Author Topic: Rogue One  (Read 15049 times)

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Offline MP-Ryan

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I thought CGI Tarkin was generally well done; in his first appearance you could definitely tell he was CGI, but in some of the subsequent shots there was considerable realism.  CGI Leia, on the other hand, was not well done; I suspect the filmmakers went "screw it, she's on screen for about 3 seconds, good enough."

Things I liked:
- No mumbo jumbo in the plot. It's a Star Wars film stripped down to basics.
- It shows what a disorganized cluster**** the Rebels were, which puts the context of the inefficiencies of the Rebellion in ANH in a greater context.  (I read a really great piece from a vet of the USMC on the tactics used in the ground fight and by the Rebel command structure generally that talks about how they were highly adaptable, but also inefficient, whereas the Empire is quite efficient with zero adaptability).
- The characters were generally well done.
- No embedded love story.
- SPACE BATTLES.

Quibbles (spoilered):
Spoiler:
The continuity from the end of Rogue One into ANH was generally good but left a few nagging details loose, and it all has to do with the transfer of the data from the flagship to Leia.  As it stands, the transition makes no sense - Leia claims in ANH that she's on a diplomatic mission to Alderan, but Vader clearly both saw her ship leave the flagship and tracked it to Tatooine.  This is just frickin' lazy writing; once outside the shield, it would have been trivial to have the flagship, after it was disabled, beam the data across space to a Rebel-friendly diplomatic ship.  This would have simultaneously explained both why it took Vader a while to track it down, and why Leia could maintain some fiction of plausible deniability.  Why no one spotted this or managed to fit that detail in is utterly beyond me, and it was completely possible to do.  All that needed to happen was instead of passing the disc from person to person and into the transport, the last person could have been stuffing it into a communications bank to retransmit while Vader mowed everyone down.  Utterly lost opportunity, which is why it bugged me.

The only other annoyance to me was why the hell did Vader's mask have bright red eyes?  They're black in the OT, and its just distracting.
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Offline zookeeper

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The only other annoyance to me was why the hell did Vader's mask have bright red eyes?  They're black in the OT, and its just distracting.

They seem to have quite a red tint in ANH, actually, although not necessarily in every release. So that's probably why, although I don't recall how red they were in this one.

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Finally saw it tonight.  I liked it.  MILES better than The Force Awakens, but then I also think that one's much worse than the prequels and looks like a SyFy channel movie that somehow got permission to use Star Wars IP. 

Plot works, except I'm not understanding how *spoilers below*.  No massive, unanswered questions or complete lack of reasons for what's going on.  Properly paced and reasoned out, allowing for some minor rushing of character development being as how it's a standalone and all. 
Space battles.  YES.  NOW we're back in the SW universe.  Ties, X-wings, Y-wings, Imperial Shuttles.  Hell, land battles too.  Except for the weird **.
The ending for the main characters, BRAVO.  If ***
Vader - now THAT'S how you work in old characters.  THAT's what a badass sith looks like.  (Except in his first appearance he looked to be walking all prissy like, not the lumbering strut from the original trilogy.  Anyone else catch that?)

A few things pulled me out of the movie.  The worst was the fact that my theater must have had something screwed up because the screen was WAY too dark.  It was about halfway through the movie before I stopped thinking "man I wish I could see what was going on."  Definitely different than the old "director wants to be edgy with overly dark tones" annoyance, something was clearly wrong.  But that's not the movie's fault, so on to other things.
The only one I haven't seen mentioned yet was our old friend shaky-cam action scenes.  Why anyone still thinks this is good cinematography is beyond me.  The rest I'll just throw my agreement to.  GCI Tarkin and Leia were the worst offenders.  REALLY creepy.  The hammerhead thing made me start thinking about physics in the middle of all the awesomeness.  The hatch was a little out of left field, but there was also plenty of that kind of stuff in the original trilogy so it still felt Star-Warsy and didn't really bother me.

