Star Wars Anthology shit talk (Rogue One, Young Solo, TBD)

It seems like Sam's part was cut down or changed quite a bit in the reshoots

Me back in April: Also does anybody else think they cast FW basically just to be the guy who says the trailer stuff? I bet you he has one scene and we just saw most of it

Well if so then the reshoots made me mostly right, therefore hooray reshoots

funny that in decades of Star Wars films, the last two are the first that actually have Imperial motherfuckers defecting.

looking forward to when Kylo Ren switches teames in the next one.

Yeah but realistically how did the guy who told Andor come by this information? Did Bodhi go around telling all his stormtrooper buddies ''hey peace out, Mads Mikkelsen's a traitor and I have a secret message from him to Saw Ferreira?'' It's just a really contrived plot IMO.

You guys pining for the days of over-explanation from the Lucas prequels lol

maybe they'll make a movie explaining how the Bodhi defection information was acquired

Bodhi went to a trading post and started asking around about how to find Saw Gerrera. Word gets out.
The dialogue explains pretty much all of this.

Here's the War is Boring review (warning: prose bad)
https://warisboring.com/rogue-one-shows-us-the-dark-side-of-the-rebellion-d6aebf38bf6e#.eo75nbkc8

"you guys" = not me! I got it all the first time thanks

there was also an APB for Bodhi on Jedha too with his actual likeness - which made it kind of funny to me that he shows up on Skariff and nobody recognizes him when he comes on board for the inspection. but w/e, they were all ready to blast away anyway.

I still love the reaction of the derpy Imperial employee who gets asked to comb through his records:

"ALL of them?"

so Droopy-esque.

You guys pining for the days of over-explanation from the Lucas prequels lol

― Nhex, Thursday, December 22, 2016 8:59 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah, fuq that. much of the original trilogy wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny either, but frankly who gives a shit

I mean the universe-building is swiss cheese and succumbs immediately to any attack of logic, like all space opera, but the reasons why people go places and talk to other characters are all pretty well explained imo

Yeah honestly the plotty stuff is only distracting to me where the story isn't working as a story (momentum, character arcs, emotional investment, tension and release). The prequels are actually Exhibit A here - it's a real fucking boring story and so virtually every scene I can find myself getting distracted by how much the minute-to-minute plotting makes no sense. Yeah, the big picture stuff is gratuitous over-explanation but that's not what I'm talking about here.

Plus, there's plenty here that I'm sure is 'explained in the dialogue' but, as with the whole master switch confusion, that's not really the problem - it's that things have been made unnecessarily complicated and the story itself has stopped working. Film Crit Hulk is OTM about the third act problems (tho IMO that was still the strongest chunk of the movie and he's way off about the first act).

looking forward to when Kylo Ren switches teames in the next one.

― Neanderthal, Thursday, December 22, 2016

and blows Luke.

The Force Awakens

I dunno, I felt like the bar is somewhere around the climactic action in Dirty Dozen / Kelly's Heroes where an ensemble is all doing different stuff in different places and it probably all makes sense to the commanding officer but pretty much nobody else, and there's always something or other that throws a wrench into the plan and requires valiant workarounds. I didn't mind. To me the shield gate + radio dish shenanigans are all of a trope, no different than having a blind guy who is superlative at all forms of combat

a blind ASIAN man

Yen's character reminded me of Shaw Brothers' Crippled Avengers

I was annoyed not that they cast an Asian actor (there are no "Asians" in Star Wars world, anyway), but it seemed a little on the nose that they also made him a blind martial arts expert. Like, any of them could have been blind and good at fighting, they just happened to give those attributes to Donnie Yen.

I agree the reshoot stuff clearly affected Whitaker the most. Why didn't he join them on their adventures? Because that would have involved reshooting every subsequent scene. Better to just have him say "I give up."

idk I think the Hulk dude and RLM are right on this: heist/caper/mission movies have a certain structure that wasn't used here (or replaced with something else that works): you establish what everybody's trying to do, what each of their roles are in the plan, the obstacles they expect to overcome... and then the tension comes from whether they pull off those obstacles, things going wrong, they turn the corner and where they thought the door would be open, there's guards there!, or, we were counting on the blind semi-Jedi to do this but he's dead, etc. (Funnily, in The Great Escape one of the things that goes wrong is that one of their team goes blind along the way.) Here the obstacles were mostly invented on the fly - oh now we need this cable and this switch, oh there's a previously unmentioned satellite adjustment switch down the catwalk - following the logic of video game mission-padding.

