I don’t know your kids, so I don’t see how this invalidates my statement in the least. Bully for your kids though.
My kids are better than your kids, at least to me. :)
My kids haven’t seen any Star Wars movies. At least not yet. But I’ll report back on their stack rankings of the movies once we do.
My 12 year old saw the latest 2 main SW movies and Rogue One. He liked them all. This past weekend I thought I’d have him watch the original. He immediately noticed the decades old special effects and mentioned that quite a bit. But, after it was over, he was all ready to watch TESB. So, that was cool. He’s not at that teenage stage where he would poo poo anything older than he is.
No, god damn you. Rogue One was a perfectly emcapsulated stand alone story. Why you gotta do this?
Unless it’s a Saw’s renegades movie about the interregnum between the prequels and ANH. I could be game for that.
It apparently will have Diego Luna, so I’m down for the adventures of Cassian before he met Jyn.
A prequel to a prequel? It’s like prequel-ception. I can’t even remember what direction time moves in anymore.
Well, I went into Rogue One completely unspoilered, and up until the end of the movie, was already assuming it was going to be part of a trilogy, so I guess I’m not quite as disappointed as I should be.
Finally got around to seeing this. I apologize if I’m reiterating ponts that have been made many times over, but in general I thought the movie suffered from a finale that went on too long, a dearth of exposition, and incompetence on the part of the militaries that really made a farce of things.
I’ll start on the last part: They steal a shuttle and hope the codes lasted as long as they need to get through the shield: that was the plan. From there on, it should have been obvious they were effed, since they did not know the Rebels would follow up with a task force; they planned on blowing things up way before they knew they could get to the plans surreptitiously, and if doing that, had no plan once the Imperials pulled the sphincter shut. In short, their planning incompetence really should have spelled the end of the movie in failure. Good news! The Empire has no idea how to deal with a rebel attack. Sure, they landed a few Black Stormtroopers in kinda-sorta the right place later on, but otherwise it was one befuddled captain or another falling down over and over. Stormtroopers walk out of their bunker like a bunch of prisoners seeing the sun for the first time, minutes after the alert has sounded… were they all asleep? Tie fighters take forever to launch, but when they do, it’s an entire squadron… did the green light not get flicked or something? Why did those star destroyers sit there forever while the rebels drop bombs on everything? (Oh, because they need to crash into the shield generator… sigh.) And then the rebels. All we needed was a few lines like, “Y-wings, target the Tie hangars!” “Cruisers, encircle the SD’s! Keep them guessing! Frigates flank right!” or whatever. As it is the capital ships sat there and did nothing… until Vader shows up.
Ah yes, what is it that Vader did to suddenly destroy a pile of Calamari Cruiser, frigates, gunships etc? Pop out of hyperspace, was about all I saw. Okay, so if appearing a Star Destroyer in precise coordinates in exactly the right time in the right place to magically destroy an entire task force is Vader’s mastery of strategy and the Force, he couldn’t quite plan a little blockade to stop escaping ships? (all that was needed here were a couple of tie’s getting blasted out of the way or something and I’d forgive a little quicker).
Never mind that the battle on the ground was just a complete mess, no landmarks to sell the tension of their positions. There’s a reason a war movie tells you, ‘this is an important building, this is the bridge, remember them’, because you’ll understand how far they can retreat, where the last stand is, feel the attrition happening to your heroes. Originally I thought they had maybe twenty troopers on the shuttle? During the attack it felt like 50? Who cares! If this was Star Wars trying to be a war movie… it was a pretty bad one. War movies need visible strategy or tactics, or it’s just an action movie (yes).
Speaking of those rebel troopers… my twelve year old self can’t believe I’m writing this, but I’d trade twenty minutes of that final battle for more insight into the Rebel power structure, or how all those troopers were clandestinely convinced to join up. A montage jumping from the shower stalls to the gun range to the hangars, notes passed around, hey there’s action to be had, don’t miss it… etc. As it is we have a bunch of moon faced guys in garb suddenly right there on the deck and no one giving them a funny glance.
The details were just so dissatisfying.
Edit: oh crap, I’m replying to a month old post
Finally, somebody gets it. This is not a good movie.
