Rogue One AT-ACTs in Rogue One!!

I was talking aesthetics, not practicality. In Star Wars, I think iconography, simple shapes and great silhouettes should trump practicality. The AT-ATs in ESB are mechanical versions of Hannibal's war elephants. That makes them better than the AT-TEs, which are just...ugly.

 

Of course a modern US jet fighter with heat seeking missiles would rip them all the shreds. The Star Wars Universe values Looking Real Cool over straightforward practicality in all sorts of places.

I grew to like the AT-TEs. They started life as just a weird background vehicle in the Prequels, like that spidery thing with with a long snout gun. It took the Clone Wars to make them serious, and I thought they worked fine in the cartoons.

 

I started liking the AT-TE's at first 2. But I grew 2 loathe that mass driver oversized cannon with exposed gunner as more impractical then a giant "mechanical camel" with no defence weapons on it's top or back.

 

Not sure I'm explaining myself very well, because some of your examples are just reworkings of designs from the OT (R1 AT-ATs, Resistance X-Wings, FO Star Destroyer) and others are fine, I guess, but I don't think anyone would say they're iconic -- FO transports (meh), Resistance transport (meh). The only one in your list that I think might prove iconic over time is Kylo's shuttle, but even that is derivative of the Lambda-class shuttle from the OT. In all of those cases where the new design is based on an OT prototype, I think the OT version actually works better -- as a design.

That leaves the R1 hover tank. I haven't seen enough of the tank in R1 to say, but ask yourself if any design from the PT or the ST (so far) is as iconic as an AT-AT, or a Star Destroyer, or the Death Star, or the Millenium Falcon, or the Tantive IV/Corellian Corvette/Rebel Blockade Runner or whatever it's retconned canon name is. All of the designs that have become so iconic -- they're all OT, and they all stem from that McQuarrie/Johnston collaboration. It's more than just squaring off some edges and pasting greeblies on the exterior -- it's about taking relatively simple shapes that start out as fantastical and molding them into something instantly recognizable and apparently functional.

Anyway, I don't mean to argue/belabor it -- we may just have to agree to disagree. I just feel like there's plenty of McQuarrie that's getting repurposed in the new films, but there's (seemingly) no one like Johnston on the production, and I think the films are poorer for it.

 

SW has, as stated above, always been more about "looking cool over practicality" when it comes to vehicles. AT-AT's, AT-TE's, AT-ST's, even the Death Star itself, none of these make particularly practical military weapons.

 

I would love it if we got to see a lot more interior shots of the AT ATs in this film.

 

Yeah, TFA showed that they're big enough for a person to live in, but we only got a quick look inside even there. I kind of like to imagine that, in ESB, Luke just happened to throw that grenade into the AT-AT's bathroom while some poor guy was sitting on the commode reading a newspaper or something.

 

I like it!

I was always fascinated by what it would look like from the AT AT commander's point of view to turn around from the head and walk through the neck into the main body.

 

The shot of the AT-ATs is what really makes me think Edwards was the right guy for this film, funny enough. I loved Monsters but I didn't really care for Godzilla, but regardless, both films really show off how well the guy can present something on screen with a real sense of scale and weight, and that's reflected very much in the shot of the AT-ATs in this trailer. I'm now all the more interested in seeing how the big battles are going to play out through Edwards' eye. This isn't a monster movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's letting him play around with those sensibilities, and I think that's one of the best thing that the Star Wars Stories have to offer: directors can come in and bring their own unique experiences to the table in one-off films that don't have to redirect the course or style of the main narrative.

 

I fully agree with you, which is why I support the new concept teams looking back to McQuarrie and Johnston for inspiration. In fact, I think most of McQuarrie's unused designs are better than 95% of what Star Wars concept artists come up with today, and during the PT era (though Chiang does a pretty good job of carrying the McQuarrie baton). In that context, I hope all new designs have some basis in the McQuarrie/ Johnson DNA.

The Kylo Ren shuttle is the perfect example (and I would include the FO transport, as I think its wedge shape is brilliantly simple, much like the McQuarrie/Johnston aesthetic). A new ship that has McQuarrie/ Johnston in its bones, but lurches off into a new and iconic direction. BB-8 is another one. Clearly based on the brilliant astromech design, but imaginatively reconfigured.

