I haven't even seen this movie yet, but I'm only glad they left out the Millennium Falcon.

I agree with you on all counts, especially where you claim it's better than the prequels. It's a movie I'd at least consider watching again. Though, it does have some serious flaws.

TBH the main problem is how did they ****ing enter hyperspace from so deep inside a gravity well at that one point, holy ****, come on, is nothing sacred?!?!

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

I will be seeing this movie sometime after Christmas.

Well, they included the Ghost (ship from the CGI series Rebels).

Huh, I didn't expect to see the best Star Wars film since ESB. Definitely far better than TFA. Only better than RotJ due to the virtue of RotJ consisting of additional scenes that don't involve Vader, Luke and the Emperor.

Liked HK-47- I mean, K the robot, as well as the Kung-Fu Master and his bodyguard. The explosion at the end of the Iraq sequence was just gorgeous. To my surprise, I actually preferred the first Vader scene to the second one (would have been more effective if they hadn't shown Vader in the Star Destroyer before he appeared on the rebel ship). That said, even though the actual TODOA Scene (spoilers) wasn't as awesome as I expected, it was still bloody gr8.

Can't see why people complained about CGI Tarkin (sure, it wasn't completely smooth, but far better than what I was expecting). Or actually I can: they're a buncha whippersnappers!

And no, I couldn't watch the film without thinking "Hey, it's the mercenary hijinks of Jan and Kyle!".

That said, I still have no particular interest in the planned Boba Fett, Han Solo and Obi-Wan movies. I only went to see this film because I was asked to by a dear person. By now, I should be the one making wacky popular sci-fi hijinks about trade politics, but alas it was not meant to be. Oy!

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT #2: THE CORRECTION TO THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

I may go see the movie tomorrow, after all. Tomorrow is still before Christmas, so this goes against what I initially stated.

Then again, it's always before Christmas, isn't it? Just like it's always after Christmas. The only exception is Christmas itself.

Wow, Donald Trump hasn't even taken the oath of office yet and he's already made Star Wars great again.

Now, since it wasn't obvious enough last year that my joke was mocking those complaining about a black stormtrooper, the above is a joke mocking those that are attributing virtually everything positive that occurs to Donald Trump. Apparently, my joke has relevance since there are those out there trying to drum up some anti-Trump sentiment to the film which is supposedly due to some writer "tweeting" something about the Empire being white supremacists.

So I've stayed away from this thread other than the first bit to find it humorous how similar Jon`C's views and mine are with regards to Episode VII and the movie theater experience. I decided to watch the film at the local Regal Cinema RPX screen. I hadn't sat in their RPX seats before and have virtually sworn off 3D but I felt this would be a good film to try it out with. No IMAX screen.

I bought tickets early enough that I had my choice of seats for the entire room. I asked the guy to pick what he liked best which had me about three fourths of the way back. I think I would have liked a few rows forward more but they were fine. The sound system was better than other screens and the theater. I can picture myself going this route again.

The 3D trailer for the upcoming Spiderman film had me seriously doubting my decision to view in 3D. The 3D effects were horrendous and looked like what I always describe as the Viewmaster Effect for anyone that remembers that old toy. But then the trailer for the next Guardians of the Galaxy film rolled and the 3D effects in that were excellent. At that point I became a little optimistic on the choice. If you're wondering about whether to watch the film in 3D or not, I don't think it matters. I didn't experience many, if any, of the things I dislike about 3D films but I did like the added sense of perspective. If this hasn't already become the norm for 3D films, it needs to.

As to the film itself, I don't believe I can find the way to describe just exactly how much I liked the film. My sense during and after the movie was so opposite to how I felt about the last one. Now, I really don't hate TFA but I easily rank it among the bottom three mainstream films. By contrast I rate this latest installment easily in the top three, probably top two, and perhaps as the best one yet. Not only that but I think it actually lifts up A New Hope by providing weight to the Death Star plans and a serious and dire sense of urgency to the circumstances unfolding.

I only watched one review of the film prior to viewing by a kid named Chris Stuckman. I was recently introduced to his YouTube channel and I like his work and humor. He complained a little about a CG character being in the film too much and thought they could have replaced some of that time with Vader. I surmised he was talking about Tarkin and his comments about it being obvious it was CG caused me to focus too much on him. Of course you can tell but if you didn't know better you might not and I disagree with having more Vader in the film. There was the right amount of Vader used to great effect. He also said that he thought it was a good but not great Star Wars movie. I disagree and from this I learned that I need to calibrate based on how highly a reviewer praised TFA.