Spoiler:
*the ending with playing hot potato with the plans disc fits with the beginning of ANH.  ANH implied it was a chased down undercover courier ship, not an escapee from a massive space battle almost Battle of Endor scale and Vader himself.  What the hell was Leia even doing in the middle of that?  The fact that it WAS a BoE level event is also a bit of a discontinuity, but I'll give that one a pass because it was awesome.

**not-quite-ATATs in a part of the timeline where we should be seeing the SAME equipment as the original trilogy, not those godawful 'precursor' types from the prequels.  Come to think of it some of the TIEs (what I assume were meant to be interceptors) had the same problem.

***they had survived somehow, that would have been really, REALLY bad.  Thank god they didn't try to force it.

Those were a transport variant of the AT-AT, the AT-CT, they are bigger but don't have much armor.
The Tie Interceptors were already in service at the time of Rogue One, but not yet in great numbers, the Striker is meant to be some atmospheric variant and some can double as troop transport.
« Last Edit: January 02, 2017, 06:04:08 pm by Det. Bullock »
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Offline Scotty

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I thought CGI Tarkin was generally well done; in his first appearance you could definitely tell he was CGI, but in some of the subsequent shots there was considerable realism.  CGI Leia, on the other hand, was not well done; I suspect the filmmakers went "screw it, she's on screen for about 3 seconds, good enough."

Things I liked:
- No mumbo jumbo in the plot. It's a Star Wars film stripped down to basics.
- It shows what a disorganized cluster**** the Rebels were, which puts the context of the inefficiencies of the Rebellion in ANH in a greater context.  (I read a really great piece from a vet of the USMC on the tactics used in the ground fight and by the Rebel command structure generally that talks about how they were highly adaptable, but also inefficient, whereas the Empire is quite efficient with zero adaptability).
- The characters were generally well done.
- No embedded love story.
- SPACE BATTLES.

Quibbles (spoilered):
Spoiler:
The continuity from the end of Rogue One into ANH was generally good but left a few nagging details loose, and it all has to do with the transfer of the data from the flagship to Leia.  As it stands, the transition makes no sense - Leia claims in ANH that she's on a diplomatic mission to Alderan, but Vader clearly both saw her ship leave the flagship and tracked it to Tatooine.  This is just frickin' lazy writing; once outside the shield, it would have been trivial to have the flagship, after it was disabled, beam the data across space to a Rebel-friendly diplomatic ship.  This would have simultaneously explained both why it took Vader a while to track it down, and why Leia could maintain some fiction of plausible deniability.  Why no one spotted this or managed to fit that detail in is utterly beyond me, and it was completely possible to do.  All that needed to happen was instead of passing the disc from person to person and into the transport, the last person could have been stuffing it into a communications bank to retransmit while Vader mowed everyone down.  Utterly lost opportunity, which is why it bugged me.

The only other annoyance to me was why the hell did Vader's mask have bright red eyes?  They're black in the OT, and its just distracting.
Spoiler:
It took a non-trivial amount of time for a dedicated high-bandwidth transmitter to beam the transmission to the Rebel ships; I rather doubt any of the Rebel ships had the same capability.  As is, "I'm on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan" is still technically correct, since that is where she's heading.  It's enough of an excuse to drown Vader in the equivalent of red tape, since there's little he can do to a sitting Imperial Senator without having damn solid evidence, which without the plans he does not.  The Senate isn't dissolved until some time later.

Frankly, I think the fact that people are calling this a plothole or lost opportunity is petty nitpicking of the most obnoxious order.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Uh, Scotty...

Spoiler:
Once the shield finally went down and the antenna was aligned, the upload took seconds.

Honestly, it's a quibble, but a legitimate one.  There were plenty of ways to conclude the film in a way that makes sense with the early events of ANH, and for some reason they didn't.  The way it was done was rather silly, and that's the only reason anyone is nitpicking it.
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Offline StarSlayer

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Uh, Scotty...

Spoiler:
Once the shield finally went down and the antenna was aligned, the upload took seconds.

Honestly, it's a quibble, but a legitimate one.  There were plenty of ways to conclude the film in a way that makes sense with the early events of ANH, and for some reason they didn't.  The way it was done was rather silly, and that's the only reason anyone is nitpicking it.

