The way I like to imagine it is that in their ancient and diverse civilization technology got out of hand and they don’t have a systematic understanding of it. It all seems to be cobbled together from advanced highly interoperable parts that they don’t necessarily understand in depth. That could explain why so many of their solutions are so inelegant (data storage claw machine, anyone?) but at the same time Baby Anakin could “build” a droid that fits an established type and is interoperable with completely different ones.
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What if the Empire is really more like Goa’uld, parasitic inheritors and pillagers of technology? Or the Jedi are really a Cargo Cult trying to bring back the true progenitors like in The Uplift Saga?
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Yeah, Vader’s shag pad on Mustafar was originally part of Empire, but was cut for time/budget. It’s called Bast Castle, and is an original Ralph McQuarrie design.
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Just saw it, random thoughts.
K-2 was great.
I thought it was suffering from prequelitis at first- wooden acting and a plot lost in exposition, but was pleasantly surprised by the end.
Dear lord did it need a stronger score.
Star destroyers can maintain hull integrity crash landing on a planet but a little corvette can push one clean through another? Wut?
I really liked how the desperateness of Episode IV was set up; you have a bunch of ineffectual alliance members and outlaws squabbling until holy shit there’s nobody left, the fleet is smashed, and the Empire’s on its way. It made the rag-tag nature of the rebellion in IV-VI make more sense to me.
Poor Red 5.
The swarm of TIE fighters out of the gate was fantastic.
Vader’s costume looked off to me, though I’m not sure why. I felt Jones didn’t have the cadence of his speech right, and Wilding didn’t have the physical presence. When Krennic shoulder checks him and Vader shifts, no, sorry no. When Vader comes for the rebels though, yeah that was great.
Was Leia smirking? EVERYONE IS DEAD and she smiles? It’s also hard to claim you’re on a diplomatic mission when Vader has watched you escape.
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A couple of observations that made me think of my Engineering job for my own employer, which is sometimes compared to an evil empire:
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The Engineers all have to work at a dark, damp facility yet the blueprints are conveniently stored at a sleek tropical paradise on another planet? Seems about right, actually. I’ve been working at my job for close to 10 years and still haven’t had an office in a building with windows. (I’m not talking about a window office, mind you- just one in a building that contains windows.)
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When all the Death Star engineers were gathered together, there were what, like 10 of them? (The director specifically asked oif they were all present.) I’m currently working on a project that, while related in some ways, is definitely a smaller scale effort than building a moon-sized space station, And there are several times that many Engineers involved.
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As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Imperial pilot seemed a little more shaggy and unkempt than the typical Imperial worker. (Or the unhelmeted ones, at any rate) He would have violated the grooming codes of my employer. If the empire is this lax, does it mean that my employer is, in at least that one sense, even more uptight than the evil empire? Nah, that’s not a fair comparison. My company is a family-friendly enterprise, all about spreading joy and optimism to the world and is no way like an evil empi…
well damn. Never mind…
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I just got out of the theater from my first viewing.
My single complaint… WHERE ARE THE MOTHERFUCKING BOTHANS?!
I’m very impress with the movie. I’d even say it may be better than Jedi. But I spent the whole damn movie wondering when the Bothans were going to show up.
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Wookieepedia says the emperor worked against Vader’s constant efforts to upgrade and improve his life support suit. Tje emperor took pleasure in making sure Vader was topheavy, less than agile, and reliant on the emperor’s resources.
It also says that Vader’s life support suit was basically worse than being dead for how much suffering it caused him. That’s why Vader built at least (including Rogue One) two isolation chambers he didn’t have to wear the suit in.
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I was annoyed by the cg ressurection. I thought we were further along and out of the uncanny valley. My wife didn’t realize that the Peter Cushing character wasn’t really him until I pointed it out. What annoyed her is that Darth Vader was way too short in this movie. He was over 7 foot tall in previous ones, but in this one, he was only 6 foot tall. Something that I didn’t notice. I told her that Darth’s really long legs must have been in the shop.
She was also upset and angry that everyone died. Movies should never end this way, according to her. I wasn’t bothered by it. Too bad no lucrative sequel gigs for any of them!
And of course the satellite dish needed to be be re aimed. But why would there need to be a place to load a data cartridge up there on the roof?
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Now, now… you do realize that the Bothans you mention were keeping an eye on the Emperor’s movements, some three and a half years after the destruction of the first Death Star, right? It’s not like those Bothans were the only spies employed by the Alliance, after all.
Aw, you knew that, right?
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I very much would like to be angry, but you make a valid point from the stance of the cannon before it got split. That’s where I come from a lot, because that’s when I did my reading.
Staying current has a value of its own.
I could encounter less surprises if I paid attention to the differences between “canon” and “legend”. But the legends are a significant portion of my head canon. Probably because I’m dumb and don’t know how to let go.
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Me too.
I did notice that he acted differently. But to me it seemed like they tried to distill Vader. It was completely consistent with someone trying to act like Vader from ANH, but using skills from Jedi. Seriously, in all previous stuff, he walked pretty heavily. In R1, he was almost like a ballet dancer. He covered distances super fast with a lot of small strides or something. I’ll have to buy the movie to count it right legally, since human memory is garbage.
I kept current on what is now “Legends” until halfway through the whole Yuuzhan Vong storyline, then finally gave up. But what we’re discussing is purely from the movies. The Bothan spies that Mon Mothma mentions in ROTJ are the ones who supply the information that the Emperor himself will be aboard the Death Star II to personally oversee its completion, making it an irresistible target. No mention is made of the Bothans having any connection to the acquisition of the plans for the first Death Star that ended up in Leia’s hands on the Tantive IV. If someone made that connection in the old EU, I’ve certainly forgotten it. God knows the Bothans got up to much mischief in the New Republic, though.
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Those Bothans died to deliver the information mentioned in Jedi, not the intel mentioned in A New Hope.
And they weren’t even spies. They were just suicidal bicycle couriers.
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Damnit. You’re right.
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Damn. As if “Princess Leia was the only character to make it out alive” wasn’t dark enough, 2016 had to take her too.
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they were probably able to use footage shot in 77. That looked like a shot from ANH (which obviously begins shortly after R1)
I saw that as an Anakin line, but as before when faced with disappointment, he loses all humor. And thats where he is at the end of R1 / just before his ‘intoduction’ in ANH.
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I was deeply hoping at least one would show up, just so we’d have the look of the Bothans be set in canon. But I also knew the Bothan spies didn’t show up until a few years later in RotJ.
I’ve seen it with a few people who have either never seen a Star Wars movie (!) or haven’t seen them for many years, and none of them had any idea that was a CG character. The ones who knew it couldn’t actually be Cushing assumed it was an actor with really good makeup.
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I like that the weapon on the Death Star is basically a giant light saber.
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There was a regrettably bad Kevin J. Anderson novel about another iteration of the Death Star’s planet-killing weapon being built in isolation, without the surrounding spherical space station itself. That single-purpose weapon, like the book itself, was dubbed Darksaber.
Probably sounded like a neat idea to Anderson’s kids.
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