Saga Best Disney Star Wars Film?

This.

Rogue one was a masterpiece.

It was the first one I got my fiance to watch and she loved it.

 

I've enjoyed all the Disney entries. I chose TFA for this poll because of the sheer fun factor. Likewise Solo. The other two I admire and they may have greater artistic merit but I wouldn't watch multiple times as they're fairly down beat.

 

The Force Awakens is my personal favorite, but I believe The Last Jedi is the best film of the Disney era.

Rouge One is at the bottom for me.

 

Rogue One is at the "bottom" for me of the Disney movies but when I say R1 is at the Bottom I mean, I still love the bejesus outta it and we're talking mere inches. Solo is ahead of it just cuz it has freakin' Han, Chewie and Lando in it!

Anyway I'd go TFA>TLJ>Solo>R1

 

I love them all! But if I had to rank:
TLJ, Solo, TFA, Rogue One

I suspect Solo will be on frequent rotation at home.

 

RO and TFA, Solo and then TLJ.

 

The Last Jedi is my favorite( though I wish it had a little more action) followed by TFA. R1 and Solo are interchangeable but I am way more nitpicky w/ R1 so I guess I have that last right now.

 

For me it goes...

1) Rogue One
2) Solo
3) The Last Jedi
4) The Force Awakens

 

1 TFA
2 TLJ
3 R1

4 Solo

Ii is difficult to rate Solo. It is a good/OK film but for me it is so much smaller calliber then the rest. I feel like Solo belongs to Clone Wars and Rebels stuff.

 

Rouge One.

 

This is going to be easy.

Rogue One - by far the best SW movie of Disney era. It's fresh, unique, imaginative, clever and has Lucas' name written all over it.

As far as the others go, TLJ is right now second (despite all the hate, this is a very, very good movie... with a number of flaws and missed opportunities), Solo is number three, although that may change as I've seen it only once.

TFA is a disaster.

 

Solo for me. The worlds weren't as luxurious as they were in Rogue One, but Han became a much more interesting character to me. I also prefer the action set-pieces in this film more than any of the other ones. The Train Heist is just pure fun. Plus, seeing a SW movie that didn't rely on the Imperial/Rebel conflict, and instead focused on new threats, made the stakes much more enticing. Crimson Dawn, the Pyke Syndicate, and The Cloud Riders are all so cool.

 

For the uncritical and highly tolerant viewer, Rogue One is the finest viewing experience. Disney colonizes the OT and cashes in on the sacrifice depicted in SW77 by fabricating an unasked for solution to a non-problem, which was that a flaw, a chink, an oversight, a gap, a snafu, a fubar, a mistake, a woops, an optimization, a value engineering, existed in an impossibly complex technological terror. As if whoever embarks upon trying to construct a technological terror, by their own admission, is going to count the stars, define the ecliptic, prophesy the shadows of every nut and bolt. No. It's a technological terror. There are going to be mistakes and oversights. The Rebel pilots who dropped like flies were porting several missions and films made of missions of WW2, where the grit of the matter did not depend upon a saboteur who carefully engineered a weakness behind enemy lines, but rather as best as one could do with what gaps and corner cases the enemy had left open to the assessment of low probability risk.

The Rebels of SW77, once they got the plans, had only a Hope that a weakness could be found, and not a certainty that a weakness existed because a ghost in the machine had confirmed it to be so. But now Disney pats itself on the back for making the story more complex, and the vast audience goes along with this, by saying that the flaw was by design. Ok.

So now. The Imperials that were not smart enough to detect the flaw in this design are hung out to dry. The Imperials just cannot compete with Rebellion knowpower as showcased by their MVP Galen. The Imperials are not dangerous by themselves to construct this technological terror. But it's not just that. The Rebels who get this data tape, that has these plans, should not be all that much smarter than the Imperials with respect to their own Imperial technology. But. Lo and behold on Disney's watch, the Rebels who receive the data tapes do not have a Galen Erso in their closet, their filing cabinet, their hard drive, their lunchbox, their bread box, their trunk or on their iPhone, but they are by some providence apt and equipped to discover this flaw that the Imperials who built the thing are not apt or equipped to discover although they had all the time to do so. Did Galen Erso telepath himself into their researchers in the nick of time? Did he leave a long voicemail? With the technical acumen of such talented weakness detectors, the Rebellion ought to weakness-detect the weakness of anything the Empire puts out, and win the war quickly. TIEs, AT-ATs, SDs - they should all fall before the awesome weakness-detecting power of Disney's version of rebels. What's the holdup, weakness detectors who are now as smart as Galen Erso?

Gag me with a fork, for I am not an uncritical and highly tolerant viewer.

