New Testingstan

DROP ON PURPLE SMOKE! DANGER CLOSE!

I probably got the syntax wrong, but that would be a modern day analogy.

So I am reading a review now that criticises the film for not making you care about the characters enough... saying they are shallow, and I basically agree, it didn't spend a lot of time on them. I do think the film did a better job stopping to breathe than TFA did, but not as well as ANH.

Of course, part of ANH's strength is that it uses simple stereotypes to abbreviate the characterization and storytelling (and rogue one's greying is a nice change of pace), but I think it did a good job beyond that too. I have praised the death star battle as being one of the best in sci fi history because the radio chatter and little visuals throughout I felt did a great job making you emphasize and care about the rebels in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Basically, ANH might be ahead here in my mind simply because it cheated. But it cheated quite successfully IMO.

that said my opinion on rogue one is still overall positive.

Ya definitely a 6 or 7/10 sort of thing. I didn't regret paying to see it in the cinema, but it's not one that I'm ever going to go out of my way to watch again.

I did like that there was a split from within the rebellion, even if *why* that happened is a bit vague. Could have done without the awful CGI reanimation though.

Bounty wrote:

Tbh the x-wing air strike in the middle of the film was the worst for that. What a lame arse air strike. Literally all it did was kill a bunch of mooks. Modern day fighter jets would have blown up the whole facility.

Kinda makes sense since just before Cassian radio'ed in that there were Rebels on-site.

Nope. The General was going to call off the strike but it was too late, it had already happened. The exact quote was 'they've already engaged' so the initial attack runs at the very least should have been full power.

And what would the point in the pitiful bomb that failed to kill krennic (who was right there) and left Galen alive enough for some last words if the cannons could pump out order of magnitudes more boom?

--

Just seen it btw. I'd rate it very okay. It got better towards the end. But Jyn's character arc was weird. 'The Rebellion just assassinated my father. Therefore I will go"

I'm very iffy about the way Leia was used. So Her dad has given her mission to get Kenobi. So why is her ship docked in the belly on the Mon Cal ship for the whole battle? Why when she had the all important plans and Vader in hot pursuit does she head to Tatooine to fulfill this much less important mission? Rather than retransmitting or duplicating the plans in any way?

Dumb but watchable.

Kinda felt that the prologue hinted at a much more interesting movie about a Death Star designer who gets second thoughts about building a planet killer, and his way too ambitious friend. But I guess they needed their winter blockbuster movie with wisecracking sidekicks and whatever else we've probably seen fifty times already, this year and every year. Improved by not having to leave any room open for a sequel, but weighed down by trying to take place literally 15 minutes before ANH and "explaining" why none of the characters show up again.

CG impersonations looked pretty terrible, and if they weren't going to have someone even try to sound like Peter Cushing, they could have just recast the role or not have Tarkin at all.

Big disaster explosions looked nice but also kinda dumb. It's interesting that after all these years Deep Impact remains the best "huge fuck off explosion" movie.

Also the music was like out of one of the games or something. The rebels hyperspace in and they play a little rebel fanfare, c'mon son, was this made by gamers or something? Is that why it's called "Rogue One"? And is that why they namedropped "magpulse" and whatever in the other one?
oh my god that's it isn't it?

Crazedwraith wrote:Just seen it btw. I'd rate it very okay. It got better towards the end. But Jyn's character arc was weird. 'The Rebellion just assassinated my father. Therefore I will go"

I think the whole character arc and motivation stuff in the second half of the film is problematic.... I'll have to watch it again to really judge (which as i have said before i actually look forward to, unlike TFA which i thought was unbearably boring and forced myself through twice just to try to give it an honest chance... and it failed), but like the rebel leadership just seemed to change minds as the plot required and the characters were just kinda there.

Rather than retransmitting or duplicating the plans in any way?

So doing this kinda backward but I think they dropped a line in there just saying the file was too large to transmit without the gigantic dish, so perhaps the rebel ships just didn't have enough power for a long-distance transmission, and/or enough bandwidth to get the whole file sent in less time than it'd take to just hyperdrive the disk over.

Though, they do burn it to a disk pretty quickly after receiving the transmission.... and when they get them out of R2 in ANH, they plug a cable into him instead of pulling a disk out of his pocket, so apparently they did copy it a couple times.... but still that was all on the one ship, could be they weren't able to copy it among the other ships (besides, "jamming") and have them all run off separately, so no point making a bunch of copies if they'd all blow up together anyway. (though ANH saying they want to retreive the plans is silly if it could be copied with such ease. "here vader take the original disk and leave me alone meanwhile i'll take my 100 other copies to all my rebel friends". They shouldn't have transmitted it at all! Then it'd all make enough sense.)

