IS it Necessary?

Any good movie with a good story is welcome. I love the Star Wars universe not especially one or two characters.

 

"Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire."

If I had the choice, I'd love to watch a four hour version of A New Hope, i.e. see more of Yavin IV and other places and events surrounding ANH. I'm just uncertain whether they will really see to it that continuity is acknowledged down to the minutiae, after all they will be playing in the sandbox of the mother of all Star Wars films. At this stage I consider Rogue One to be an experiment with hopefully a successful, impressive and palatable outcome.

And if it is a good story worth telling, then I'd say the more the merrier.

 

Why do you ask us our opinion if you can't accept it ?

 

Necessary? No. Fun? Yes. Nothing in Star Wars is necessary, but there's no reason why they shouldn't make stand-alones if they want to do it. I say, go for it, LFL/Disney! (And if Rogue One turns out to be bad, well then I'd be happy to ignore it just like I ignore the Holiday Special and such things - no damage done).

 

A couple years ago I might've said Rebels wasn't necessary either, but lately I am digging that show.

The time between ROTS and ANH is very fertile ground considering that what we got with the PT more or less isn't what we expected. A Star Wars movie not burdened by philosophy and flashy sword battles could be really unique.

A Han Solo prequel though... that is unnecessary.

 

Slightly off topic,.. The battle of Derra IV canon? It was the battle just before both,.. And was a long standing rebel base

 

If it's in Brian Daley's radio dramatization and does not contradict the six films, then it's George Lucas Canon. To what extent the Rogue One producers feel bound by that is a different story, of course.

The ANH prologue mentions the essentials:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships,
striking from a hidden base (Yavin IV), have won their first
victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

This merely informs us that they have won their "first" victory. It follows that other battles were won by the Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal
secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the
Death Star, an armored space station with enough
power to destroy an entire planet.

This informs us that the Death Star plans were stolen "during" the battle. However, it's unclear how the plans were stolen. Either a certain Imperial ship was boarded during battle (with deliberate intent to steal the plans?) or the Rebels deliberately provoked the battle to distract from a Special Forces operation elsewhere to steal those plans.

In the earlier screenplay / novelization Vader accused Princess Leia of having passed "directly through a restricted system". "I know that several transmissions were beamed to this vessel by spies within that system. When we traced those transmissions back to the individuals with whom they originated, the had the poor grace to kill themselves before they could be questioned."

That sounded different in the 1977 Lucas Notes according to which Leia had received the Death Star plans from Rebel spies aboard the Death Star. But, of course, the Death Star could have been within this restricted system.
Confronting Leia Vader only talks about "plans" and doesn't use the word "Death Star" (yet, one of the stormtroopers had earlier informed him, that the Death Star plans were not in Tantive IV's computer).

I'm curious how much continuity we'll see in Rogue One. Vader also made it clear, that "all the Rebel spies have been eliminated - by our hand or by their own"

 

Since I already got some spanking for expressing my dislike of various TFA designs and am getting dangerously close being stigmatized as a "fault finder" I'd like to say here that I really love the design of the Rogue One dropship whose additional details we can see much better in this high-res segment.
It looks almost too elegant (like a lightsaber) compared to other designs "as clumsy or random as a blaster", IMHO.

So yes, Rogue One is necessary, even if it is just to show that original vehicle designs without the taste "derivative" are still possible.

 

I don't think that necessary is the right word for it, if it was really necessary it would have been shown to us in ANH, instead of mentioned in the crawl.
But I can say that I am much more interested in seeing that first victory against the evil Galactic Empire than I am in seeing "The Adventures of Young Han Solo" (at least for now).

 

I think the anthology films are generally designed to fill in parts of the universe that aren't integral to telling the main saga story, that is to say the story of the Skywalker family and (maybe...?) the reemergence of the Jedi Order. A lot of people are already crowing that the ST will be a rehash of the PT / OT, which is sort of the point, and so it's smart to keep the franchise moving in directions that aren't saga-specific.

You're right to point out that we didn't need this story, per se. But I think post-Order 66 stuff is being canonically addressed in Rebels, and personally, I'd rather see stories from the 99.99% of the galactic population that isn't Force-sensitive. Creators also want to hang new stories on pegs of familiarity, so connecting it to something we know—the heroic and dangerous and not Force-related capture of the Death Star plans—is a good choice.

Necessary? Nah. A decent choice to fill-out that SW universe? I hope so. I'm pretty optimistic about the whole endeavor.

 

Right, I think it is a nice option for them to dip their toe in the water and see how the audience responds to a different story-line, not around the Skywalkers.
It is different, but familiar enough.

What I would really like would be for them to move the anthology storytelling to the Old Republic era...

 

I'm going to echo the sentiments of others in this thread and say that while it's not necessary, to me it's a welcome expansion into the world of Star Wars. I think the EU (now Legends) materials showed just how many different stories could be told in the sandbox outside of the Skywalker-related trilogies. There's a lot of possibilities if done correctly. I think it's wise to start out in semi-familiar territory for the first Anthology movie (as @Kuroth Wain so eloquently put it...

Audiences think they know this story, but we only really have a few broad strokes. Depending on how well it does I think sets up the future for just how far they venture away from what we've seen in the movies so far. As for the Han story, I still need some convincing, but I'm keeping an open mind about it and enjoying the fact that we have so much new Star Wars content coming to us in the near future. I never would have guessed this would be the case 3 years ago before the Disney sale.

 

With The Story Group in play, it's all connected. I think it would be a bit tough to explain why there aren't any lightsaber users and all in The OT and why there aren't any supposedly jedi by the time of TFA. The only issue with making a film between ROTS and ANH is that you are limited in your storytelling and what your explanations for things with major characters would be.

 

There are still a lot of great storytelling opportunites, but it would be harder to use existing The PT characters due to contracts, aging, etc.

 

I'm genuinely curious, what would you like to see in the Solo movie?
For me, I would hope that they stay way from sabacc games where ships are gambled, 12 parsec runs and life debts...
Leave some mistery around Han, I think it makes the character more interesting.

I think I would rather see a "simple" smuggling run, maybe the one that got him indebted to Jabba?

Anyway, I guess that, when we get to 2018, I'll be just as excited for the movie as anyone on this forum!