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Star Wars review
Dec. 16th, 2017 03:22 pmNot the new one - I've only just seen Rogue One, having not bothered to see it at the cinema over the past year.
It's not encouraging me to pay to see Last Jedi, even though I know it's not an official trilogy trilogy film, but merely a sort of 'episode 3.5', created solely to explain why the Death Star was capable of being destroyed in the first / 'episode 4' film.
The obvious answer to that is that real military hardware often has weak spots but the constraints of time and money and inevitable compromises between priorities mean that people are expected to live (or die) with them. See the armour protection of British battlecruisers, for example. That was a compromise that lead to four of them exploding, killing virtually everyone on board.
Here, who'd expect anyone to get close enough to have a chance of succeeding for a start? That's what you have squadrons of fighter aircraft* to protect against.
But instead of that, we have over two hours of film trying to justify a) someone going 'I know, instead of wrongly specifying, say, a fuse so the thing blows up when it's used because of the enormous energy involved, I'll give it a tiny weak spot just in case the fighter fleets fail to protect it and someone can make an almost impossible shot...' and b) after the Empire knows that the plans have been stolen and that there is a problem, not doing anything about it.
When it's not trying to retcon it's much better than when it's parasiting on the other films, except that they make one of the problems of the existing films even worse.
For forty years, I have been wondering why the Empire's marines do not have hand grenades. If they had done so, Star Wars would have been at least an hour shorter and ended with the rebellion being wiped out. But they're simply not there in any of the films, right up until this one shows them being chucked around with no indication that they're not the utterly standard bits of equipment you'd expect them to be.
Argh.
The other films didn't need this one, and this one would have been better if it didn't try to directly link to them. Particularly by the CGI casting decisions...
* Quick reminder that nearly all of Star Wars military is based on WWII films.
It's not encouraging me to pay to see Last Jedi, even though I know it's not an official trilogy trilogy film, but merely a sort of 'episode 3.5', created solely to explain why the Death Star was capable of being destroyed in the first / 'episode 4' film.
The obvious answer to that is that real military hardware often has weak spots but the constraints of time and money and inevitable compromises between priorities mean that people are expected to live (or die) with them. See the armour protection of British battlecruisers, for example. That was a compromise that lead to four of them exploding, killing virtually everyone on board.
Here, who'd expect anyone to get close enough to have a chance of succeeding for a start? That's what you have squadrons of fighter aircraft* to protect against.
But instead of that, we have over two hours of film trying to justify a) someone going 'I know, instead of wrongly specifying, say, a fuse so the thing blows up when it's used because of the enormous energy involved, I'll give it a tiny weak spot just in case the fighter fleets fail to protect it and someone can make an almost impossible shot...' and b) after the Empire knows that the plans have been stolen and that there is a problem, not doing anything about it.
When it's not trying to retcon it's much better than when it's parasiting on the other films, except that they make one of the problems of the existing films even worse.
For forty years, I have been wondering why the Empire's marines do not have hand grenades. If they had done so, Star Wars would have been at least an hour shorter and ended with the rebellion being wiped out. But they're simply not there in any of the films, right up until this one shows them being chucked around with no indication that they're not the utterly standard bits of equipment you'd expect them to be.
Argh.
The other films didn't need this one, and this one would have been better if it didn't try to directly link to them. Particularly by the CGI casting decisions...
* Quick reminder that nearly all of Star Wars military is based on WWII films.