They could also not want to make too many copies out of fear of some random third party getting their hands on the dangerous weapon plans, though there's no hint of that in either movie.

regardless though i think failure to transmit is plausibly explained. They wouldn't have needed that gigantic dish on the planet if it was that easy.

Why when she had the all important plans and Vader in hot pursuit does she head to Tatooine to fulfill this much less important mission?

I can explain that too: she wanted to introduce some middle-men so the imperial ships couldn't simply follow her right back to the rebel base directly.... though Alderaan itself could have fulfilled that purpose....

So why is her ship docked in the belly on the Mon Cal ship for the whole battle?

That bothered me too, but perhaps the guy's argument with Vader in the next film hints at it: maybe they thought she could slip away then use diplomatic immunity legal tricks to avoid inspection later.


meh it is all a bit shoddy

tl;dr: you can see the seams from the rewrites

Leia's ship being in the final battle didn't bother me at the time, the whole finale seems like a super rush on the Rebellion's end so maybe they didn't have the time to drop her off at Tatooine.

though ANH saying they want to retreive the plans is silly if it could be copied with such ease

Aw man, maybe Tarking really did fuck up royal blowing up Scarif - what if the archived copy was the only one they had? Build the Death Star, destroy all the plans and keep one master copy for the archives, consult it when needed. Maybe the Rebels could've skipped the attack and just waited until the septic tank clogged and nobody can figure out how to fix it.

Apparently no one gives the scripts any love these days. There are a lot of recent movies that could have used one or two more script treatments or drafts to let them figure out what they really wanted to say. In my opinion, this is where the problems in the prequel trilogy really stem from. AotC apparently only got some minor touch-ups and dialogue changes from the first draft; the script of RotS was barely even finished when they started shooting, and that's a pretty confused film.

Turns out you can fix a bad shot in post, but not a bad script.

TPM of course went through many drafts and treatments, changing Anakin into a little kid, introducing Qui-Gon and so on. While a lot of people find those things a bit crap (even though Qui-Gon obviously kicks ass), I think everyone can agree that they, and the whole film, feel a lot more thought through than Anakin's "welp, guess I'mma murder children now" fall in RotS. We obviously see what Lucas was going for there with Anakin's fear or loss (maybe it's even too blatant), but that story was really rushed.

fun fact tho: "midi-chlorians" were apparently there from the start, mentioned in some memo from lucas to aspiring EU writers back in -77

Bounty wrote:Aw man, maybe Tarking really did fuck up royal blowing up Scarif - what if the archived copy was the only one they had? Build the Death Star, destroy all the plans and keep one master copy for the archives, consult it when needed. Maybe the Rebels could've skipped the attack and just waited until the septic tank clogged and nobody can figure out how to fix it.

I like it. Easy to explain too: they are extremely high security and destroying unnecessary copies would be a good way to keep the enemy from hitting the backup copy.

I developed a fanon theory that Tarkin was the best Imperial Grand Moff the Rebellion ever had. Because all his actions in Rogue One and ANH in the long run only helped the Rebellion. By blowing up Scarif Base he must have set back Imperial covert operations and R&D by a fuck ton, all because he had the Death Star now and none of it would matter. Except, a couple days later a certain radicalised youth from a desert planet saw to that.

Not to mention Palpatine dissolving the senate as well being a staggering miscalculation that only aided the Rebellion. All those influential political leaders would have no reason not to return back to their homeworlds and join the Alliance after Luke blew up the Death Star. Which ties into a theory that I had for why the Death Star was necessary for Palpatine to dissolve the senate. Basically, after the Clone Wars all these capital worlds in the Republic would have invested in planetary shielding in order to prevent future devastating wars, but it would also mean they couldn't be retaliated against by Palpatine's forces, at least not conventionally (skulduggery and black ops wetworks though? Sure, but not as easy as it sounds). Thus rebellious senators could oppose Palpatine politically without fearing reprisal against their worlds (if they weren't afraid of being force choked by Vader at any rate, but even ANH demonstrated that Vader had restraint, otherwise he would have just choked Leia on the Tantive IV - Leia, even as a traitorous senator, was treated relatively humanely in comparison to the rest of her crew). The Death Star was needed because its superlaser could penetrate planetary shields and still dump enough excess energy into the biosphere to cook the planet and its inhabitants. The second it became operational and demonstrated its efficacy at Jedha and Scarif, Palps could move to sweep away the senate for good, which was likely something he had been building towards doing for years prior to ANH. It's quite telling that the first high powered use of the Death Star was against a Core world like Alderaan.