I really wished I could have paused the movie and taken notes. There was one moment in particular where I thought there was a terrific "reference", a feeling that I had that someone brought something from a past Star Wars iteration into the film that was excellent. I suspected I would forget exactly what that was and I did. If I was seated between Jon`C and Brian we would have got it or I could have mentioned it but, no. I was sitting between my wife and son. Nobody to tell, lol. Still, I had a huge sense that the people that worked on this movie knew a lot of Star Wars lore from games, comics, etc and brought that in. All of the talk about crystals had me thinking of KoToR. The new droid reminded me of HK-47. One of the characters had a weapon that reminded me of a repeater. Various versions of TIE fighters reminded me of the old TIE Fighter and Rebel Assault II games.

One interesting note and if you're still wondering about the inclusion of a title crawl you can stop reading now. I was a little disappointed not to see it but I came away thinking it would have been harder to included one being the way the story opens and then jumps ahead. However, odd as it seems to me, there appears to be people that are confused by the time setting of the movie and why the princess is at the end. I guess this could have been cleared up with a title crawl or perhaps with, and how nerdy would this be, a time stamp during key scenes that indicated time before the Battle of Yavin or maybe destruction of Alderaan or something. Again, I don't care but even my son said, "a new Death Star" when he saw it. Technically, he wasn't wrong, but still!

I could be wrong on some of these points but what I found odd is that even with my addled brain, I didn't have any problem answering these questions.

My impression was that it was a harder decision to rally behind or initiate the fight. Once the battle had begun it was a far easier choice to join it.



He was obviously already conflicted and then learned that Galen was actually sabotaging the Empire. On top of that, he watched through his scope as he threw himself in front of the other engineers.



It appears that the shield surrounds the entire planet. You can sort of see it fade off into the distance. I was wondering the same thing, I think due to a similar thing in one of the new dumb Star Trek films or something, until I noticed that.

I thought the new movie was fantastic!

The planetary shield surrounding Derra IV- I mean, Scarif is similar to that surrounding the forest moon of Endor (except it's powered from the surface, not a different celestial body).

Not like that cheap-o shield on Hoth, which only surrounded the vicinity of the Rebel base.

I joke here about Imperial Siege on Derra IV, but actually Scarif also strangely made me think of one of the huge Planet Sith levels.

I thought the K2SO droid was an interesting mix of HK-47 and 8T-88. Like, HK's programming in 88's hulking body.

I think I was too judgmental. I'm going to go watch it again, but in 3d next time. I just have to convince my son to go with me. He's 10 now, but he's been afraid of 3d since he was ~3yo. We were at disneyland and my wife took him into some 3d show about bugs and he was traumatized. It was pretty hilarious but he refuses to see a 3d movie...

Saw it today (yesterday technically), thought it was brilliant. My only nitpicks are the brief cameo of R2-D2 and C-3PO, and CGI Tarkin. The former felt like out of place fan service in a movie where all the other familiar characters fit in great, and the latter, while impressive for CGI, still wasn't convincing enough for me to look at the man and suspend my disbelief. I do prefer the CGI over just getting a new face for the role, though, and I understand Tarkin had to play a pivotal role with the Death Star, so I don't know what they should've done instead. My expectations for how he looked were probably too high as well, because I had read an article delving into the effort to make him appear as real as possible. Young Leia looked totally real to me in that brief scene of hers, on the other hand.

Vader was awesome. I got some chills out of that last scene of his.

Best Star Wars movie since ESB? Nah. This was great and I liked this over FA, but RotJ wasn't surpassed here, even with its faults. The greatest moments in RotJ are just too good, and it has enough of the good stuff despite everything.

I really, absolutely don't think this was the best SW since TESB. In fact, just like TFA, it was pretty meh. It was enjoyable, sure, but nothing special. AT-ATs went down way too easily, by the way. TFA I thought was a completely redundant effort. Terrible idea to do anything whatsoever after RotJ, I felt the same way about the old EU books that did that. Aside from that, it was just one big nostalgia effort. Say what you want about the prequels, yes they had flaws, but at least Lucas didn't rehash the originals. TFA had a real big problem connecting to the SW universe we've come to know. There were some things about it that were really not clear, or didn't make sense at all. Rogue One didn't really feel like Star Wars to me. The pacing was different, the music was really nothing memorable. This is what you get when you don't have John Williams, I guess. But it really made it feel less like Star Wars. It was enjoyable, and I'd watch it again, but at no point I felt really excited. The little Dark Forces nods were cool I guess, but they don't make the movie for me. None of it stacks up to the Lucas saga, in my opinion, as bad as the prequels were in some respects. (Not all, mind.) EDIT: JFC, why isn't it letting me make paragraphs? What kind of bug is that? Not even editing works.

