[Sandwich]

Damnit, 2016!!!!!

R.I.P., Carrie Fisher.

[Det. Bullock]

P.S. Darth Vader making a cartoon-villain "choke" pun? Really?

He always made jokes while strangling people, like the famous "lack of faith" or the "apologies accepted" in the sequel.

[Black Wolf]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people complaining about that line, and TBH I wasn't exactly stoked with it myself, but it's hardly out of character for either Vader or Anakin. He's been quipping like that since either 1977, or since he was a padawan, depending on whether you want to take the in universe or IRL timeline.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Vader also does way more quipping like that in comics.

[Trivial Psychic]

Finally got to watching it myself.

Spoiler:

I caught the page for General Syndula on Yavin base.

The cameo by that pair from the Mos Eisley cantina was cool.  I guess they boarded a flight right afterwards or they'd have been toasted by the Death Star.

The CGI Tarkin & Leia thing seems to me to be mostly in the mouths.  The mouth seems to lack depth and the teeth look wrong for some reason.  Also, Leia's mouth was too wide.

I read that the footage of the pilots seen in ANH was actually unused shots from that movie that were stumbled upon by accident.  I don't recall that "where are you going Red 5" line from ANH.

I've already mentioned seeing the Ghost in the battle sequence.

My concern comes down to the ending and how it ties in with ANH.  After boarding in ANH, Vader says "several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies."  In this film however, the plans weren't "beamed" to the ship, they were hand relayed to it.  Also in ANH, Vader would have said we-saw-your-ship-at-the-battle.  You-are-rebel.  They should have had the ship manage to retransmit the message after having its hyperspace drive damaged preventing escape.  Empire is jamming transmissions so the ship has to try to run on sublight to get outside the battle area and escape the jamming field.  It manages to but fighters give pursuit and disable it.  Shuttles board her, Vader does his thing, crew runs with data disc to backup transmission room.  Vader slices open door and kills the crew member, only to see that the transmission is complete.  Aboard blockade runner, crew member races to hand Leia the disc, she delivers the "hope" line, end of movie.

[Mikes]

Finally got to watching it myself.

Spoiler:

I caught the page for General Syndula on Yavin base.

The cameo by that pair from the Mos Eisley cantina was cool.  I guess they boarded a flight right afterwards or they'd have been toasted by the Death Star.

The CGI Tarkin & Leia thing seems to me to be mostly in the mouths.  The mouth seems to lack depth and the teeth look wrong for some reason.  Also, Leia's mouth was too wide.

I read that the footage of the pilots seen in ANH was actually unused shots from that movie that were stumbled upon by accident.  I don't recall that "where are you going Red 5" line from ANH.

I've already mentioned seeing the Ghost in the battle sequence.

My concern comes down to the ending and how it ties in with ANH.  After boarding in ANH, Vader says "several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies."  In this film however, the plans weren't "beamed" to the ship, they were hand relayed to it.  Also in ANH, Vader would have said we-saw-your-ship-at-the-battle.  You-are-rebel.  They should have had the ship manage to retransmit the message after having its hyperspace drive damaged preventing escape.  Empire is jamming transmissions so the ship has to try to run on sublight to get outside the battle area and escape the jamming field.  It manages to but fighters give pursuit and disable it.  Shuttles board her, Vader does his thing, crew runs with data disc to backup transmission room.  Vader slices open door and kills the crew member, only to see that the transmission is complete.  Aboard blockade runner, crew member races to hand Leia the disc, she delivers the "hope" line, end of movie.

Theoretically ... there could still be events between Rogue One and ANH that are offscreen. Yes a flimsy excuse ... but all those Bothans could still die, somehow? lol.

[Grizzly]

The bothans do most of their dying between ESB and RotJ though.

[BlueFlames]

I finally settled on giving this one a miss.

The thing about a prequel--especially one that ends so close to an established chapter of a franchise--is that you know how it ends.  When the outcome of the story is known, the plot provides no dramatic tension, and so it falls on the writers and cast to develop some really compelling characters, whose fates and interpersonal conflicts you care about.  In the case of Rogue One, even the positive reviews concede that the characters are a weak element of the film.

The sliver lining is that since six years of uninterrupted, annual Star Wars films is something that I foresee becoming pretty tiresome, missing the occasional side-story is going to preserve/build my anticipation for the main series entries.  Just as long as Episode VIII isn't a note-for-note rehash of Empire Strikes Back....  You get one, Disney.  One.

[LaineyBugsDaddy]

BlueFlames, that was the point of Ep VII, afaict. It was an apology. It was Disney saying, "Hey, we're sorry for what Lucas did to the franchise. Now that we've bought it, let us show you that we know what Star Wars is really about. Here, have this movie that will remind you of everything you loved about the original movie."

[Luis Dias]

I am deeply under-excited for this, so I'll skip it as well. The trailers just don't sell anything remotely interesting to me.

[Sandwich]

If/when y'all watch it on bluray/digital download, there's a good chance you'll wish someone had told you to go see it in the theaters while it was still playing. This is that. Go see it. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth it.

