• invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    I really liked Ben Mendelsohn’s portrayal in Rogue One. I figured this was going to be a cameo, but it seems like he’ll be pretty integral.

    This is my favorite kind of Star Wars, though. You only get a little taste of it in the original trilogy, but it’s obvious there’s a bunch of military brass trying to do the-trains-run-on-time fascism post-Clone Wars, but you have this weird Space Wizard wasting budgets on super weapons while his trash can cyborg of an enforcer lingers around their meetings and offers one-liners shitting on their strategies that they have to entertain or else he’ll choke someone and no one is sure if they actually have to put up with him or not.

            • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              15 hours ago

              Haha yeah. I love how this cut scene drives home a point that is a bit more subtle in the actual film- that the Empire is extremely overextended and unstable right from the jump. Like this guy in the first half hour of the movie is like wait what you ended the Senate were fucking cooked. It makes a lot of the rest of the OT make more sense

              • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                15 hours ago

                Yeah, I don’t think I picked up on that overextended subtext until far later… maybe ROTJ when the Emperor shows up to the Death Star II. I recall there being a lot of “this shit is behind schedule” vibes.

                Also, I’m not super clear on things, but I assume that most of these generals are Navy guys from the Clone Wars? I assume that after the Empire is declared, they sweep the CIS quickly without Palps, Dooku, or Grevious. Even still, there’s like ~15 years between Rise of the Sith and Andor so are all the ships just doing fashwave for a decade and a half?

                • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  12 hours ago

                  Yeah they are mostly Republic officers. One of my favorite little lines in Andor is when he says he’s been fighting the Empire since he was 6. Palpatine established the Empire when Andor was a teenager, so he’s saying he spent his childhood fighting the violent colonial extraction committed by the Republic.

                  Can you imagine any other star wars show talking about rebelling against the Republic? Incredible.

                  I believe the whole Imperial Navy got rapidly built up in about a decade after RotS, and it suffers from lowest-bidder mass production. Stormtroopers are shit conscripts because all the clones rapidly aged to death, TIE fighters are mostly cheapo bullshit with no shields. Rebel ships are a lot of legacy expensive hardware, and technology is pretty stagnant so they’re just all around way better. The main part of the Empire rises and falls in less than 20 years, before being relegated to a few rump states that end up coming back in the new trilogy.