Even John Williams pales to John Williams. The prequels had the Duel of the Fates (plus the PT ended nearly twelve years ago) and FA had a nice theme for the climactic lightsaber battle, but other than that he's not doing anything much more memorable than the new guy in R1. The soundtrack highlights in R1 were the recycled iconic bits, and it tends to be the same with Williams himself.

I don't recall ever having too much difficulty taking down walkers from the cockpit of an Incom T-65.

Yeah, it's true that Williams' best work was in the OT. TFA soundtrack wasn't memorable either.. But this just felt off.

Something that has been bothering me since TFA was the specific conditions planetary shields work. Star Killer base had a planetary shield which was supposed to repeal anything except objects traveling at light speed. If you think about a galaxy where billions of ships have that capability shouldn't planetary shields be specifically designed against faster than light objects!? One miscalculated jump and you can go into a star, well what then? What if your ship collides with a planet? Wouldn't the mass of a starship going that fast decimate practically anything in it's path?

This is the point where I have to question if the mass of the ship is reduced to that of light, or if a Death Star is really needed when you can just program automated capitol ships to jump into enemy planets to destroy them.

Is there some old EU stuff that explains how that works? Help me Massassi, you're my only hope!

Haha, that makes no sense at all. Was that in TFA? I can't even remember that. Priceless!

I was probably too busy wondering why there was a 'first order' and why Leia was leading a 'resistance'.

That still confuses the hell out of me.

And then I realized what was so good about the original Star Wars. All it took was a few simple lines that told you everything you needed to know about the state of the galaxy.

"The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."

"That's impossible! How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?"

"The Regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station."

Lucas did that really well, and TFA really sucked at it. Unless it was deliberately vague about the state of the galaxy. But it's not working for me either way.

Also, "Look, I know we just escaped with the death star plans right in front of your nose, but we're a consular ship on a diplomatic mission LULZ" Yeah, this really makes ANH better. =|

I get what you're saying, but Star Wars has never been about answers to questions like that. I generally favor harder sci fi, but as long as Star Wars doesn't trend too far into anything is possible territory, I'll be ok with it.

I'm glad I don't know my basic physics, otherwise I'd have to consider things like that as I evaluate these movies.

I guess that is the trade off with the format of Star Wars. I view Star Wars as a fantasy series, because it uses technology as a vehicle to convey monomythic themes. When people like Neil Degrasse Tyson rant about the science I don't care because it isn't about the science. The movies before Force Awakens never made an effort to explain how anything worked. Suddenly we have a lines about shield refresh rates (TFA) And data transfer rates, and that Kyber crystals fuel the Death Star (Rogue One.) When the new movies start explaining the technology, even in the smallest of ways, they begin to move away from fantasy into poorly thought out sci-fi.

I still love the OT. I liked TFA and Rogue One, though not above Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, and for the most part I feel that they capture that Star Wars atmosphere of swashbuckling adventure. But the more dialogue that goes into explaining the technology the more the captivating sense of wonder dissolves.

If I remember right, when a ship in hyperspace runs into the mass shadow of a planet/star/whatever, the gravity fluctuations tear through the ship fast enough that it's ultimately destroyed; pieces may revert to realspace as a result of the FTL explosion, but it's not like slamming into a physical object and any fragments that remain in FTL aren't going to interact with realspace objects other than maybe being torn into smaller pieces. If the ship was flying at near (below) c, then you're absolutely right that the amount of kinetic energy would be ridiculously high. That's the idea behind using gauss or rail guns; don't need explosive munitions when you can get a solid projectile moving fast enough to cause a similar effect.

Interdictor cruisers generate a gravity distortion strong enough to trigger the safety systems in the hyperdrive, so it pulls the ship out without blowing it up, although the drive may be damaged in the end since it's thought that the drives work by generating localized gravity distortions to jump over the light-speed barrier (as pointed out, SW doesn't have the best track record with defining how the tech works).

Now, for the stunt that Han pulled in TFA, I'm sure that for that to happen he had to have disabled the safeties so he could approach that close; he should've been pulled out way sooner. But had he missed the timing by fractions of a second, they surely would've died.

They definitely tried way too hard to tie the plot into ANH.

This is why branding and IP is the worst **** ever. I'm all for expanding an existing fantasy world within limits, but in my experience when they start really hashing out the details of a world/story, it degrades in quality. It doesn't matter why lightsabers work, what matters is they're ****ing laser swords, for the purposes of the movie at least. Though in JO that was sort of a plot thing. I guess the point is that, whatever crystal powers the Death Star literally does not matter to the story.

If I ever make anything again, I'm so going to put dialogue everywhere about how the F***ing F***Berg Machines are powered by the S***Sam F***Stable Dingleberry Snotburgers just to get these complaints.