[Phantom Hoover]

Spoiler:

My concern comes down to the ending and how it ties in with ANH.  After boarding in ANH, Vader says "several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies."  In this film however, the plans weren't "beamed" to the ship, they were hand relayed to it.  Also in ANH, Vader would have said we-saw-your-ship-at-the-battle.  You-are-rebel.  They should have had the ship manage to retransmit the message after having its hyperspace drive damaged preventing escape.  Empire is jamming transmissions so the ship has to try to run on sublight to get outside the battle area and escape the jamming field.  It manages to but fighters give pursuit and disable it.  Shuttles board her, Vader does his thing, crew runs with data disc to backup transmission room.  Vader slices open door and kills the crew member, only to see that the transmission is complete.  Aboard blockade runner, crew member races to hand Leia the disc, she delivers the "hope" line, end of movie.

This is an insanely tiny continuity error which allowed for a great Vader scene.

[swashmebuckle]

Saw it today. It definitely held together better and was less derivative than TFA, but while I was entertained, it's totally skippable. It's like any of the Disney Marvel movies, a Star Wars-flavored lightweight genre film, in this case a war movie. You know how it ends and it doesn't do anything particularly interesting getting there, but there is plenty of action and fan service to keep your attention for a couple hours. I found the CG Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher crashed hard into the uncanny valley pretty much as soon as they moved which was quite distracting. Maybe they'll fix it in the special edition?

Don't wanna sound too down on it, it was definitely stronger than TFA (and I found TFA to be totally watchable). The script and characters and editing were all fine. They made a conscious decision to abandon the film serial style of the Trilogy which is too bad, but at least they made it consistently contemporary as opposed to TFA which would have those classic elements like wipe transitions next to a Michael Bay/Avengers style rotating hero shot or some other totally incongruous elements. The music was 100% forgettable

It does have some premium X-wing pew pew.

[jr2]

If/when y'all watch it on bluray/digital download, there's a good chance you'll wish someone had told you to go see it in the theaters while it was still playing. This is that. Go see it. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worth it.

There is a certain departure from most movies that you're used to..

Spoiler:

All of the main characters die.  I mean, you'd kind of expect that in a situation like this, if it were real.  But it's a movie, and we all know how Disney movies end, right?  Not this time.

That ^ might be part of why the characters are considered 'forgettable'.  I don't quite follow, but then again, it is a departure from most ending that we are used to being spoon-fed.

[Mika]

Computer generated Peter Cushing had too much subsurface scattering.  Part of why he was so scary looking back when he was alive was how his flesh seemed so tight over his bones.  His flesh seemed too fleshy in CG.

He also seemed slightly too blue to me.

Interestingly, I'm seeing that there's a number of performances where people playing the opposite role of what they actually are tend to make the best out of it. If off-the-set comments are correct, Peter Cushing was nothing like his character in the New Hope. He couldn't fit his feet to the imperial boots, so he instead wore sandals in the sets which is why they don't show his feet in the movies. Carrie Fisher had trouble acting with Cushing the way she did because Peter was most of the time far too nice a person in real life.

So beware of the people playing the good guys 

[BlueFlames]

So beware of the people playing the good guys 

Mark Hamill does get pretty enthusiastic about playing the Joker, whenever the opportunity arises....

[StarSlayer]

Saw it at IMAX and thought it was quite a ride, certainly worth the price of admission.  There were a lot of nice touches like using the extra footage from A New Hope for Red and Gold Squadrons and it did a good job of painting the grim realities of the Rebellion plus didn't pull any punches.  If I wanted to nitpick at it I could probably find things to gripe about but overall pretty solid effort.

Though it does color certain scenes in A New Hope differently, Leia and Vader's meeting on the Tantive IV takes a new spin and it makes Luke look like a major douche at the briefing on Yavin.  Some of those pilots just went through the battle over Scarif and are looking at another Hail Mary suicide mission and here is some yokel talking up shooting varmints in his T-16.

[zookeeper]

There were a lot of nice touches like using the extra footage from A New Hope for Red and Gold Squadrons

I just... don't... understand how anyone could think of that as a "nice touch". It's the same as if in a prerendered game cutscene you suddenly had a few shots from a cutscene from a previous installment of the series 20 years old which obviously looks entirely different, just so you could feature a recognizable character as fan service. It's bizarre, looks and feels really cheap... one of the worst bits of the movie for me, because it immediately pulled me out of it.

[Klaustrophobia]

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.

[jr2]

The hammerhead thing made me start thinking about physics in the middle of all the awesomeness.

The only thing that was a bit silly was the part with the Star Destroyer and the smaller ship. You would think it would either tear a hole in the Star Destroyer or flatten itself.

Not really.  The corvette did not engage full throttle until after contact, and then basically you would have whatever momentum the Star Destroyer could be pushed up to, backed by its mass, as well as the continued application of thrust from the corvette behind it.  What caused the mayhem was the mass and speed of the Star Destroyer, with all of the energy gained by its momentum (in the movie, the Star Destroyer looked close together.  In reality, you have to remember Star Destroyers are multiple kilometers long, so you had a distance of probably at least a couple of kilometers to accelerate that mass before impact.