Spoiler:
Profundity being the largest capital ship present may have been the only vessel equipped with a receiver capable of digesting the transmission, otherwise every ship in the flotilla could have had a copy.  Since Tantive IV was docked when Profundity received the plans Vader may have felt like cutting out the middleman, figuratively and well literally.
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Offline Scotty

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Uh, Scotty...

Spoiler:
Once the shield finally went down and the antenna was aligned, the upload took seconds.

Honestly, it's a quibble, but a legitimate one.  There were plenty of ways to conclude the film in a way that makes sense with the early events of ANH, and for some reason they didn't.  The way it was done was rather silly, and that's the only reason anyone is nitpicking it.

Spoiler:
It's explicitly mentioned that the file is so large that it requires the use of the ****huge transmitter to get it to the Rebel fleet in the first place, so I think you're watching a drag race and assuming that the 20 year old sub-compact should be able to do that because it is also a car. :P

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

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Whether or not Ryan's off-the-cuff proposed solution can also be quibbled, the fact remains that the transition was REALLY rough and there's no clear way to get from where R1 ended to where ANH began WITHOUT quibbling, logical leaps and "well they could have done ____ and then it kinda makes sense".
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My question, is how quickly did C-3PO and R2-D2 board the Tantive IV, and how quickly did that dock with the Profundity? Or did the Tantive IV stop by Yavin to pick them up after the battle?

 

Offline zookeeper

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One unfortunate drawback of Rogue One is that it makes one aspect of TFA appear even more ridiculous: the Starkiller Base. Rogue One specifically paints the construction of the Death Star as a really difficult and monumental task. And that makes the idea that the First Order could build a superweapon several times more powerful seem quite a bit dumber.

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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My question, is how quickly did C-3PO and R2-D2 board the Tantive IV, and how quickly did that dock with the Profundity? Or did the Tantive IV stop by Yavin to pick them up after the battle?
**YES**

Thank you for pointing that one out.  They certainly wouldn't have returned to Yavin after the battle.  Otherwise, with the exception to recovering Kanobi, there would have been no need to go through any of the events from ANH.  The plans would already be in the hands of the rebels on Yavin.  I can't recall what C3PO said though, whether they planned on boarding the Tantive or not.
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Offline deathspeed

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Vader - now THAT'S how you work in old characters.  THAT's what a badass sith looks like.  (Except in his first appearance he looked to be walking all prissy like, not the lumbering strut from the original trilogy.  Anyone else catch that?)


I DID catch that, to the extent that I thought maybe a woman was wearing the costume - there was a lot of swivel in the hips.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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Offline Det. Bullock

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My question, is how quickly did C-3PO and R2-D2 board the Tantive IV, and how quickly did that dock with the Profundity? Or did the Tantive IV stop by Yavin to pick them up after the battle?
*groan*
They simply gave the order on the loudspeaker before they bothered to tell them to come aboard (it's a classic "nobody tells me anything!" gag), it's clear the Tantive IV was already at Yavin otherwise the droids would not have been there since their master was the captain of the damn ship.
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Offline Klaustrophobia

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I DID catch that, to the extent that I thought maybe a woman was wearing the costume - there was a lot of swivel in the hips.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I had the same thought about if it was a woman.
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Offline karajorma

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Well the film finally opened in China so I got to see it today!


Definitely miles better than TFA. That droid steals the show though. Minor problems with the ending but in general it's definitely the best Star Wars thing I've seen since RotJ.



 
Quibbles (spoilered):
Spoiler:
The continuity from the end of Rogue One into ANH was generally good but left a few nagging details loose, and it all has to do with the transfer of the data from the flagship to Leia.  As it stands, the transition makes no sense - Leia claims in ANH that she's on a diplomatic mission to Alderan, but Vader clearly both saw her ship leave the flagship and tracked it to Tatooine.  This is just frickin' lazy writing; once outside the shield, it would have been trivial to have the flagship, after it was disabled, beam the data across space to a Rebel-friendly diplomatic ship.  This would have simultaneously explained both why it took Vader a while to track it down, and why Leia could maintain some fiction of plausible deniability.  Why no one spotted this or managed to fit that detail in is utterly beyond me, and it was completely possible to do.  All that needed to happen was instead of passing the disc from person to person and into the transport, the last person could have been stuffing it into a communications bank to retransmit while Vader mowed everyone down.  Utterly lost opportunity, which is why it bugged me.

