Author Topic: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS  (Read 7466 times)

Golden Girl

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SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« on: December 16, 2016, 09:27:21 PM »
Some thoughts:

It's a fun movie, but also one with problems - like The Force Awakens, it's not weighed down by Lucas' flaws, but also like TFA, it's not elevated by his genius either.

There are quite a lot of pacing and editing problems, which are to be expected from having such extensive re-shoots, and a lot of bits from the trailers aren't in the final cut.

The late change in composers also makes for a rather rushed and flat score, even weaker than TFA's score.

Lots of fun references to the other movies, and some slightly hit and miss CGI work to bring back a couple of very familiar faces.

Character development is close to zero for most of the cast - it's a larger ensemble than other SW movies, so there's not as much time to flesh out characters, so some of them come off as 2-dimensional even for an SW movie.

The recreation of the style of ANH is very well done, and links up almost seamlessly with the original movie by the end.

Darth Vader is pretty much just a cameo, but his short amount of screen time will very likely still please all fans of the Empire.

The re-shoots affect the tone of the movie, as it seems caught between trying to be a darker and grittier take on the SW universe and fitting in with the tone of the other movies.
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saipaman

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2016, 12:47:14 AM »

Character development is close to zero for most of the cast - it's a larger ensemble than other SW movies, so there's not as much time to flesh out characters, so some of them come off as 2-dimensional even for an SW movie.


Given the ending, would there have been any actual point to more characterization?   

Golden Girl

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #2 on: December 17, 2016, 02:15:15 AM »
Given the ending, would there have been any actual point to more characterization?

Well, making the audience more invested in the characters would help with the emotional impact of the ending.
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saipaman

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2016, 04:39:38 AM »
Maybe we'll get a prequal to the prequal and then we'll get some characterization.

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2016, 07:31:42 PM »
While, I agree there has been next to no character development. And this is coming from someone who HATES episode 7 (me); this movie had many great things in it as well as some stupid parts. Such as the sharkhead ship slamming into the star destroyer and how the At-At's looked. Overall, it had relatable characters where in episode 7, there was not one that I could not relate to. No one was overpowered (is Rey), everyone was just a regular trooper; which I liked.
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Blondeshell

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #5 on: December 17, 2016, 10:59:27 PM »
this movie had many great things in it as well as some stupid parts. Such as the sharkhead ship slamming into the star destroyer and how the At-At's looked.

Minor nit to pick: They were actually AT-ACTs, which were different from AT-ATs.

http://www.starwars.com/databank/at-act-walker

eabrace

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #6 on: December 18, 2016, 12:14:38 AM »
I suppressed a "squee" when they came over the intercom in the hangar.

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saipaman

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #7 on: December 18, 2016, 03:43:36 AM »
I've always wondered why Imperial war doctrine places no value on combat air (space) patrols.

doc7924

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #8 on: December 18, 2016, 06:53:58 AM »
Spoiler alert -

They get away with the plans and give them to the Rebels.


hurple

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #9 on: December 19, 2016, 02:30:46 PM »
Spoiler alert -

They get away with the plans and give them to the Rebels.

Oh, jeez, man... Way to ruin the whole movie for me.  Now that the ice and snow have cleared here, I was planning to go see this.


CG

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #10 on: December 19, 2016, 02:44:35 PM »
Shouldn't the cast be all Bothans?

saipaman

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #11 on: December 19, 2016, 05:50:41 PM »
Shouldn't the cast be all Bothans?

Would any prior definition of 'Bothan' be in canon now? 

Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #12 on: December 19, 2016, 05:53:14 PM »
Shouldn't the cast be all Bothans?

I was thinking that too, but someone more of a Star Wars than me reminded me it was the plans to the second death star that the Bothans died getting.

Golden Girl

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #13 on: December 19, 2016, 07:09:13 PM »
Shouldn't the cast be all Bothans?

Only if the movie was set just before ROTJ :P
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CG

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #14 on: December 19, 2016, 07:10:23 PM »
What can I say?  Death Stars all look the same...  ;)

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #15 on: December 19, 2016, 08:41:06 PM »
You didn't really need much character development.  The most developed character is the droid.  Well the most personality. 

I do like all the throwbacks to a New Hope including the angry duo that ran into Luke and Obi-wan in the bar.

I really wanted to see the Death Star exit hyperspace.  The resurrected and de-aged characters looked a little odd.