Also in that sequence: I think it was a mistake to have BOTH the X-wing battle above and the squad of faceless Nam vets on the ground, because both basically have the same role: we don't really know these characters but they're doing something that supports the mission and adds a sense of desperation and doom as they all die. Having to keep cutting away to both drains time from the main cast whose heist we should be invested in. I'm spending so much time thinking about this because I think a lot of the material was THERE (and maybe ended up on the cutting room floor) so it's kind of an interesting mental recut exercise, how few things you'd really have to change for this to end up being one of the all-time heist movie greats.

My theory would be that the X-wing stuff was added (or expanded) by Disney. It forces that kind of confusing scene with the Rebels debating whether to act on this new intelligence, and it makes the least sense to the plot insert anyway. If they transmitted the Death Star plans to this whole fleet, why would the copy that Leia is transporting in A New Hope be of any particular importance? Why would people in A New Hope be surprised to discover the Death Star and its destructive power? Anyway it just "feels" wrong, as others have pointed out - it always seemed much more like the plans had been slipped out by a small covert team rather than in a giant space battle that everybody in the galaxy would know about. It's certainly a lot cooler that way.

It wasn't totally coherent, but this was *not* a heist movie, more like a modest race against time/point A-B-C movie, a la "Raiders of the Lost Ark." (Though obviously it's no Raiders).

funny that in decades of Star Wars films, the last two are the first that actually have Imperial motherfuckers defecting.

Darth Vader defects in Return of the Jedi!

If they transmitted the Death Star plans to this whole fleet

only the flagship has a big enough receiver, you see. and then it has to be written to a disk. this isn't just commodity equipment we're talking about!

I was annoyed not that they cast an Asian actor (there are no "Asians" in Star Wars world, anyway), but it seemed a little on the nose that they also made him a blind martial arts expert. Like, any of them could have been blind and good at fighting, they just happened to give those attributes to Donnie Yen.

What were they called in TFA again? Culture Club?

At least they didn't back the plans up onto multiple devices and networks. A lesson for us all.

THERE ARE NO NETWORKS IN STAR WARS

jfc

So many Original Trilogy plot devices hinge on 70s-era mainframe computing, as discussed in that gloriously nerdy storage article linked earlier in this thread

Another Disneyfication problem might be this: we don't really get to see the Empire's atrocities at a vivid enough level for the characters' motivations to make sense. They blow up that city, which is obviously a horrible war crime, but c'mon, give me a T2 shot of people disintegrating, or idk have the kid that Jyn saves be playing with a doll and then the doll's horribly burnt head comes flying out of the wreckage or something. The Empire's exploiting the planet and mining its crystals? Go Temple of Doom and show us the kids getting whipped and the families impoverished by this colonial imposition, or have the guard at Saw's base talk about how his aging father had his hands cut off for publishing forbidden literature, or something.

I think this would all help make Jyn's arc make more sense: she starts out thinking her life's story is about individual survival and is grimly satisfied with that, and gradually she comes to realize that these other people's suffering is hers too, she gets her consciousness raised and she realizes she needs the Rebellion. TFA has this problem a little bit, but Finn's horror at the slaughter in the opening scene is able to stand in for a lot of this because it's so immediately human - a lot of it can just happen in the acting.

That evil empire stuff has already been established in the other six movies...

Though I think the alternate Jyn arc you're talking about sounds like what the movie would have been in the original, pre-re-shoots version that was hinted at in the trailers

Curious about that, because I didn't find the Jyn character particularly interesting or fleshed out. She kind of seemed to flow with whatever the plot needed her to flow with, and other than "generally rugged survivor", I'm not exactly sure what her personality is supposed to be.

the last two are the first that actually have Imperial motherfuckers defecting.

Late to responding on this thanks to being on holiday flight, but yeah, as mentioned above, Vader has a faceturn at the end of Jedi to redeem himself.

Minor stuff here but I loved the scene where we first see Bodhi getting delivered to SG's gang out in the desert. The aliens were weird and threatening and the sound design was just right ( loved the lumbering sloth dude) and for a second there's a musical echo of Williams' EP4 R2-meets-Jawas music. Really perfect little SW moment.

I will say I'm glad I skipped all the later trailers, as I was pleasantly surprised and bemused that they went that big with the space fight at the end. Watching in the theater, I did have mixed feelings of excitement and almost embarrassment at how over the top self-indulgent it was. "Best fanfilm ever" really does hit pretty close to the mark.