adr wrote:(which as i have said before i actually look forward to, unlike TFA which i thought was unbearably boring and forced myself through twice just to try to give it an honest chance... and it failed)

your face is unberably boring

Anyway I should do a rewatch of the film in the next couple of weeks but I suspect I'm going to become more critical of it.

Stofsk wrote:I developed a fanon theory that Tarkin was the best Imperial Grand Moff the Rebellion ever had. Because all his actions in Rogue One and ANH in the long run only helped the Rebellion. By blowing up Scarif Base he must have set back Imperial covert operations and R&D by a fuck ton, all because he had the Death Star now and none of it would matter. Except, a couple days later a certain radicalised youth from a desert planet saw to that.

On the other hand though, DS2 popped up awfully quickly....

your face is unberably boring

WHO COULD LOVE ME?!?!?!

adr wrote:

Stofsk wrote:I developed a fanon theory that Tarkin was the best Imperial Grand Moff the Rebellion ever had. Because all his actions in Rogue One and ANH in the long run only helped the Rebellion. By blowing up Scarif Base he must have set back Imperial covert operations and R&D by a fuck ton, all because he had the Death Star now and none of it would matter. Except, a couple days later a certain radicalised youth from a desert planet saw to that.

On the other hand though, DS2 popped up awfully quickly....

That's actually reasonable when you consider my point about the senate. DS1 took so long to build because they were hiding it from senate scrutiny. Because if the senate got wind of it being build, well then they'd rebel (and that's exactly what happened ultimately).

But with DS2, it was built secretly in a different way - to prevent it from being attacked. It likely wasn't built secretly in the sense that it was built slowly like the first DS was. Like, to build DS2 that quickly a lot of resources had to be reallocated, and that would have tipped off people that the Empire was doing something massive, but wouldn't know where or how. Whereas to build the DS1 a lot of resources had to be reallocated too, but because it took so long what they could do was pace that out over years so it wasn't as noticeable.

Also, DS2 was planned to be a trap, so more than likely Palpatine intentionally dropped bread crumbs for the Rebellion's spies to find.

your face is unberably boring

WHO COULD LOVE ME?!?!?!

that's what you get for not liking TFA

(although tbh, as much as I like TFA I do agree that it was trying too hard to be a retread when what it should have been doing, and what I found it did *REALLY* well, was be more original. The first half of the film made it feel like the plot was about finding Luke, and then the second half was about 'lol we have to kill the second THIRD death star again guys'. I thought finding Luke was more engaging a plot than blowing up Starkiller base, and the worst part of the film for me was Starkiller base killing all those planets and having it be observed by characters in a different part of the galaxy FOR FUCK'S SAKE JJ LEARN TO ASTRONOMY)

I just had a thought about the plans: it should have been a physical disk the whole time that they had to steal from the planet and launch it back up by ship. Then the rebels tractor beam it aboard and run. We'd then have no transmitting at all to explain while keeping the "beamed aboard this ship" line.

Dooey Jo wrote:fun fact tho: "midi-chlorians" were apparently there from the start, mentioned in some memo from lucas to aspiring EU writers back in -77

It's pretty silly how upset some people get at the idea that a trait that is by all appearances passed down genetic lines and gives a small minority of the population the potential for psychic powers comes with physical indicators that can be detected in a blood test.

adr wrote:I just had a thought about the plans: it should have been a physical disk the whole time that they had to steal from the planet and launch it back up by ship. Then the rebels tractor beam it aboard and run. We'd then have no transmitting at all to explain while keeping the "beamed aboard this ship" line.

Yeah except Vader outright accuses Captain Antilles of intercepting transmissions from Rebel spies

since ANH is your favourite you should have remembered that adr son i am disappoint

Yeah, it actually did come to mind after I made the post but I was too lazy to edit.... but rogue one didn't show them intercepting a transmission but handing off a physical disk

lolol

whatever though not that big of a deal

It was a physical disk, but they had to send the information by transmission.

Though, they didn't really intercept the transmission so much as receive it.

