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Spoilers Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - Grading & Discussion

Grade the movie.


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A little startup company called ILM

The eyes are the window to the soul. The eyes are the hardest part to nail down and you usually tell if it's a CGI face.

The de-aging works great for someone who's alive to reference.

People that have passed are a bit harder.
Yeah, no. Those were both really bad, too, particularly with motion. In the pictures you included, Downey even looks bad in a still.

I get that some people aren't as sensitive to it, but I certainly am. It's nauseating.
 
Yep - Hell, in the original 'Star Wars' - there's NO indication that the Emperor was a Sith or even knew much about the Force (probably because everyone involved in production at the time thought the movie would be a one off - bomb at the theatres; but Lucas and FOX would recoup via merchandising.)

Once Star Wars became a mega hit - and Lucas knew he could actually tell the story he had originally come up with - in ESB, he started re-aligning everything to fit his original narrative.

Didn't Fox give away the merchandise rights to Lucas in return for a cut in his Director salary? Because at that point in time merchandise was more or less non-existant
 
Watched this yesterday. Solid B+, I liked it.

Not sure if discussed upthread but one hole I noticed straightaway was - R2 and C3PO were already on Yavin. How would Leia get them onboard her cruiser to jettison them over Tattoine with the plans? If she picked them up while being persued by vader then she could have just delivered the plans herself no?
 
Watched this yesterday. Solid B+, I liked it.

Not sure if discussed upthread but one hole I noticed straightaway was - R2 and C3PO were already on Yavin. How would Leia get them onboard her cruiser to jettison them over Tattoine with the plans? If she picked them up while being persued by vader then she could have just delivered the plans herself no?

Captain Antilles hadn't left yet, so R2 and C3PO was still wandering around, I guess...
 
Michael Douglas' digital de-aging is a revolutionary breakthrough in special effects, while Downey Jr. is more noticeably off in comparison but still vastly superior to digital de-aging done even less than ten years ago and certainly less cartoony than Carrie Fisher's de-aging.

Ok, considering what we see of the Empire's inner workings and the destructively jealous mindset of its top brass in the events of Rogue One the Galactic Empire's chance for being a stable, durable regime was pretty much fecked as soon as A New Hope and was trapped in a economic/political/military death spiral before the Battle of Endor commenced. The Galactic Empire had frittered away much of its legitimacy and popular support (this shrinking goodwill permanently blown away with Alderaan), got bogged down in millions of insurgency campaigns throughout the Galaxy and had its Navy unable to hold down the systems everywhere, and so the Imperials became fatally fixated on the Death Star, a symbol for their own fear of losing control really, rather than a symbol of power.

The Death Star blowing up was a huge body blow the reeling Empire never quite recovered from and it was on borrowed time from that point on. And even if the Death Star repelled the Rebel attack at Yavin it was ultimately only a glorified giant hammer that would only work in the short term to suppress the intangible ongoing crisis of the galactic population's growing unease and dislike at Emperor Palpatine's one sided authority. Palpatine was forced to build a second Death Star to vainly shore up his rapidly crumbling credibility, even if his minions were probably unable to fully finish it (and perhaps why it was expended as bait at Endor).

And elderly and dysfunctional as the Senate was, Palpatine dismantling the Old Republic's institutions and re-distributing direct authority amongst his loyal Moffs and Grand Moffs to protect his absolute power was a paradox (shared with real life dictatorships) of the Galactic Empire sowing confusion while trying to impose order, having a horizontal military thugocracy that encouraged fiefdoms and squabbling (when you had the Empire's chain of command inhabited by magnates like Tarkin, Vader, Jerjerrod, Motti, and Krennic who couldn't stand the sight of each other), a relatively chaotic system which would no doubt erupt into open fighting once Palpatine was no longer at the wheel...
 
We know in the Star Wars universe they can't track ships through Hyperspace without a homing beacon (A New Hope and Rebels shows us this)

So when the Tantive IV jumped, there is no way Vader could have found it right away, unless he attached one when the camera wasn't looking.

