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 Manchu wrote:
Aside from the main cast superheroes, 30ish Rebels landed on Scarif in the stolen Zeta-class. U-Wings carry 8 passengers, and maybe three or four made it through the gate. So something like 60-100 Alliance soldiers fought groundside against an entire Imperial garrison at a super secure installation, including two elite formations (shoretroopers and death troopers). The Rebels encountered no real obstacles to achieving their operational goals, thanks to tactics like slowly walking in the open while under fire from augmented super soldiers a few dozen yards distant. That happened twice, by the way. I also noted that the two Imperial-class Star Destroyers in orbit never deployed and barely fired any weaponry. Guess the British-accented crew was on a tea break. Thankfully, Darth Vader showed up in time to do with one ISD what two couldn't manage, but of course his brutal scene was yet another empty show considering all the Rebels needed to do was hand a small object past a semi-blocked door.

So, kind of like ROTJ where the stormtroopers were defeated by outnumbered rebels and some teddy bears, and the imperial fleet's capital ships apparently forgot that they could do more than launch fighters? Clearly Rogue One is not a lesson in good military tactics, but let's not act like anything else in Star Wars (or movies in general) is much better.

Anyone else notice the similarities to video games? I.E Dark forces?
The...thingy Jyn and what's-his-face use to get the plans seems to be inspired by a stage in one of the old Dark forces game.
Y-wings using ion weapons to immobilise a star destroyer was also prominent in the X-WING and TIE fighter games.
A droid with an obvious hatred for humans also assists two hero's in thwarting the villain [KOTOR]

There's also this
Jyn Urso: Jan Ors
Cassian Andor: Kyle Katarn
Director Krennic: General Rhom Moc/ Bevel Lemelisk
K2S0: HK-47
Saw Gerro: Qu Rhan/ Jolee Bindo

Oh man that reminds me, I forgot to mention my other favorite part - the suicide mission Corvette that accelerates the disabled Star Destroyer into crashing. I don't think it pulled up, right? Their willingness to do that (and the commanders to clearly order that), along with all the troopers on the ground willingness to go on essentially a one-way mission, nicely showed the desperation of the rebellion / war to me.

But yeah, that Corvette was awesome - everything about the space battle was really, I only wish they'd shown more!

I wouldn't draw too many parallels with the games when it comes to characters. That was more like them filling traditional character roles. Except maybe K2SO being inspired by HK-47.

However, I would agree with you very much on the feel for the base and facility designs. The first time it really jumped out at me was the lift platform on Eadu.

The walker that gets downed by the x-wing had it's cargo doors open which you can see in the shot as they pull away, which would indicate that the walker shields were down as they need to lower shields in order to deploy their troops in the various games. Fighters and Y-wngs are able to knock out the walkers they just have to work at it pretty hard if their shields are active.

The other gets dropped from being hit repeatedly in the knee by the door gunner using Ion weaponry which they weren't shown to be using on Hoth aside from the giant boob cannon to disable the star destroyer. Ion weapons are specialized in knocking out shields so IMO it makes sense that sustained fire from a heavy blaster could cripple a walker since their legs are the weakest point. It'd likely take a combination of luck and skill but we only see one walker brought down in such a fashion and they aren't facing dozens of them.

Tarkin and Leia seemed good when they were still, but the lack of movement of their upper lips is where I had some difficulty with. They did a very good job of capturing the overall look but it's the lack of small refined movements in the upper lip and corners of the mouth that betray it as being artificial CG. The sync was off with their speech and since we're so attuned to facial movements when speaking to others it's an instant red flag as being seen as not real. The face shot of Leia they could have left out and it would have been fine as we all know who it is simply based on the dress and profile, no matter how they approached it Tarkin would have been tough. It didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the film but CG characters are always a little jarring IMO.

