a traitor (take her away!), he’s blustering because of a degree of blatant disrespect he likely doesn’t get often, let alone from teenagers.
I like to think she’s a brazenly fearless bullshitter. Anakin’s daughter after all.
DV: Give me the disk with the plans to the Death Star that I literally just saw your troops put on this ship with my own two mechanical eyes three minutes ago.
PL: Fuck you. What plans?
She’d have to be, it’s literally the only way it makes sense for her to be at the battle and for them to be on her ship afterwards.
Well, I mean, those could have been another pair of droids too. Not to sound racist or anything, but a lot of Protocol Droids and Astromech Droids tend to look alike to the untrained eye.
My best guess is that Leia was on Yavin, just not at the meeting for whatever reason. Maybe she had other stuff to attend to while her dad was representing Alderaan. Papa Organa tells her to grab a ship and go to Tatooine to find Obi Wan and ask for his help. Rogue One goes Rogue, as rogues are wont to do, and many of the Rebel leaders use the opportunity to jump into the fray, either because they wanted a chance to fight, or because they realize the cat’s out of the bag now.
Leia, being a Skywalker at heart, impulsively jumps in as well, and she’s in the perfect position to board the crippled flagship and send her men aboard to grab the plans off the databank (this is my fanwank theory for why her ship is docked and why all of the Rebels we see in that scene are dressed like the personnel on her ship. It’s unlike Leia to spend the battle hiding out in the hangar bay when we see other corvettes in the action, and all of the other crew I recall actually seeing aboard that ship earlier were Mon Calamari).
How about this one? Around that same time, did you notice the guys playing Dejarrik (Chewie’s holo-chess game) “old-school” style with miniatures instead of holograms?
One other thing that bugged me, and maybe it’s just me. We saw Jyn in the borrowed imperial uniform she wore at the end back in the 1st teaser trailer. Since seeing that image in the trailer, I’d assumed those sticks coming out of her back were some kind of weapon. Kind of like Bobbie Morse’s, Nightwing’s, or Daredevil’s fighting sticks. But apparently, either I was just wrong, or any scene where she used them got cut. It’s not like she didn’t know hand-to-hand combat, we saw her kick butt earlier. Does anyone know what those are supposed to be? I avoided all spoilers since the teaser, so was any clue given elsewhere? Is that weird uniform from some other source?
You may be right. The esthetics of the movie tired me, I just can’t take them any more.
Rocky 4 was the same basic story, but it had interesting characters.
Also, the acting was bad, the characters flat, too much action-trumps-dialogue. At no point in the film did I care about the characters. It felt like those YouTube fan-fiction videos but with more budget.
Why would anyone believe Jyn? Why would anyone join her in a suicide attack after a simple, generic, not particularly moving speech?
Maybe the Empire actually built them out of plastic?
Although they looked more gray in the originals.
A good point. However, I get the sense that many systems still enjoy a certain degree of autonomy and that the Empire may not have legal authority, even if it has de facto authority. But yeah, it’s difficult to reconcile Leia’s corvette trading turbolaser blasts with what is obviously a legitimate warship under Imperial flag and then crying “diplomatic immunity”.
Right, and when Artoo first shows the snippet of Leia’s video in Luke’s workshop, and Luke asks who she is, Threepio replies “I’m afraid I’m not quite sure sir. I think she was a passenger on our last voyage. A person of some importance, I believe.” So they are definitely not part of Leia’s entourage.
Another interesting point - the officer Vader chokes (manually) at the beginning of Ep IV is Captain Antilles. Who certainly knew where the rebel base is according to this movie. But Vader was so pissed off about the plans he killed the guy before he found out what else he knew. Not quite a screw up at the epic level of Commander “Hold your fire, there’s no life forms.”, but still pretty bad.
I saw it based on the strength of the reviews. I really enjoyed it, but yes, it’s a war movie in the SW universe. It doesn’t have the magic of the Force (aside from the one martial art guy… and what, even a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it’s East Asian looking guys that develop martial arts?! ), so I think in the long run it’ll be fairly forgettable, but definitely an entertaining couple of hours.
Though I will say that CGI Tarken kept taking me out of the film a bit. Couldn’t they have hologrammed him instead (it would alleviate the uncanny valley aspect).
Eh, that seems like a silly reason to shoehorn them in. In any event, it would’ve just been easier to place them on the Tantive IV instead of at the rebel base on Yavin 4 (where C3PO has no reason to not know they’re rebels). Although I suppose having their cameo at that point would break up the action sequence there.
I was unaware about the Clone Wars connection, but my point remains that none of that is important to the plot of the movie. It does give some exposition about her background, but she could’ve just as easily been a random criminal or bounty hunter or ex-soldier without needing to be part of his rebellion. And the rebel extremists didn’t really matter either (and if anything made the first part of the movie more confusing than it needed to be).
Re Tarkin he seemed to change between shots from basically normal to the occassional nightmarish. I suspect there were lots of shots of the real Cushing (perhaps frames from the original) which were used and those were the realistic looking ones.
In the case of Leia, I thought she was fine except they showed her as she looked in ROTJ, not the teen with some remaining puppy fat she really was in 1976 when it was shot.
And not appearing in Ep4 is easy to explain without any handwaving.
First they wouldn’t head straight back to Yavin because that could compromise the base.
And second, we don’t see all of the rebels on Yavin just the fighter pilots and ground crew preparing for the attack on the death star.
But I will forgive the filmmakers for that just because they brought red and gold leader back for the space battle. I may have squealed in delight when they were on screen.
I’m surprised at all of the criticism about the look of Tarkin.
I went in pretty blind, having avoided everything except the first teaser trailer (I almost made it in without even knowing Vader was in it- that got spoiled for me less than a week before seeing the movie!). From the teaser, I actually thought Mendelsohn was Tarkin and I was critical that he didn’t look old enough. From his first appearance in the first scene, it was obvious that Mendelsohn wasn’t Tarkin so then I wasn’t sure Tarkin would even be in the film.
When I did finally see Tarkin, and throughout the film, I thought it was amazing that they got such a convincing double who was also a sufficiently talented actor. Throughout the entire film, I thought I was watching a new actor who, based on a natural resemblance to Cushing aided by make-up and lighting, was turning in an impressively convincing performance in continuity with the first film.
It wasn’t until I got home and read the Wiki article that I realized they did it with a motion capture actor on set, CGI, and a voice actor who has experience matching Cushing as Tarkin.
So, to see all the criticism about him being in the uncanny valley, I just don’t get it. For me, it was done extremely convincingly.
Leia was more obviously a CGI aided stand-in for me but not so much that I didn’t think it looked like a real person. It was more because she looked so much like Carrie Fisher but not exactly. Upon watching it a second time, I think she’s done very well. Definitely looks like a real person in frame with the other actors. I think it looks like she’s got more eye make-up on than Fisher ever had as Leia, more dark eyeliner along her bottom eyelids. I think if not for the eye make-up, it would have been nearly perfect.
The space shots are quite fantastic. During the original series we saw basically what was state of the art then; Alderaan looks suspiciously like Earth from somewhere between the Earth and the moon; i.e the Apollo programme pictures. In the battle over Scraiff, we see large structures in orbit around a conveniently mostly waterworld planet, looking like shots of the ISS.
), so I think in the long run it’ll be fairly forgettable, but definitely an entertaining couple of hours.