I couldn't disagree with this criticism more. I can remember when I was younger, thinking what a dick Vader was because he wasn't even willing to consider the fact that they might be telling the truth. Clearly Vader knew they were lying. Re-watching A New Hope I was amazed at just how much story was contained in the first two sentences of the title crawl and how now that Rogue One is a thing they serve as a perfect summary of the film. In the final sentence I notice how the verb "races" now has a more immediate meaning. While I was looking for a quote from ANH I found this page which pretty much contains my thoughts on some of these points. Note, the page has a video (I didn't watch) and an ad popped up so it might be particularly annoying on mobile.

http://www.cbr.com/what-rogue-one-completely-changes-about-star-wars-a-new-hope/

Saw it.

Despite it being for dramatic effect, I don't see how blowing up Scarif (the whole planet or just the base...?) helps the Imperial situation. Seems like shooting yourself in the foot since the incursion seemed more or less contained, unless I missed something. I mean, the archives that reveal the Deathstar flaw could still be inspected.

2 points...

1. different model... these are AT-ACTs meant as cargo transports not battlefield assault/troop transport vehicles like the AT-AT... they are combat capable but only really useful against infantry
2. x-wings pack a bit more firepower than a snowspeeder

That was just Tarkin taking out a rival with just a bit of overkill. Attempting to eliminate any compromise was just an excuse.

I mean, the empire knew the Death Star was built with a way to destroy it , yet they didn't analyze the plans to discover the weakness. Even though the Rebels could analyze it in like a couple days and figure it out. They're basically just incompetent.

I did not like Rogue One. If you find a spoil, you should have seen the movie by now.

• I did not care for the characters, because the film didn't leave room to develop them. I was bored, and they were boring. I didn't care that they died.
• Why did Saw stay on exploding planet? He could have easily gotten on the leaving ship? I get the whole, "I'm tired of running", but it doesn't quite make sense.
• When situations spontaneously happen, there was always an answer to the situation i.e. can't send the signal, flip that switch, it just so happens to be right there! Film moves along.
• The last scene does not represent Darth Vader. The way he moved was not Darth Vader.
• CGI characters were garbage and distracting
• Was it just me, or did the effects seem a bit cheap? Darth Vaders house on lava planet looked like it was out of a video game.
• Never understood the pointless action scene where Jyn runs to father on platform and ship taking off nearly blows her off. Was that suppose to be suspenseful? It just seemed pointless.

He stayed on the planet because he had to.

They did the same corny thing that they do lots of times to kill off inconvenient characters. I know of no person IRL who would risk their lives because of destiny, but fantasy plots love that ****.

For what it's worth, Rogue One answers that question "what's it like to have a Star WARS movie" that I had as a teenager back in the 2000s. So that was that. That second half was an enjoyable ride of action that keep a good pace till maybe the last minutes of the film. Like many others, I didn't care for the characters but I found it entertaining how they were individuals responding to a situation that was getting dire and hopeless as it went on. And I liked how a singular objective tied the space and ground action rather then the mess of stuff happening like in the Prequels.

I generally liked TFA and now Rogue One did its thing for me (honestly, it was assembled and packaged for SW viewers...like me). But two movies in under Disney ... I think I'm done with Star Wars. Kinda a weird feeling. And EA can't seem ... to do SP games so not expecting anything JK-related that's decent.

So I re-watched TFA last night on Starz. As I expected most of what annoyed me didn't bother me so much anymore. I'm not sure exactly how I'd rank these films now but I think worst to best it's approximately this:
TPM/AOTC
TFA/ROTS
ROTJ/R1
ESB/ANH

Does anyone else think all of the inevitable one off films are just going to be too much? I'm sure there's going to be many good movies but some things are left better to the imagination. Reminds me of how I grew up really liking the character of Wolverine and he had no origin story. Then in the late 80s or early 90s they started coming up with things and then more and then changing them and more and more and the mystery was lost. I seriously don't even know what his origin is anymore. Star Wars shouldn't end up like that but I think TFA was danger close to destroying the entire franchise. Certainly recoverable but a very bad direction in many ways. At least with TPM we just ended up having to dismiss one character and midichlorians or whatever the hell they were.

I thought it was very good. I also thought The Force Awakens was very good.

Disney should continue to do what they're doing, because what they're doing is very good, unlike much of this thread, which is very bad.

I just hope they learn to tone down the fanservice more. I think they'll just have to learn to let go and just make a movie that happens to be in the Star Wars universe. I think they went in the right direction with Rogue One, they just have to step away from their check list of things-that-have-to-be-in-Star-Wars.

We will probably get some good movies and a lot of crap. We'll just have to adjust our headcanon accordingly.