 Manchu wrote:
Aside from the main cast superheroes, 30ish Rebels landed on Scarif in the stolen Zeta-class. U-Wings carry 8 passengers, and maybe three or four made it through the gate. So something like 60-100 Alliance soldiers fought groundside against an entire Imperial garrison at a super secure installation, including two elite formations (shoretroopers and death troopers). The Rebels encountered no real obstacles to achieving their operational goals, thanks to tactics like slowly walking in the open while under fire from augmented super soldiers a few dozen yards distant. That happened twice, by the way. I also noted that the two Imperial-class Star Destroyers in orbit never deployed and barely fired any weaponry. Guess the British-accented crew was on a tea break. Thankfully, Darth Vader showed up in time to do with one ISD what two couldn't manage, but of course his brutal scene was yet another empty show considering all the Rebels needed to do was hand a small object past a semi-blocked door.

That was my biggest issue with the end of it. Were the two ISDs on lunch break? Were the engines turned off? Were they holding back? Why were they just standing there? And why the hell didn't the second move out of the way as soon as the other one began getting pushed towards it?

One of the ISDs was fighting, the other was the one that got the **** kicked out of it by the Y-Wing bomber assault.

Saw it today and loved it.

It definitely ends better than it starts, but I like how the "team" comes together. The space battle at the end was just perfect and I loved seeing Vander's Gold Leader and Dreis' Red Leader. The shining jewel of the movie is Vader's throwdown of the rebel soldiers when they board their ship. I've been waiting to see Vader do that on the big screen my entire life.

Saw it yesterday, probably my favourite Star Wars film. Its a shame none of the characters survived, because I would have liked to see some of them again in future films. Jyn Erso in particular. (and I don't mean films set prior to Rogue One, I mean films that continue the timeline). Hopefully Jyn Erso shows up in the young Han Solo stand alone film. They'd be similar ages prior to Rogue One (Han Solo ~ 30 years old, Jyn Erso ~ 25 years old). Isn't Felicity Jones contracted with an option for one more film?

Matpat of the Film Theory Youtube channel had a cool theory that the main rebel characters of Rogue One could be...

I was completely entertained by this movie. Best I have seen since guardians of the galaxy.

Were the CGI cameos of Tarkin and Leia motion capped? If not, perhaps they should have been.

They weren't mocapped - they were cg composited over the existing performers though (face mapping).

Unlike Tarkin of ep3, played by Wayne Pygram (who played Scorpius in Farscape), where it was prosthetics and some CGI touch-ups (but he didn't say anything).

I enjoyed it. More than ep4, to be honest (because it really hasn't aged well).
I don't know if I like it more than ep5 yet (only seen r1 once, but empire I have seen about 30 times over the years.)

 chromedog wrote:
They weren't mocapped - they were cg composited over the existing performers though (face mapping).

Unlike Tarkin of ep3, played by Wayne Pygram (who played Scorpius in Farscape), where it was prosthetics and some CGI touch-ups (but he didn't say anything).

I enjoyed it. More than ep4, to be honest (because it really hasn't aged well).
I don't know if I like it more than ep5 yet (only seen r1 once, but empire I have seen about 30 times over the years.)

This guy?



Wow, thats bad. Looks like a walker on the Walking Dead.

Too bad they couldn't do something more like this incredibly lifelike and awesome bust.








http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2011/05/25/scary-realistic-life-size-bust-of-star-wars-villain-grand-moff-tarkin

It was alright, it looked and felt liked Star Wars but I found a lot of the characters dull so it was hard to get emotionally invested. Preferred Force Awakens despite being highly derivative it at least had good characters.

 Manchu wrote:
Everyone dies because the script kills them. They are completely safe from all danger until the script has no further use for them. That's a cartoon version of war.

Oh please! You could say the same of any scripted media.

http://www.history.com/news/the-real-history-that-inspired-star-wars

Although there are parallels between Emperor Palpatine and dictators such as Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, the direct inspiration for the saga’s evil antagonist was actually an American president. According to J.W. Rinzler’s “The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” when asked if Emperor Palpatine was a Jedi during a 1981 story conference, Lucas responded, “No, he was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy.” In a 2005 interview published in the Chicago Tribune, Lucas said he originally conceived “Star Wars” as a reaction to Nixon’s presidency. “It was really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships? Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”

On topic :


3.5- 4 stars out of five.

Fun enough.

So glad Disney took over, I can't tell if Lucas is all there anymore

The Ewoks from RoTJ are actually supposed to be the Vietcong. And the Empire was the nasty Americans.

