thoughts on the Rogue One trailer

I recently viewed the Rogue One trailer and while it appears to be the best Star Wars movie since 422733600 (that’s May 1983 for those of you who aren’t on Unix time) there are 10 glaring issues with it.

0) Where is Wedge Antilles?

Wedge_Antilles
You know this guy. Courtesy of StarWars Wiki

He’s either in or leading Rouge squadron since let’s say Always! Since Mon Mothma was apparently cloned for this movie you’d think they could clone Wedge, and no Wedge isn’t loosing his pasty complexion and acquiring rhythm since Riz Ahmed is playing someone called Bodhi Rook.

1) More importantly the editor is clearly anti droid. Droids are in less than 10 s of a 117 s trailer, And the shots are all terrible just look at this.

bot_2 background_2
out of focus, out of shot and obscured
bot_3 background
You can barely see this droid behind the asshole who’s cutting it off in an emergency.
bot_1 background
this is the longest shot with a droid in it. Where the droid is largely hidden by I assume Generic_Rebel_Trooper_1
bot_4 action bot
and a ‘classic’ shot of it’s back panel. At least it knows which way to look when escaping, unlike the skin tube next to it.

I realize Star Wars isn’t exactly the droid friendliest place in the universe, but this is ridiculous.

4 thoughts on “thoughts on the Rogue One trailer”

  2. Personally, I think there’s a bit more to the apparent lack of droids than meets the eye (obviously I’m not talking canon here).

    Based on Episodes I-III, droids are relatively advanced at the current time – both in terms of armaments and AI. Of course, the Trade Federation decided to program their foot soldiers with the AI of a human 3-year old to keep them in line. Which, obviously, posed the sentient organisms issues when a cyborg like General Grievous takes over.

    Despite their superiority, we don’t see them playing major, galaxy-conquering roles in Episodes IV-VII. This leads one to suspect that what is really going on is abject persecution of robots because of their failure to win during the Clone Wars. They have been relegated to servile roles and blatant enslavement. I mean, can anyone forget what the Jawa’s did to their robots?

    Oh, and what’s with the boxy bots? Did they decide to make them less humanoid after the Clone Wars just to not feel so bad when they demolish them?

    1. It’s pretty well established that the Star Wars Universe is not a droid friendly place. However this trailer indicates droid intolerance might be getting worse.

      As for the Trade Federation’s droid army. The problem there was not the installed AI. It’s that the Trade Federation Goons forgot to turn on the networking and distributed computation features (They never struck me as particularly bright). This is apparent because the droids use longitudinal waves in a gaseous medium for communication rather than faster and more secure photons. If the droids used processors equivalent to that of an RPi one battleship full of droids would have the same computing power as 2 AlphaGos, which should be enough to keep some farmers and swamp creatures in line long enough to build a mobile oppression palace.

  3. I’ll also say this…as a Star Wars nerd, I know what those boxy droids are. They’re GNK power droids, so all the droid action we’re getting so far is a bunch of walking batteries. That’s pretty lame…if that’s all the focus droids are going to get in Rogue One, I may not watch it. Needs. More. Droids! Needs! Better!! DROIDS!

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