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Wasn't there some various scenes in Revenge of the Sith where they activate gravity boots or something?

I've kinda blotted out the first half of that film from my memory.

 welshhoppo wrote:
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.

being the size of a moon, yep it does.

The lack of overture/scrawl was IMO to avoid the romance/serials association. This film billed itself as more grown up.

 Manchu wrote:
Disagree. There is a difference between a story about war and war as a setting for a story. R1 - like all other Star Wars movies - falls into the latter category, despite marketing patter. R1 is no more a war film than ANH or ESB. ESB depicts warfare in an arguably more serious and dark manner than R1, even considering ESB ultimately is not about war generally or even really the GCW specifically. R1 is an adventure story shot with a certain style of lighting and some far-less-than-half-realized ruminations on the "gray areas" of political conflicts.

You get that by that standard, most war movies aren't war movies? Certainly almost none of the WW2 war films qualify for your definition - characters dying in service of the plot or at the conclusion of their meaningful participation in it is a standard in fiction generally, only rarely subverted, and certainly not that often in war movies.

Frankly I think anyone who went into this expecting Game of Throne Wars or Star Wars: Platoon was fooling themselves. It is an adventure story(so are many war movies, fundamentally), but it's hardly a cartoon as you claim.

It's not a perfect movie, but it is a pretty great one and it's certainly the best Star Wars film since the OT.

Yes I think most films set during wars that do not explicitly deal with war itself are actually adventure movies. R1 like ANH is a good example. So are a lot of the WW2 pictures, which of course helped inspire Star Wars to begin with.

It's not just "walking in and expecting" a dark, serious movie; it's a movie that presents itself as dark and complicated but actually is just another morally facile adventure flick.

Clearly you watched a different movies to the rest of us.

It's possible. Maybe the rest of you didn't see the movie where the good guy suddenly murders his erstwhile ally. But that is what happens near the beginning of Rogue One. And then later on, after the main character has called him out on this because it is the central theme of the movie up to that point, it turns out that good guys who do terrible things aren't bad buys because after all they do it for a good cause. You may have not seen Rogue One, if you missed these parts.

 Manchu wrote:
It's possible. Maybe the rest of you didn't see the movie where the good guy suddenly murders his erstwhile ally. But that is what happens near the beginning of Rogue One. And then later on, after the main character has called him out on this because it is the central theme of the movie up to that point, it turns out that good guys who do terrible things aren't bad buys because after all they do it for a good cause. You may have not seen Rogue One, if you missed these parts.

It was very obvious from Cassians mannerisms that he didn't like doing what he was doing. When he saw Galen stand in front of the Stormtroopers to protect his people, something snapped inside him. He didn't kill Galen, and he didn't trudge all the way up there with a sniper rifle to take in the sights. After that, he started to support Jyn. He wasn't a good person. That was the point of his character. But he had a change of heart towards the end and decided to do soemthing good.

Maybe you missed it, but this is also Han Solo. A smuggler and killer. He, however, didn't have and qualms shooting people, just look at how he wasted Greedo (Han didn't shoot first, Han shot. And Greedo died. Then Lucas decided he didn't like Han being so cold blooded). Throughout A New Hope he's a complete mercenary, and doesn't give a gak about anyone else, he just wants his money. His about face to having a heart of gold was much more abrupt than Cassians.

But because it's in a film nerds have adored for twenty years, he's allowed to be a bad guy that's also good.

Cassian is not an an analog for Han. They are actually direct opposites. Han was a selfish criminal who disavowed responsibility for anyone and anything but himself, maybe Chewbacca aside. Cassian by total contrast is supremely committed to the Rebellion, even to the point of sacrificing his own personal judgment and values. Whereas Han starts to care about the Rebellion because he starts to care about people who care about it, Cassian cares about the Rebellion over and above any individuals - most of all, himself.

Cassian defends himself against Jyn's accusations by saying he didn't pull the trigger but she correctly sees through this deflection and compares him to a storm trooper. ANH never asks what separates the good guys from the bad guys; it never pretends to deal with anything even remotely ambiguous.* R1 sets up that theme and carries it for a while but sort of abandons it in favor of an increasingly preprosterous"epic" adventure, completely dropping the issue of moral grayness for the simplistic notion that Cassian and others who have done evil in the name of good are justified because of their willingness to self-sacrifice. Unlike on the shuttle leaving Eadu, Jyn buys this bs on Yavin - maybe because she doesn't care anymore, maybe because the studio execs didn't care anymore.