Might I just say that I'm glad the rebels were able to knock out the walkers with conventional fighters INSTEAD of tripping them up with tow cables. Tow cables have become a cliché as EVERY vehicle based star wars game usually features a sequence of that.
If any of the game developers were listening they'd have noticed the rebels HAD to use snowspeeders on hoth as it was too cold for their other vehicles to work properly.

And with the rebels desperate gambit in the finale, I kept remembering the 'Good day to die' song from one of the starship troopers movies. To pinch a quote from the 'other' space franchise. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

Blind mystic force guy must've been livid that the Gm wouldn't let him put any ranks in move object eh ?

For me it never hit the heights of the best parts of Force Awakens... but was never as bad as the bad parts of any of the other films either.

... It was pretty much like 90% of the Star wars RPGs I've played

Hallway scene needed to have gone one a good...30 more minutes. Haha

 Skymate wrote:
Might I just say that I'm glad the rebels were able to knock out the walkers with conventional fighters INSTEAD of tripping them up with tow cables. Tow cables have become a cliché as EVERY vehicle based star wars game usually features a sequence of that.
If any of the game developers were listening they'd have noticed the rebels HAD to use snowspeeders on hoth as it was too cold for their other vehicles to work properly.

And with the rebels desperate gambit in the finale, I kept remembering the 'Good day to die' song from one of the starship troopers movies. To pinch a quote from the 'other' space franchise. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

which is silly because X wings and Y wings and every other ship in the universe fights in the cold dark vacuum of space.

 Peregrine wrote:
So, kind of like ROTJ where the stormtroopers were defeated by outnumbered rebels and some teddy bears, and the imperial fleet's capital ships apparently forgot that they could do more than launch fighters?

Yes, this is exactly what I have been getting at: R1's "dark, gritty" battle scenes are actually as dumb/cartoonish as the Ewok battle in RotJ.

 reds8n wrote:
For me it never hit the heights of the best parts of Force Awakens... but was never as bad as the bad parts of any of the other films either.

That's pretty accurate for me, too (if we exclude ANH and ESB).

I loved this. Although quite different from FA, it needed to be.

My only complaints are the jarring beginning and the CGI Leia. The beginning should have said "A Star Wars Story" right after "a long time ago...".
It didn't necessarily need a text crawl, but an acknowledgment that it wasn't a Saga film would have been nice, but instead it just jumps right in.

While I think CGI reconstructions of past actors will probably never reach perfection (humans are just too good are recognizing fake faces) I think Tarkin was done well. Maybe he was there a bit too much, but he NEEEEEDED to be in this movie. His role in ANH is too important for him not to be here.

But Leia did not need to be seen so close up. We could have been fine with a shot from behind, or the side, or even just a few feet farther away, with other stuff in the shot to distract our eye from the "waxy" look of her face.

9 out of 10 for me. I'll never be able to watch ANH the same again (which is a good thing since I've seen it over 50 times)

-

Probably could have gotten away with a Tarkin cameo, perhaps via holonet a la the Emperor's first appearance in ESB.

 welshhoppo wrote:

which is silly because X wings and Y wings and every other ship in the universe fights in the cold dark vacuum of space.

If it hasn't been made exceedingly obvious by now, the Star Wars universe has no concept of how space works.

Now that I think about it, is there even a scene outside of TFA without completely normal gravity in all the films?

Watched it, enjoyed it, more of a prequel than the other three combined.

It also reminded me how "clean" everything was in the prequels. Episodes IV-VI were dirty and grimy, and even the clean areas (Death Star, Cloud City) looked like actually lived in places. The Prequels even managed to make a desert planet feel clean and orderly.

Nope, there is always gravity.

I kind of understand the trench run from a new Hope. The death star probably has its own gravitation field.

 Galef wrote:
a. The beginning should have said "A Star Wars Story" right after "a long time ago...".
It didn't necessarily need a text crawl, but an acknowledgment that it wasn't a Saga film would have been nice, but instead it just jumps right in.
-

I thought that the "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..." established it as a Star Wars film, but that the lack of the Star Wars Fanfare, Star Wars title, and text crawl was enough to establish it as not being one of the "Episodes".