Pablo (Story Group guy) said on twitter that he doesn't think ANH is 10 minutes after Rogue One.

https://twitter.com/pablohidalgo/status/812047747385675776
 
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Normally you can't track a ship through hyperspace, but the old Radio Drama suggested that Vader did just that (or else he already has someone onboard that ship as a spy and used that to track the ship...such as a droid), and came out of hyperspace right behind Leia's ship over Tatooine.

Unless Leia attempted to do a bunch of jumps to lose the Empire between Scariff and Tatooine, the travel time between those to systems should be the time between Rogue One and A New Hope.
 
Considering there are two droids on board that he has an incredible long history with and his daughter on top of it, it's no wonder the force guided him to the right ship, albeit for the wrong reasons.
Never mind his son and former master on the planet at the coordinates they came out of hyperspace.
He was not aware why, but the force connections here make sense retroactively.
 
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So when the Tantive IV jumped, there is no way Vader could have found it right away, unless he attached one when the camera wasn't looking.


This is why I believe that the Tantive IV should not have been so close to Scarif during the battle. Jyn could have transmitted the Death Star plans if the Tantive IV had been further. And the mission to steal the plans should have been sanctioned and planned by the Rebel Alliance from the beginning.
 
It was....okay, but I won't, unlike TFA, be watching it more than once. While I understand why the movie had to end the way it did, I really can't get motivated to sit through every main character biting the dust, one by one.
 
Huh. Your reason for not wanting to rewatch the film is one of the things that makes it better, to me, than TFA.
 
This is why I believe that the Tantive IV should not have been so close to Scarif during the battle. Jyn could have transmitted the Death Star plans if the Tantive IV had been further. And the mission to steal the plans should have been sanctioned and planned by the Rebel Alliance from the beginning.

I thought they explained in the movie why they couldn't do that.
 
I'm also sure in retrospect the Rebels would acknowledge that they should have gone all-in from the beginning, but it's easy to say that in retrospect.
 
I thought they explained in the movie why they couldn't do that.
Yeah, the plan was to grab the plans and take off before the Imperials knew they'd even been stolen. How exactly they expected to escape in just a cargo shuttle is a bit of a mystery, but the point is that the idea to transmit was something they improvised on the fly. In order for it to work, they needed a fleet in orbit to 1) take down the shield and 2) receive the transmission.

Plus I think people (including the EU authors who wrote the previous versions of this incident) are forgetting the wording of the ANH crawl: -
It is a period of civil war.
Rebel spaceships, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel
spies managed to steal secret
plans to the Empire's
ultimate weapon, the DEATH
STAR, an armored space
station with enough power to
destroy an entire planet
.​

As I've underlined, it makes it clear that the theft took place in the midst of a battle that definitely involved space ships, which were definitely dispatched from Yavin 4. So the idea that Leia's ship received the transmission while elsewhere just doesn't track.
Also of note: "have you been in many battles?" "several I think..."
Clearly Leia was not meant to have been keeping clear of the action.
 
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I think the dialogue said that the Admiral has gone up to the ship and that he intends to go to battle.
So he hadn't already gone, he was just getting ready, I assume it took some time to organize all those ships during which the droids boarded as well.
I wonder if that whole scene was meant to be a funny "3.5th wall" moment, because C3PO's basically saying "Oh look, the Rebels are going into battle, sure am glad I'm not going along with them!" and of course, we the audience know that they will be in the middle of the battle, and they will manage to get the plans to the Rebel Base.
 
I think the dialogue said that the Admiral has gone up to the ship and that he intends to go to battle.
So he hadn't already gone, he was just getting ready, I assume it took some time to organize all those ships during which the droids boarded as well.
Well, except there wasn't all that much time to do it.

Rogue One had already engaged the Empire, and had been fighting long enough for word to get back to Yavin. The first wave of Rebels arrived soon thereafter, with the Admiral amongst them. Yet we saw C-3PO and R2-D2 bitching about it as ship after ship had already taken off to join the battle.

Considering the time it takes to travel there via hyperspace as well, there just wasn't enough time for them to get onboard.
 
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