* One possible exception - Leia's willingness to sacrifice Dantooine.

 Manchu wrote:
* One possible exception - Leia's willingness to sacrifice Dantooine.

Maybe Leia didn't think she was sacrificing anything, it was an abandoned base, after all. I think she expected the Empire to search in and get back to her after they came up empty, not blow up the whole planet.

Just based on the film itself, we don't know whether Dantooine is inhabited - hence calling it out as a potential ambiguity. If we assume that Dantooine is bereft of life, and that's why Leia chose ot, then she hasn't really made a difficult moral choice at all, which is consistent with the rest of ANH.

On the subject of Dantooine. I wonder if the 'rebel base' mentioned in the original movie could be the Jedi convent from the KOTOR games?

Dantooine was a previous, now abandoned, rebel base (prior to them relocating to Yavin4).
The Empire DID send scouts to check it out - and they returned, reporting it abandoned "for some time" (it's in ANH ... Followed by "she lied to us ..." ).

Leia was willing to sacrifice an otherwise abandoned planet in order to save the rebellion - it was purely a delaying tactic, but Dantooine (and Yavin 4) were otherwise abandoned planets. The rebels preferred to use otherwise unoccupied worlds to limit collateral damage from potential Imperial punitive strikes.

No-one knows what actually happened to the previous occupants who built the temple ruins in Tikal Yavin4 but they weren't around when the rebels moved in.

In the defunct EU, they were Sith temples.

As to Dantooine - whether or for how long a Rebel base has been abandoned doesn't answer whether the rest of an entire planet is uninhabited. Similalry, we only see one location on Yavin IV. My point is not to argue that Leia necessarily did make a tough call when she said Dantooine. Rather, the issue is that it could have been a tough call if you stick to only what we see and hear in the film. But I can well believe that Dantooine was uninhabited, Leia knew as much, and that there was nothing whatsoever morally ambiguous about directing Tarkin to that planet; if so, it's an entirely heroic action undertaken to save the people of Alderaan. And that is consistent with the morally uncomplicated nature of ANH, which is such a contrast to the direction R1 halfheartedly goes.

 Manchu wrote:
Yes I think most films set during wars that do not explicitly deal with war itself are actually adventure movies. R1 like ANH is a good example. So are a lot of the WW2 pictures, which of course helped inspire Star Wars to begin with.

OK, so you are just inventing your own more restrictive definition of "war movie" as a way to bash this one.

It's not just "walking in and expecting" a dark, serious movie; it's a movie that presents itself as dark and complicated but actually is just another morally facile adventure flick.

And you're doing it because otherwise, this criticism would be hilarious nonsense. It is, by the way. Hilarious nonsense, that is. Again, it's not perfectly executed, but to brand a film "morally facile" just because it's not a relentlessly grinding docufiction about the horrors of war and you thought the closing shot for two of the characters was a bit sappy is just bizarre. The main characters are criminals and assassins, pretty much all the "good guys" die, the Rebel leadership are shown to be perfectly willing to order people killed and their operatives willing to silence informants or kill off even members of other Rebel cells when it's expedient, the film presents an outright collaborator as a sympathetic character, crikey they have a Rebel corvette go 9/11 on a Star Destroyer. Again, it's not Platoon, but if you went in expecting something truly dark and twisted the problem was your expectations, because the advertising promised a dark and complicated Star Wars film, and it delivered on that.

Dantooine is not an uninhabited planet - its a farming planet.

I saw it on Saturday. I thought it was great. In the black and white universe of Star Wars this movie managed to be an interesting shade of grey. Greatly enjoyed the characters too, and how they managed to recreate the aesthetics of the originals.

A big highlight was finally getting to see Vader in his armour being terrifyingly dangerous in one of the movies. That corridor scene makes me giddy.

Best Star Wars movie outside of the original trilogy.

The final 15 minutes were perfect. Bringing back Tarkin and Leia and Vader was awesome. It was terrifying seeing Darth Vader cut his way through the rebels, while they scream and pound on the doors.

The space battle reminded me of episode 4, with similar trench runs.

I'm not sure if the star destroyer shot in the beginning of the movie was a model or not, but almost all big space ship shots looked real, they looked like the models used in the original trilogy.

The movie showed something no other Star Wars has done: it showed the people, those who fought. The actual war that was being fought on the ground. Rebels dieing. I liked it.

