Satya's blog - Star Wars: Rogue One

Watched Rogue One on Dec 15th at the hired.com event.

Spoilers ahead!

Call-backs to the original movies:

1. Blue milk (is that an even older call-back to "Blue Harvest"?)
2. The Governator
3. The Princess
4. The reprise of the blockade runner boarding scene (at the airlock *to* the blockade runner)
5. Choking people
6. Imperial battle station design elements
7. "Commence primary ignition" (Which I always heard as the nonsensical "Commence spider ignition")
8. The guy who has the death sentence in twelve systems
9. Nice reveal at the end there. Saw it coming at the exact right moment (not too early, not too late)

Random observations:

Somewhere, some time, I remember reading a thing that was supposed to be an early draft of the original movie. It had a subtitle "Journal of the Whills", and Biggs Darklighter and his brother Luke were searching for (the? singular?) Kyber crystal. I can't find this thing anywhere, though Gizmodo seems to remember the same thing: http://io9.gizmodo.com/all-the-major-star-wars-cameos-and-connections-you-may-1790195147

Who cleans all the imperial installations and mirror-polishes everything?

At least that platform at the data archive had a hand-rail. Who builds platforms over sheer drops, and why? Was that control panel there so you can see the dish while aiming it? How would that even work, you don't aim a dish like that by eye!

Things I didn't like:

The punning: "Choke on your aspirations"? (That's a double pun btw). It doesn't fit the character, I'm sorry, I can't take that. It's as bad as Han shot first.

While the quasi-Jedi guy was awesome, I felt that the character was simply shoe-horned in there for comic relief. One droid (played by Alan Tudyk! +1!) is enough for comic relief, thanks.

Inexplicable things:

They have a shield around an entire planet, where is it generated from? The DS-2 shield in ROTJ was generated from a base on (the moon of) Endor.

That's a short list.

Observations about the Governor:

So we know the actor has been dead for two decades. Apparently they got someone else to be the body double (see wikipedia article for the movie). I assume they texture-mapped the original actor's face on. To me it seemed as if they'd got a character out of a video game.

The effect was *just* a *little* bit short of real. Maybe because I was looking for it. I'm trying to read it as the Governor has cold dead eyes because he's that much of a stone-cold whatever, not because it's animated.

Sadly I spent so much time staring at the effect that I missed the dialogue.