Since I didn't follow any production gossip I have no idea what or why they did re-shoots but I rather believe they found it necessary as they were editing it together.  But lately the news of re-shoots, which isn't a new thing, is now always attributed to the film being diddled with by the studio or it got panned in a test screening.

Overall I thought it was a good film.  Nice job expanding a single line from the story roll of A New Hope into a movie.
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Blondeshell

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #16 on: December 19, 2016, 10:00:05 PM »
Here's some insight into how the reshoots might have altered the tone/direction of the story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DkQehtt04

eabrace

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #17 on: December 20, 2016, 12:06:26 AM »
Here's some insight into how the reshoots might have altered the tone/direction of the story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DkQehtt04
On the bright side, the trailers didn't give too much of the movie away because a lot of footage from the trailers didn't make it into the final version of the movie.  :)
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saipaman

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #18 on: December 20, 2016, 05:37:45 AM »
On the bright side, the trailers didn't give too much of the movie away because a lot of footage from the trailers didn't make it into the final version of the movie.  :)

That's a lot of money to spend on a disinformation campaign.

eabrace

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #19 on: December 20, 2016, 10:28:30 AM »
That's a lot of money to spend on a disinformation campaign.
I don't even think that was intentional.  The director isn't usually involved in cutting the trailers.  The people putting the trailers together don't always have the final cut of the movie to work from, either.  Normally that doesn't make a huge difference, but I recall reading that the reshoots for Rogue One were unusually extensive.  They didn't just go back to get better angles on scenes they'd already shot, there were re-writes of the script involved to get from
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Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #20 on: December 20, 2016, 01:02:43 PM »
Well that movie was completely pointless, but at least it was better than ep 7.

Dev7on

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #21 on: December 27, 2016, 08:29:08 PM »
I think the movie was ok. The pacing is slow until the end. This film is made specifically for hardcore Star Wars fans. I like Star Wars but, I'm not a huge fan. My dad is. Everytime Dad spots an Easter Egg he whispers in my ear and I'm like "Wait...what? That's what from eposide what?" My favotite scene in the movie is hands down the Darth Vader scene at end of the movie that's it. Does anyone else have a problem with CGI Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia? <--- R.I.P. to the both of them by the way.

MyriVerse

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #22 on: December 27, 2016, 08:45:51 PM »
No problem with the CGI, just like for that of Tron Legacy and Ant-Man.
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Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #23 on: December 28, 2016, 12:15:02 AM »
I thought CGI Tarkin was the best actor in the movie. Leia was some serious uncanny valley action though.

Still can't get used to the non James Earl Jones Vader voice though.

Arcana

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #24 on: December 28, 2016, 01:55:12 AM »
This film is made specifically for hardcore Star Wars fans.

I finally saw Rogue One the other day.  I actually think the opposite: The Force Awakens is a more attractive movie to Star Wars fans than people unfamiliar with Star Wars, but I think Rogue One is a better movie for people unfamiliar with Star Wars even with all the easter eggs.  Without the easter eggs, I think the movie stands alone as sort of a "Dirty Dozen" set in the Star Wars universe that you don't need to know a lot to appreciate (although it helps).

The one thing that I think is unequivocally a gift to the fans is the ending.  We all know Darth Vader is the boogeyman of the Star Wars universe, but we never really fully see that in an actual Star Wars movie.  That scene at the end is a culmination of all that the prequels showed about the power of the Jedi and all the menace implied by the original trilogy.

Probably the thing I think the movie did surprisingly well is how it portrayed the rebellion as being this fragile thing teetering on the edge of collapse, and how it was the people who were doing the dirty work of fighting it that understood that the best.  Yes, having the rebel fighters rally around Jyn was a little cheesy, but for me what sells it is later when the rebel HQ gets word that an assault has broken out on Scarif and Mon Motha asks for Admiral Raddus, only to be told that he's already heading to his ship.  Its pretty clear that Jyn isn't some magical rallying force, it is that much of the rebel fighters were looking for an excuse to fight, understood they were possibly making a last stand, but just needed a little push to set them off.