While I probably have a higher opinion of Chiang than you do, I agree that there doesn't seem to be that magic duo of McQuarrie/ Johnston in the concept art world. My hope is that Chiang finds a soulmate to design with, and we get close to that.

 

Yeah, I'm with you. BB-8 is a tremendous design, and I think Ren's shuttle is probably the standout in an otherwise uninspiring field, at least in terms of ships & vehicles.

(the creature design, and the droid design generally I thought were aces. Really tremendous. All of them seemed new but were still recognizably at home in a Star Wars film)

I just realized I left one ship design out of our ST discussion, and that's the quadjumper -- I think that's actually a pretty cool design and it's unfortunate we barely see it and pretty much the moment we do, it gets blown up

Hoping we get to see one of those bad boys in flight in one of the later films, maybe...

 

Robot chicken! I thought the idea sounded familiar! Lol. Been ages since I watched those.

 

JabbatheHumanBeing wrote

I agree that it could work well thematically. I just hate the convoluted AT-TE design.



Despite being first and foremost an OT aficionado, try to topple this one like they did in ESB...

Of course, I love the walker design in ESB but in contrast it's a beautiful allusion to arrogance: Pride cometh before the fall...

 

Oh the AT-ST's are even worse. They look like something that OmniCorp would come up with they're so unwieldy and impractical. Oh and I'd totally forgotten about that Robot Chicken sketch, cool.

 

Oh, I agree that it's much more practical than the AT-AT (and it seems they went for a similar design with the new types of AT-ATs we see briefly in TFA). It's just ugly, formless and without that iconic silhouette that McQuarrie's designs always had. I think aesthetics is far more important than function in the GFFA.

 

I always got the notion that the Empire was all about "looking big/powerful over practicality", compared to what we saw in the PT during the Clone Wars. Hence the more droids and grounded designs in the PT.

 

I think that it's more about intimidation as well. Like the DS, or the AT-AT/AT-ST's, etc all look cool and powerful. But ultimately they're slow, ponderous, awkward, unwieldy, clumsy, or some unholy combination of all of those things. Not very practical basically.

 

I just don't like the AT-TE, its aesthetics don't inspire the imagination like the AT-AT. One PT walker I do really like because of its potential multi roles is the AT-AP.


I can imagine a number of stories based on its crew and their various missions, may be because its crew is small and you could really get to know them. Imagine a troop of AT-AP's on missions and their respective crews? May be something like this...

 

these AT-AT's to me seem like theyre early versions of the ones we see in ESB. a bit of a transition from ROTS to ANH but obviously closer to ANH time period. hence the taller/slender (?) and a bit more colour to them. thoughts?

 

They have some features similar to the AT-ATs in Rebels. At this point I'm guessing there are at least three separate 'production blocks' of AT-ATs, each with incremental improvements over the previous production block.

 

The AT-AT's on the beach reminded me of a level from the original Rogue Squadron game on N64. Ah, nostalgia.

 

Given that Gareth Edwards two previous movies have involved monsters, and one of the most compelling scenes in Godzilla was the titular character emerging from out of the sea in all of his awesomness:



I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to do something like that here (with the AT-AT's rising out of the sea and heading onto the island in a quite menacing fashion).

 

Not exactly sure where to put this, so...

I think one of the things I love about the shot from the trailer is that it invokes a feeling similar to what one feels at places like Gettysburg. The place is beautiful and peaceful. What bad thing could possibly happen here? The costliest battle in North American history, that's what. I get a similar juxtaposition with palm trees. People will wage war anywhere, no matter how gorgeous, because war is stupid and doesn't give a ****.

 

This. It's the "hell in paradise" effect, where evil things are much more unsettling when they happen in beautiful places. Horrific slavery in the gauzy light of the American southeast, with its lazy summer days and Spanish moss. Pseudo-religious serial killers in the beautiful bayous and waterways of Louisiana. Carnage and napalm in tropical Vietnam. Evil wraiths among the rolling green hills of Hobbiton. I find all of those things scarier than seeing the belly of the beast.

That's what Edwards is going for with the tropical location, IMO. That hell in paradise sensation. And judging by just a few shots from the teaser, he nailed it.