Other specific complaints: the wanton caprice with which Vader's geometry vis-avis the Blockade Runner is depicted. The fact that RO shows one thousand TIEs defending Scarrif where six defended the DSI. The fact that the MF hull in TFA, where young Master Hobbit Abrams slams it around like a Kenner toy, has the strength of a Larry Nivens General Products Hull, but this generous inviolability is not extended to Star Destroyer hulls.

Extracting those flaws and tabulating the totality, Rogue One is the finest Star Wars experience and the finest film experience of the Disney offerings. It maintains OT and PT levels of Star Wars scale, scope, stakes, exposition, world building, variety of world, variety of climate/domain, variety of vehicle, construction upon an actual concrete foundation of the main character -who in this case JUST HAPPENS to be a woman-, adequate face time, construction and lighting of the supporting characters, adequate subsurface romantic tension, adequate ratcheting of tension to an inexorable declaration of justice.

I happen to like SOLO:ASWS story more, for reasons, but it does not measure up to these metrics.

I've typed enough on TFA and TLJ in my time on this forum. They don't merit more typing, at this time at least.

 

I love this line.

R1 "correcting" a non-problem is one reason I stop short of really embracing the film even though I don't dislike it like I do TFA and TLJ.

 

Rogue One, not even close. Perfect storm for me.

 

The other thing I forgot to add that completely broke consistency with OT was the rebel fleet size at the end. Disney was not just colonizing the OT, it was colonizing the PT (colonizing back in time prior to what foundations were laid in OT). Disney is Skynet sending Terminator movies back in time to reconfigure, reshape, overwrite what you used to know was fact. It used to be that Yavin IV the hidden fortress was the last stand of all hope. Woops - oh, now we have cruisers. Yeah, but, ESB had a group of cruisers that showed that hope could survive in the vacuum of space away from any one planet surface, but that was BECAUSE the Rebellion had earned the support of multiple other compatriots that it did not have at Yavin! Sorry. Now you know that Yavin IV was Not the last hope, because the Rebellion was already as big as at the end of ESB, and they already had a bunch of cruisers hanging out, so you no longer need to feel that pinch of desperate suffocating terror as a youngster of Gen X that a technological terror will solidify a tyrant's iron grip on a galaxy. Raddus got this. He has that special bridge. Eat your popcorn. Go get more concessions.

With flaws that can be enumerated at length and in detail, ad nauseum, Rogue One is still the finest available star wars experience from Disney.

 

....

You ok @Hernalt ?

 

Isn't the point of R1 that the Rebels lose their big impressive fleet, leaving only the ragtag ships in ANH? They also explicitly don't have a large support, as we seen in the council scene where several leaders a simply not convinced to formally combat the Empire.

Besides, in ANH the reason we only saw fighters and no larger ships was due to that being the only effective strategy against the Death Star, which had defences designed for Capital ships.

 

Exactly right. It was even stated explicitly in the novelization.

 

That's how feel about TFA...won't see TLJ until its put on Netflix on the 26th.

Yeah, I haven't spot major flaws myself yet, I would probably be forgiving of them as the movie its pretty solid on its own. An aspect that I enjoy immensely is it gives you a glimpse of how the galaxy is being wared by the Empire and conflict; something that for a franchise that has "wars" in its title it is really glossed over IMO.

 

Spoiler

Motti is the ranking officer on the Death Star. His opinion is authoritative with respect to whether or not the Death Star is up to the task of repelling an assault. Tagge fears a Rebel Alliance capability sufficient to destroy Imperial ships, and transfers that fear to the DSI he sits on. He presciently asserts they are "too well equipped". That does not dictate they have big ships. It means they have ships that are good enough.

The battle station is not yet "fully operational", whatever that means, but Motti is already saying that the Rebel Alliance is dangerous only to the Tagge's fleet, not the battle station. He also says that any attack they make would be a useless gesture. It does not matter that Motti is factually wrong about the outcome of the match. What matters is that he has the information. The information is that the Rebel Alliance at the time of this conversation does not have the ability to mount a serious threat, and that's even before it's "fully operational".

So what does "fully operational" mean? Tarkin says "it's time to demonstrate the full power of this battle station". "Full" could refer to the station's destructive power or ability to destroy a planet. It's the same word, after all. The snag is that Tagge worried about vulnerability while Not being "fully operational". So for "fully operational" to be related to the station's destructive power, one has to imagine the destructive power being able to be trained and turned to take out Rebel ships large enough and slow enough to be suitable targets. The Death Star's destructive power has an operating area of some finite solid angle (ten degrees across, maybe?). Dodonna's statement is that the defenses are designed around a direct large scale assault. A "large scale assault" is the attack that the DSI cannot effect at a place and time or from a direction of its choosing. So, geometrically, the Death Star's defenses are designed to repel a radially isometric assault. Dodonna's statement has no meaning if a force of large ships foolishly attacked the DSI along the vector of its (planetary) destructive power. Why would they do that. Therefore "fully operational" has to do with the ability to repel "large scale attack" from any and all directions.

