Last movie watched...

[Jim_Campbell]

I haven't seen Clone Wars but I really enjoyed the first two seasons of Rebels - looking forward to S3.

It's very good. The back end of the season is excellent. Wait until you get to Ep19. :-)

[The Legendary Shark]

Great stuff, now I'm chomping at the bit to see it! I loved Darth Vader's appearances - he was even more effective here than in Rogue One, I thought, and when [spoiler]Darth Maul[/spoiler] turned up I was properly impressed.

[Smith]

Well,he was in Clone Wars.

[The Legendary Shark]

Damn. Looks like I'm going to have to hunt that down as well.

[TordelBack]

... in the end, instead of helping to convince the rest of the rebels to grow a pair and go on the offensive, join in that last battle to die a heroic death or even make a run for a ship, he just gives up. He allows himself and his men, to whom he seems to pay no attention to in the end,  to be consumed by the destructive wave as meek as a lamb. Waste of a good character.

Spot on there.  I still think he's a great addition to the film, and the overall mythos, but I just can't work out what's going on in his head at the end: I've sort of settled on imagining his identifying the end of his long war with Jedha's plight, and with its destruction his fight is over (in reality the character is another victim of the last-minute rewrite that saw him cut out of the story after Jedha, but it would have been nice if that had been towards the Ben Kenobi end of the convenient-write-out spectrum, rather than heavily on the Padme side).

[Hawkmumbler]

Perhaps he's just tired of running. His home world Onderon was annexed by the Sepratists, leading to a violent civil war. Onderon was later one of the worlds destroyed as a test run by the Death Star, every planet he set foot on during the Galactic Civil War somehow ended up well and truly dead (Geonosis for one). Perhaps in relation to Rogue One as a self contained serial his sacrifice doesn't make much sense, but in relation to his previous appearances I think it makes more sense.

[The Legendary Shark]

Even if that's true it's lazy writing. I think Tordels is right about him being the victim of rewrites. It would have been so easy to, for example, have him mentally broken by seeing the might of the Death Star ("all I did - for nothing... Nobody can fight that..."), giving up in the wake of the death of a loved one ("I can't fight any more, not without her at my side,"), trapped under rubble, unable to run, shouting defiance with his last breath or any number of other ways. But no, he just fizzles out and I think that's a crying shame.

[Professor Bear]

He had wonky legs and couldn't run, you insensitive monsters.

[The Legendary Shark]

Maybe so - but he could at least have tried to hop it...

[Hawkmumbler]

He had wonky legs and couldn't run, you insensitive monsters.

The ablism in this forum has gone too far this time!

giving up in the wake of the death of a loved one ("I can't fight any more, not without her at my side,"),

Amazingly that actually is a part of his story line as far back as Clone Wars!

But as you say, taken out of context it's kinda ropey.

[HdE]

This woman just witnessed [spoiler]her OWN FATHER being blown up BY THE REBEL ALLIANCE![/spoiler] And that doesn't further the idea she's developed that the Rebel Alliance is a bad thing?

I'd be the first to say that Jyn's character is a bit of an uncomfortable fudge, the victim of substantial last minute changes, but what you describe isn't what happens... She's just learnt that far from being an Imperial stooge that abandoned her, her father gave up his whole life, and effectively hers too,  to work on a planet-killing monstrosity just so that he could build in an Achilles' Heel.  Despite the fact that she's pissed off with the Alliance's murder of Galen, which is compelling evidence of their deeply conservative and defensive thinking in a war they are losing, the fact is that their resources are the only hope she has of making something out of her father's sacrifice. In re-using Cassian's 'hope' speech she's criticising what the Rebellion is, and exhorting them to be what she needs them to be: risk-takers, martyrs, gambling everything on this one last chance.

This is the kind of thing that the reasonable part of me, that's still ticking away underneath all the bile and hatred, wants to look back at the film for.

But that's not gonna happen.

[Professor Bear]

If anyone can square the circle about her father being a collateral victim of the war against the Empire, arguably it's Jyn: a Rebel extremist for many years, eventually turning her back on the cause not because she lost faith in it but because she was excised by yet another father figure.  As TB points out, without that disappointment in Saw and Galen that had sent her on a downward spiral, Jyn's faith in the Rebellion/hatred of the Empire was free to reassert itself.

[Eric Plumrose]

I have absolutely no idea who any of these people you're all talking about are. And I'm pretty fucking damn sure I saw ROGUE ONE.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Echh. Haven't even seen Rogue One yet - we'll get there. Maybe in 2019.

As it stands...

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (2015)
Meandering but likable. Burdened with a flabby narrative but enriched by solid casting and eye-meltingly glorious special effects. Certainly could be a great deal shorter and a little bit more refined but my love for the genius of Brad Bird remains unfettered - the doe-eyed 60's optimism is endearing and the film is remarkably free of many of the tropes that would make it cynically hateful. For Disney to be making this sort of self-contained original film in the era of the OMNIFRANCHISE is a rare treat - and there's something marvelously Twilight-Zoney about the whole undertaking that makes it more memorable than regrettable in my view.

[Goaty]

Super

I loved it! So brutal! Better than Kick-Ass! He really did hit people with that wench!

Watch out for that director James Gunn, wonder what he does now?