And a word on the Death Star, specifically the reactor vulnerability that people have been calling idiotic for decades, and was addressed in part in Rogue One.  Personally, I've never had a problem with the Death Star vulnerability.  That vulnerability is not difficult to explain as something other than sheer stupidity.  It requires firing weapons down the one exhaust port that matters in a machine that is supposedly about 150 kilometers across.  That's comparable to finding a target the size of a beach blanket placed randomly somewhere in South Carolina.  It is possible there are thousands of similar exhaust ports.  It is possible (almost certainly) the exhaust ports are necessary and cannot be eliminated.  They are shielded against just shooting down them (which is why you have to use physical weapons and you cannot just shoot at them from above).  Even when you do shoot down them it almost never does anything.  I always assumed the vulnerability was something subtle, that the perfect shot down that exhaust port, and only that exhaust port, destroys some critical set of power-related components which causes the main reactor - which has to be a massive and potentially easy to overload generator given what it powers - to basically self-destruct.  This happens a lot in engineering all the time, where things are designed that are so powerful they are powerful enough to destroy themselves if they do not work in a very specific way.  The main engines of the space shuttle, for example, will destroy themselves due to overpressure if they do not ignite within about one second of fuel flow start.

Now that Rogue One establishes that that vulnerability is not an accident but a deliberate act, it does seem like it could be an act of genius to me.  I can imagine designing a system such that it contained a flaw that cannot be trivially removed because it is inherent in the design.  Any attempt to eliminate the flaw creates problems elsewhere.  There are historical analogous examples.  As an engineer myself, I'm perfectly okay with this narrative.  It is what I might have done.

Blondeshell

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #25 on: December 28, 2016, 02:52:52 AM »

Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #26 on: December 28, 2016, 03:45:06 AM »
Sounded weird to me in the movie so I googled and it listed someone else on whatever came up first. Idk

Re the reactor - the companion novel gives back story on it that the weapon is based on focusing an overload of a Khyber crystal. So presumably overloading it without directing that energy would be bad. Oh also I can't recommend reading that unless you really want some dull aimless back story on characters you weren't likely to care about from the movie. It's really phoned in.

Golden Girl

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #27 on: December 28, 2016, 04:37:36 AM »
Still can't get used to the non James Earl Jones Vader voice though.

That's still JEJ in Rogue One - it's just that he's 39 years older than he was in 1977 :P
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Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #28 on: December 28, 2016, 02:50:01 PM »
That's still JEJ in Rogue One - it's just that he's 39 years older than he was in 1977 :P

Glad I'm not.

Tenzhi

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #29 on: January 10, 2017, 04:56:56 AM »
Finally saw it today.  It was alright.  The Tarkin CG was simultaneously impressive and terrible.  Had everyone been done in that detailed animation, he probably wouldn't have looked like an out of place video game cut scene.  Thankfully, the Leia got less face time.

The movie itself put me in the mind of those Star Wars anthology books like Tales from Mos Eisley, et al.  It seemed a bit disjointed and unevenly paced while trying to hold itself together with familiar references and cameos.  We were introduced to some fun characters, but it's too bad they all met slightly GRRM fates.  Like episode 7, at least it was better than episodes 1-3.
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Vee

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #30 on: January 10, 2017, 05:18:41 AM »
Should check out the novelization. It's quite a bit less disjointed than the movie and is better if you can overlook some hack writing tropes and a terrible reader in the audio version. Still pretty terrible, but better, and a lot better than Catalyst which was just awful.
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The only halfway interesting thing in Catalyst is Krennic using smugglers to sneak weapons onto planets held by mining corporations and the like just before Imperial inspections, framing the corporations and allowing the Empire to sieze the installations.

I've kind of given up on any of the movies being good at this point, but at least Rebels is fun.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2017, 06:44:57 AM by Vee »

Night-Hawk07

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #31 on: January 10, 2017, 06:20:21 AM »
I didn't know that Tarkin was totally CGI until after the fact. I figured they just used that guy from the very end of Episode III and just added make up or CGI effects to make him look older. Leia was pretty obvious, though.

Blondeshell

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #32 on: January 10, 2017, 09:32:55 PM »
They weren't 100% CGI. There were real humans who provided the bodies, voices, and performances, while the CGI was applied over their heads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMB2sLwz0Do

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Re: SPOILERS - Rogue One - SPOILERS
« Reply #33 on: January 11, 2017, 05:18:44 AM »
I kind of held back replying here, since I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan, but I did finally see this last weekend.

Tarkin broke uncanny valley for me.  I saw his face and it just didn't line up with "this is real" to me.  Similar to the Final Fantasy movie, the technology is impressive, but it's not quite indistinguishable from a live action recording yet.

Leia fared much better but she also didn't move a whole lot.  I agree with Tenzhi, wisely done on their part.
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