In Star Wars and RotJ they explain the big battles and the actions the characters are taking. In this it was just a giant mess. Plus, I still challenge you to name a character from this movie without Google. Darth Vader doesn’t count.
We’ve played this game, and I can do so easily.
As for the tactics, I have to feel like this criticism ignores much of what occurs. What is spelled out.
Yes the plan was incomplete, but let’s face it, it should be. It was two dozen people going rogue. There is a plan though, and that plan is never really one of escape once they get caught. It is create a rolling series of distractions to draw attention away from the mission. There are reasons for that spelled out too, namely that they needed to draw guards away from the archives.
Look if people don’t like the movie, whatever. But the ending was he best part, and claiming it makes no sense just means you weren’t paying attention.
Jyn Erso. What do I win?
Sure I was! The movie makes it explicitly clear that the only way to transmit the plans is if the shield is down/open. So regardless of whether they plan on surviving, the only way to succeed is to fly their shuttle back out again with the plans, because the Rebels explicitly turned down the mission, and a giant task force able to take on two star destroyers, destroy the shield, and receive the data was not on the table. So, creating a diversion to pull troopers away from the data storage is dumb, because being alerted, obviously the imperials will lock the shield: game over. Obviously the second thought any competent garrison commander will have after lockdown is: rebels here? How? Oh, the one shuttle next to where the rebels are blowing thing s up! Game over. Like I said, good thing it was new year’s eve the night before, or something.
Yes. The Imperials have otherwise had great military responses to the rebels.
The thing that saves Rogue One for me is when they use the Death Star it feels like a tragedy. After coming off The Force Awakens this was a huge relief.
They used the Starkiller destroyed nearly entire Republic government, military, and most populated planets, you don’t feel it at all in the film. Instead it feels like the end of A New Hope! This is was so insanely jarring it launched me right out of episode 8.
A New Hope featured the destruction of a single planet, Alderaan, and its destruction was marked and mourned by Obi-wan, who felt a disturbance in the Force “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” Nobody, by contrast, seemed to mourn or feel much besides “that’s a shame” when nine planets were destroyed in The Force Awakens . It’s not a pretty portrait of how far we’ve come: In 2015, Star Wars explosions were bigger, the death count was astronomically greater, and we cared a great deal less.
That’s why Rogue One is such an important and welcome corrective. Edwards respects death more than he respects spectacle. He makes it count. He wanted to tell a story about the grunts on the ground — about the little people who live on these planets. Thanks to him, the horrors of the Death Star feel real instead of merely narrative or worse, cool. (I’m almost tempted to read a scene where Tarkin and Krennic admire the Death Star at work as a winking critique of The Force Awakens, which chose to show the equivalent of several holocausts at a similarly cold and beautiful remove. We don’t even learn the names of all the annihilated planets.)
I can name several characters from Phantom Menace, besides Darth Vader/Anakin, Obi-Wan, Yoda, etc. So I guess it’s the better movie?
I remember a couple of character names: Diego Luna, Robot Alan Tudyk… you know, just like I remember some of the characters’ names in The Great Escape (Steve McQueen with the bouncy ball!), The Dirty Dozen (Creepy Telly Savalas!), and Stalag 17 (Col. Hoooooogaaaaan!).
If I forget some details like character names, I do remember their characterizations. And I also thought it was interesting that as their Final Fight became ever more dire and their chances of survival shrank to zero, the theme of sacrifice was increased. Their names became irrelevant, and the importance of saving the MacGuffin Death Star Plans exploded in value. The characters – the Captain, the Sassy Robot, the Sadsack Traitor, The Blind Monk, His Boyfriend, and the Woman Who Made It All Happen, became Forgotten Soldiers, worthy of a memorial, even if their names weren’t etched in it.
(The exception to the lack of named memorials, of course, was Admiral Raddus, sometimes known as the Ackbar ripoff. His name graced the Resistance flagship in Episode VIII, and in that movie again the name Raddus was tied to potentially wasting a mighty starship to risk the potential greater good.)
Cassian Andor
Galen Erso
Director Krennic
Bodhi Rook
Saw Gerrera
Heff Tober
Chirrut Imwe
Blaze Malbus
K-2SO
Bistan
Really now, this is a dumb argument. And I realize I have contributed.