Easily a 9/10.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Dantooine is not an uninhabited planet -

damn right : my Mon Calamari tech specialist/soldier is there right now with the rest of his crew.


We left Tatooine just as some big ships went overhead, sure we'll be fine.

LOL OK define "war movie" as a movie set during a war, it's not really relevant to my larger point. That just means that all Star Wars movies are war movies when the only reason this term "war movie" has come up is because marketing people want to differentiate R1 from Eps I - VII. But whether you cut it finely or coarsely, R1 doesn't stand apart from the others along those lines. Nor does it stand apart as more thematically "serious" or "grown up" than the others, at least by the finale. R1 starts off by raising troubling questions but ultimately shrugs them off, as described in detail above.

I went in not expecting much after TFA but R1 really surprised me. For me this is the best starwars movie ever made. Visually it was stunning - loved the plot - loved the characters. Felt like a star-wars movie too.

10/10

Apparently there was a scene cut from the film when Darth Vader pursues 3 of the main cast Heroes, not just nameless Rebels. I would have loved to see that at the end of the film, Jynn and Cassian desperately trying to escape Vader and deliver the plans to Tantive IV.

 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.

A lot of what you see in star-wars clips isn't actually the whole picture and the timing isn't right ether. Looks like only 5 X-wings and a few U-wings made it through the gate but probably more made it off scene. 2 ISD honestly might have been no match for an assorted rebel fleet of 15+ ships with a bunch of fighter support. Also much like today - A single fighter packs enough punch to cripple a capital ship - perhaps the ISD chose to engage the rebel fighters away from the Rebel fleets guns. As the Rebels main objective was not to destroy star destroyers but to disable the shield gate - they went along with it. Vader was only able to crush the rebel fleet because he caught them off guard in a retreat with most rebel fighters docked or destroyed. On the ground We saw a lot of rebels getting obliterated. They had the initiative but once they lost it they were toast. I think this was a great scene. We had never seen rebels getting their asses canned so hard really.

In comparison in ROTJ (my favorite) Something like 50 ISD and a superstar destroyer catch a fleet maybe twice the size of the R1 fleet in a trap and are utterly annihilated even with death-star support. The only conclusion that can be draw is. Rebel fighter tech/skill is more powerful that star destroyers. The real question is - the empire being as strong as it is - why don't they stock their hangers with more advanced fighters? The standard Tie-fighter just isnt cutting it for these guys.

@ Xenomancers

I'm not sure that that imperial fleet was completely annihilated. What's to say that they didn't just retreat when the Death Star blew up?

 Future War Cultist wrote:
@ Xenomancers

I'm not sure that that imperial fleet was completely annihilated. What's to say that they didn't just retreat when the Death Star blew up?

As a young nerd I believe I read that the entire fleet was destroyed. Ether from the deathstar blast or the rebels follow ups after the deathstar 2- probably a combo of both.

If something is important to the plot, it needs to be shown. There is no excuse worse than, well if you read the comic book ... If I have to read the comic book or the tie-in novel or play the video game or wait for the next film two years later in order to understand something important in the movie then the movie has made a mistake. R1 showed how many fighters made it through the gate. That's that.

As to the ISDs: if two ISDs are no match for the Rebel fleet then why does one ISD (the Devastator, with Vader aboard) decisively end the battle? It cannot be because three is better than two because, by the time it arrives, the Devastator is the only ISD left in the fight. And it cannot be because the previous ISDs had sufficiently "weakened" the Rebel fleet for Vader to wipe them up because they do not even deploy before being crippled.

One of the biggest weaknesses of R1 is everything happens "because the script says so" - i.e., plot developments are insufficiently explained, relying on the audience to just accept that whatever happens in the film is supposed to happen at this point in this kind of film. The Rebel forces on Scarif are successful because of course they are, until they're not. The film doesn't actually show us why the battle is progressing the way it is; it's just "there are X minutes left in the movie so at X minus Y minutes, we need a hero to accomplish his goal and at X minus Z minutes we need that hero to die."

R1 was always up against the problem of creating tension when the conclusion is foregone. The much-praised horror movie scene with Vader is actually a great example of why R1 didn't succeed in this regard. Vader is murdering his way down a corridor of Rebel mooks. The mook at the end of the corridor has the Death Star plans and all he has to do is hand them through a semi-closed blast door. There is absolutely zero tension here as to the fate of the Death Star plans, which by the way is the whole point of this film. So the scene just becomes a kind of demo reel for showing off Vader's baddassery. Yes, it looked really cool. No, it was not good storytelling.