The ship outside received the transmission, then they passed a disk through the docking bay to the ship inside... in plain view of Darth Vader himself. Bah.

but whatever.

Oh yeah...

IIRC the lines were 'Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebels. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you'

'we've intercepted no transmissions. this is a consular's ship--urk--'

'if this is a consular's ship. Then where is the ambassador?' *choke and throw*

So it was Antilles not Vader that mentioned interception. But Vader mentioned beaming and 'several transmissions'.

Stofsk wrote:I developed a fanon theory that Tarkin was the best Imperial Grand Moff the Rebellion ever had. Because all his actions in Rogue One and ANH in the long run only helped the Rebellion. By blowing up Scarif Base he must have set back Imperial covert operations and R&D by a fuck ton, all because he had the Death Star now and none of it would matter. Except, a couple days later a certain radicalised youth from a desert planet saw to that.

On hindsight Grand Moff Tarkin was a very, very effective recruitment sergeant and saboteur for the Rebel Alliance, and the destruction of the Death Star I a week or so after Scarif was essentially the end of the beginning for the Empire's inevitable collapse.

Ralin wrote:

Dooey Jo wrote:fun fact tho: "midi-chlorians" were apparently there from the start, mentioned in some memo from lucas to aspiring EU writers back in -77

It's pretty silly how upset some people get at the idea that a trait that is by all appearances passed down genetic lines and gives a small minority of the population the potential for psychic powers comes with physical indicators that can be detected in a blood test.

I think most of the drama regarding midichlorians was that Lucas tried to present them as a cause of Force sensitivity, where more people would have given it a pass if they were presented as an effect of Force sensitivity.

By having midichlorians being the cause of Force sensitivity, it removes some of the mystery of the Force while simultaneously answering nothing. So instead of some people somehow being able to manipulate a mystical energy field that permeates the universe, they have these creatures in their blood that somehow makes them able to manipulate a mystical energy field that permeates the universe.

It would have been better if it was the other way around, where Force sensitivity causes a lot of midichlorians to show up in one's blood (with higher sensitivity producing higher concentrations), and that the blood test works like how we figure out a person has HIV by looking for the antibodies in their blood. It preserves the mystery of the Force while still having a convenient plot device for them to objectively establish Anakin as having unusually high potential.

It was a titanic misstep in a film that was filled with them.

'Explaining' the force isn't the problem really, after all Obi-wan, Yoda and even Darth Vader and the Emperor explain various aspects of it. Hell I don't even hate the idea of midichlorians in principle or anything, because Ralin makes a perfectly valid point - force sensitivity should be physically indicative, otherwise how the hell would you find potential recruits? In a galaxy filled with hundreds of trillions of beings it'd be like finding a needle in a haystack the size of a continent. At least with blood tests you could use medical census data to maybe find a few here and there.

My problem has always been that Qui-gon's explanation... explained nothing, like Civil War Man says. And in scriptwriting (or any writing tbh) if your exposition leads to more questions then it's... kinda not doing its job.

Even the person he's talking to doesn't know what the hell he's on about, however I don't think it should be seen as a technical explanation as such, but rather it ties into the main overarching theme of TPM, which is "symbiosis is cool and good". So in that context, the ability to use the Force is in some way made possible by countless tiny things working together with the organism as a whole, and the Force permeates life on every level. I think it adds another dimension to the mystery of the Force, rather than detracting from it. Of course as far as the plot goes it's not a very useful scene, but maybe it can offer some reflection on the other symbionts in the movie; the Naboo/Gungans, the Senate/galaxy at large (which is broken), and so on.

I'll say though that even on a technical level, it's a lot more inspired than just going "it's a gene lol" like pretty much every other franchise (even Harry Potter???). Do these genes code for magical proteins or something? Though I guess genes in general are presented as pretty magical by popular science...


Anyway, on the topic of the thread, youtube recommended this funny girl to me for some reason: She did not care for the movie.

Has anyone noticed a lot of recent movies do that thing Rogue One does towards the end, where they have a super convoluted series of improbable setbacks or problems? You get the feeling that the film makers had a minimum running time they had to reach or something.

He was explsining to an eight year old of course it means nothing. It basically meant 'more midichlorians more force power and youve got lots Ani' when all is said and done.

I'll admit 11 year old me saw no problems at with TPM aside from jarjar being too slapstick.

Its 'titanic misstep' is merely falling victim to hype backlash.