So the information Motti possesses is that the Rebel Alliance does not have the type of ships that can present a danger even while the DSI is still working on becoming "fully operational", when "fully operational" means being able to repel a "large scale attack" from any and all directions.

Now, a defender of RO will assert that Motti's statements are still square if you assign that he has become smug after the Rebel Alliance's loss of a fleet that Was capable of presenting a threat to a DSI that was not yet fully operational, and able to repel large scale assault. I can leave this to personal taste. Except. In 1977 Motti is speaking in the same present tense that Tagge is: The Rebel fleet is still dangerous to Tagge's fleet, which Tagge has just said is too well equipped and more dangerous than Motti realizes (or has the information for), while not being dangerous to the DSI. So in 1977 there is no mandate for a Rebel Alliance capability to field a "large scale assault", but there is mandate for a Rebel Alliance capability to be dangerous to the Imperial fleet. If there had been in the recent past some Rebel fleet capable of "large scale assault", it should show up here as an echo, a pressure wave in this back-and-forth. This conversation is steady state. A fleet the size that is shown in Rogue One would have left a mark in Motti's assessment of threat, since Tagge had just said they're too well equipped. If RO is true, Tagge's statement means 'there's more where that came from', yet, Motti doesn't bat an eye. That means the scale was small. And if we credit Motti with having an accurate assessment of enemy strength, Motti has just, in 1977, not batted an eye at the 3000 or so Rebels, off screen during the main film events, who are about to hurriedly descend upon Yavin IV for a quick ceremony, dressed in a lot of ship repair/technician fatigues, flight deck fatigues and pilot uniforms. Almost as if the bulk of what the Rebellion was was separate cells of small craft. At this time. There were certainly Alderaanian guards in the group like were on the Blockade Runner, so, one can easily surmise that there are some number of other Blockade Runners in the Rebel Alliance. If this composition of outfits is all that remains of the Rebel Alliance after the loss of a Rogue One scale fleet, it is curious why there is such a long tail at the bottom end of the partition function of rebel ships. Maybe only small ships could land in the rain forest around Massassi, and that’s who did land. That’s not too absurd a way to square this circle. {I apologize for this single paragraph but it is a continuous argument hinging upon a fact and a subjective but common sense reading of a line when in the year or context of 1977.}

Please attack any position here with evidence from SW77, or ESB80 or ROTJ83 if necessary. @Lt. Hija

 

^ I mean, I see nothing particularly contradictory in Tagge's dialogue. He's worried about the Rebel's capabilities, and from R1 we saw they were a major force a Scarif. That gives the Empire a hint of their strength, but no indication of the full scope of the Rebels (which seems to not extend much further than the Scarif assault force), so it's logical for them to fear another strike of that kind.

The defences being able to be penetrated by small, one-man fighters is demonstrated in ANH itself, when the heavy cannons on the DS surface fail to eliminate the fast moving ships. They'd have been much more effective against slow, large targets, whose size would also prevent them from getting too close to the surface without crashing (see the Executor crash, different DS, but same concept),

 

@Hernalt

What you wrote in your last post made a lot of sense to me. The way I see and understood this General Taggi realized the Alliance's "snubfighter threat" (IMHO, a nice analogy to the WW II torpedo bomber) and ultimately Rogue One did illustrate that his concern was legitimate.

The context looks the same: Dodonna stated that the Empire didn't consider a small one-man fighter as a threat to the Death Star, hence Admiral Motti's statement.

But the part I still don't get is what the capital Alliance ships were actually doing during the Battle of Scarif. They didn't take the second Star Destroyer out and were apparently just trying to somehow knock out the orbital station although I don't remember seeing that much of a fire exchange.

 

Aside from specific in-universe logic I simply preferred the OT progression where the Rebel Alliance was showed as more built up and diverse in ROTJ compared to ANH. Ackbar-lite and a full blown fleet in R1 cheapens that OT progression for me.

 

Here's my opinion.
1. R1 Amazing, powerful story of sacrifice and bravery, with great effects and acting.
2. TLJ Amazing visual effects and acting, ok story line, pretty good overall movie.
3. TFA Great story, good effects, and also great acting, but I think the plot was too simple.

This is not actually my order of how much I like the movies, just how well they were made.