That's not my biggest problem with it.

Spoiler:
According to the film Leia gets the plans for the superweapon that threatens the entire galaxy at the end of the film while she is at the big battle. She knows that these plans are vital to the rebellion and must be delivered safely to the rebels (either on Yavin or Alderan). And what does she do? Well she diverts to Tattooine to pick up a Jedi. WHY? Why in the name of all **** would anyone remotely sane do that?
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Offline Scotty

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Tatooine could well have been closer, and she did have two separate missions to complete, both of which were not on unlimited time.

 

Offline Black Wolf

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No spoiler tags, we're at page four of he Rogue One thread, it's your own fault at this point.

I thought Leia going to Tatooine made plenty of sense. Imagine you're in her position. You have the most important information in the galaxy in your possession, but you're being chased by a goddam Sith Lord, who is watching your every move and shooting at you with a Star Destroyer. You can't go directly to Yavin, because that leads Vader directly to the rebels. You can't go to Alderaan, because there are no Rebel ships there to do anything with the plans once you drop them off. You need to evade one of the most powerful men, and the machinery of the most powerful organisation in the galaxy. In fact, what you need is nothing short of a miracle. So you go to someone who maybe, just maybe, can pull a miracle out of his hat: a Jedi Master.

Makes sense to me, in that context.
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Offline karajorma

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Tatooine could well have been closer, and she did have two separate missions to complete, both of which were not on unlimited time.

And they could have completed the first one much more easily had they actually attempted to do it in the first place. :p Seriously, if the mission is so important, why is Leia not already on her way to Tatooine in the first place? It was discussed early on enough in the film that she should be halfway to Tatooine even before the rebels decide to go help Rogue One out.

But why would Leia's mission to get Kenobi be even remotely as important? Especially when you consider that by deliberately delaying getting the rebels the Death Star plans to pick him up, she nearly doomed the entire galaxy. In ANH it seemed a lot more logical. Leia was on a mission to get Kenobi and then got the plans beamed to her. So she was already close to Tatooine anyway.

I thought Leia going to Tatooine made plenty of sense. Imagine you're in her position. You have the most important information in the galaxy in your possession, but you're being chased by a goddam Sith Lord, who is watching your every move and shooting at you with a Star Destroyer. You can't go directly to Yavin, because that leads Vader directly to the rebels. You can't go to Alderaan, because there are no Rebel ships there to do anything with the plans once you drop them off. You need to evade one of the most powerful men, and the machinery of the most powerful organisation in the galaxy. In fact, what you need is nothing short of a miracle. So you go to someone who maybe, just maybe, can pull a miracle out of his hat: a Jedi Master.

Makes sense to me, in that context.

Not to me.

Why the hell would her message to Obi-wan include mention of him fighting with her father in the Clone Wars and his request for help but miss out the fact that Vader is actively pursuing her (or that he has in fact caught her) at any point in the message? We're only replacing one massive WTF with another one.

And it's not like she couldn't have gone straight to Alderaan. It's where she attempts to send the droids in ANH so it obviously has the ability to send the information to the rebels. And the only connection between the rebels and Alderaan is Leia herself, which is something Vader only figures out when he gets hold of the passengers. Without knowing who was on the ship, how would Vader know that Alderaan was a likely destination?
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Offline Scotty

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Presumably when they caught up to her there, like they caught up to her when they arrived at Tatooine. :P

Imperial cruisers are explicitly described as fast in ANH, it's entirely possible (and supported on screen) that they are faster than a corvette.  Tatooine makes a far better hail mary than "our people have no weapons" Alderaan.

  

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Besides, Vader hates Tatooine; it's full of course, rough, irritating sand that gets everywhere.
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