And that sums up R1 - a really cool-looking movie that doesn't quite tell an interesting story. Somebody, whether Gareth Edwards or Kathleen Kennedy, decided that they couldn't generate sufficient tension about the fate of the Death Star plans, given everyone already knows the mission succeeds, so instead they focused on making the mission as "EPIC" as possible, incidentally dwarfing the much more important Battle of Yavin. This was the wrong choice. It is possible to tell an interesting story, even when the audience already knows the outcome. No one watches ANH thinking that Luke will fail to blow up the Death Star.

 Manchu wrote:
If something is important to the plot, it needs to be shown. There is no excuse worse than, well if you read the comic book ... If I have to read the comic book or the tie-in novel or play the video game or wait for the next film two years later in order to understand something important in the movie then the movie has made a mistake. R1 showed how many fighters made it through the gate. That's that.

As to the ISDs: if two ISDs are no match for the Rebel fleet then why does one ISD (the Devastator, with Vader aboard) decisively end the battle? It cannot be because three is better than two because, by the time it arrives, the Devastator is the only ISD left in the fight. And it cannot be because the previous ISDs had sufficiently "weakened" the Rebel fleet for Vader to wipe them up because they do not even deploy before being crippled.

One of the biggest weaknesses of R1 is everything happens "because the script says so" - i.e., plot developments are insufficiently explained, relying on the audience to just accept that whatever happens in the film is supposed to happen at this point in this kind of film. The Rebel forces on Scarif are successful because of course they are, until they're not. The film doesn't actually show us why the battle is progressing the way it is; it's just "there are X minutes left in the movie so at X minus Y minutes, we need a hero to accomplish his goal and at X minus Z minutes we need that hero to die."

R1 was always up against the problem of creating tension when the conclusion is foregone. The much-praised horror movie scene with Vader is actually a great example of why R1 didn't succeed in this regard. Vader is murdering his way down a corridor of Rebel mooks. The mook at the end of the corridor has the Death Star plans and all he has to do is hand them through a semi-closed blast door. There is absolutely zero tension here as to the fate of the Death Star plans, which by the way is the whole point of this film. So the scene just becomes a kind of demo real for showing off Vader's baddassery. Yes, it looked really cool. No, it was not good storytelling.

And that sums up R1 - a really cool-looking movie that doesn't quite tell an interesting story. Somebody, whether Gareth Edwards or Kathleen Kennedy, decided that they couldn't generate sufficient tension about the fate of the Death Star plans, given everyone already knows the mission succeeds, so instead they focused on making the mission as "EPIC" as possible, incidentally dwarfing the much more important Battle of Yavin. This was the wrong choice. It is possible to tell an interesting story, even when the audience already knows the outcome. No one watches ANH thinking that Luke will fail to blow up the Death Star.

You make a good point about the corridor scene. What if the door was always closed and malfunctioning and at the last second a brave rebel gets the door to open just enough to stick the plans through? It would have created more tension maybe. About Vadrers star-destroyer merking the rebel fleet though - I think we are to assume that the fleet was diminished by tie-fighter harassment and was caught off gaurd - it's a good enough explanation for me. Would be great if they added a few more scenes to that battle to tie things together better. Maybe to come in an extended scenes blue ray release. (which I will buy the day it comes out).

"Caught off guard" is a hell of an understatement. They'd just fought a vicious and costly battle taking lots of casualties and damage, had all fighters docked and were jumping to hyperspace, probably with their shields down and all power devoted to the engines. Some of them even crashed into Vader's Star Destroyer when it jumped into their path.

Is it any wonder why they were annihilated?

No, the only wonder is why they weren't annihilated before Vader arrived.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
@Xenomancer - Yeah I agree there should be lots of really fascinating deleted scenes. All in all, I think a less "epic" movie with more tension would have been a lot better.

Really didn't like the Captain's sunk cost fallacy speech right before their attack on the archives.

He should also have stayed dead when he fell down the shaft.

Jyn should have already succeeded and then been shot by Imperial officer guy.

The mind eating monster was way too big and awkward. Why not start with that procedure anyway?



Apart from that, it was good fun and I liked the characters. Especially crippled "rebel extremist" guy and Jyn's dad.