Also, I can't recall the last time I disagreed with the RLM guys so much. I was impressed and happy to see the Gold Leader/Red Leader appearances not out of just ref-spotting, but that they figured out a way to scan and integrate footage from ANH into something filmed four decades later, and do so in a clever way.

I do agree that a Donnie Yen/Wen Jiang buddy adventure movie would be awesome, too.

I like how the dude with two tubes on his mask really was named "Two Tubes" like this was some Goodfellas shit or something.

http://i.onionstatic.com/avclub/5892/33/16x9/1200.jpg

http://www.avclub.com/article/meet-rogue-ones-edrio-two-tubes-guy-two-tubes-239898

Didn't somebody really similar-looking show up in the Jakku marketplace in TFA?

so long as they can the "I am the Force" twaddle

xpost

Or pay it off

Hey which one of you moonlights at io9

http://io9.gizmodo.com/i-have-problems-with-rogue-one-1790413691

I may choose to refute this article later, at some length

The moral of the story is that meter data can take perilously long to download. Make sure to test your internet speed before embarking on suicide missions.

Then a high-ranking Rebel officer orders him to assassinate Jyn’s father Galen, even though the complete destruction of Jedha City is all the proof they need that Galen’s work is done and the Death Star is up and running—killing him will achieve nothing. Why?

This order came prior to the destruction of Jedha City, and the officer clearly indicates it's also to prevent him from continuing to supply savage weapons of this type to the Empire, operational or not.

More gallingly, when Jyn and Cassian tell the Alliance about the dangers of the Death Star, and that they need to stage an assault on Scarif, the Rebels decide to sit this battle out, at least in part because Jyn is a “criminal.”

Gahh, it's not because she's a criminal, it's because she's a criminal they've known all of ten minutes who largely has been acting out of self-interest to that point to avoid reincarceration, whose father built the fucking Death Star! gee can't think why they might not want to go to Scarif based solely on her word with no empirical evidence whatsoever other than a hologram that only she saw.

Narratively, what’s the point?

story gains more gravitas when a lone rogue ship begins an unsanctioned assault that quickly gains momentum and inspires the rest of the Rebels to join in. it doesn't have to WORK for you personally but lord it's not hard to understand.

Sure, the Star Wars movies have never been strangers to killing characters, but Rogue One’s dedication to watching its characters die is relentless, and usually to no great advancement of the plot.

sure, except if they hadn't, you'd be saying "gee what kind of continuity horseshit is this, if Jyn and Bodhi, and Baze and everybody survived the assault, how come they don't appear in A New Hope! What, did they get pensions and retire immediately after?". and ffs how many appendages get severed in the original and prequel trilogies? visually, most of these deaths were of the innocent old school Star Wars type, bloodless, etc - other than the one headshot Baze takes. AFA is the one that actually had blood!

Most egregious is the death of Saw Gerrera, who allows himself to be vaporized for no good reason.

he's an old crumbling warlord who is practically almost dead to begin with and his home is being destroyed, gee can't think of why he might be ok just peacing out

I mean jesus, while Forrest is chewing scenery he even says "There's not much of me left" right before he sucks oxygen out of a machine

fwiw I assumed that was painkillers he was sucking out of that thing, not a breathing apparatus

(would also help explain the speech pathology, perhaps)

possibly painkillers. either way I'd have thought article writer might have surmised through his frailty and the obviousness of his lines that dude who probably can't take a crap without a machine might be ok getting Kevorkianed once Jedha City blows up.

btw very good job fisking all his sad arguments, could not have done it better, I will be your wingman any time

I did enjoy the misdirection of the trailer implying someone saying that the Force would "make ten men feel like a hundred," when that line is actually Cassian telling his tiny squadron, "I need it to look like you guys have an Army out there."

Saw just needed a little bacta tank spritz at the Mustafar spa to pull him out of his doldrums.

XPs

possibly painkillers. either way I'd have thought article writer might have surmised through his frailty and the obviousness of his lines that dude who probably can't take a crap without a machine might be ok getting Kevorkianed once Jedha City blows up.

Indeed, he couldn't have outrun the disaster even if he'd wanted to

can't wait for the reveal that Finn is Saw's grandkid or something in the next movie

Finger Era

Shhhh! I haven't yet had a chance to publish my Saw Gerrera/Mon Mothma fanfic yet

xp

glad Lucas wasn't allowed near this flick, during the Evazan fan service moment he probably woulda thrown in a line like "come, Jyn, we don't want things to get out of hand"