shu-of-the-wind:

fuckyeahisawthat:

ooksaidthelibrarian:

starfoozle:

Another thing I was grimly satisfied by in Rogue One: actually bringing home the horror of a planet-killing weapon. Alderaan’s destruction was seen from a distance in ANH, but this, with all its nightmarishly appropriate similarities to atomic weapons test footage, was a really powerful display of why the Death Star had to be destroyed – it is pure evil in the shape of a moon.

#destroying a planet is the most nightmarishly evil thing in the universe – simultaneously wiping biology; culture; and place off the map#with no chance of leaving traces behind and no chance at all of natives ever going home in addition to all that death –#ughhhhhhhh#planet-killing is such a cheap bullshit trick in bad sci-fi which is why i utterly loathed starkiller base#first: that’s really shitty science. second – it was given zero narrative weight and undermined the death star’s symbolism as ultimate evil#rogue one did the exact opposite and i am grateful to be horrified by it#and i appreciated the test footage-style imagery of [both times the death star was tested at low-power mode]#i’ve watched a lot of bomb tests trying to understand how any person or group of people could authorize the existence of something like that#idk man as an armchair nuclear historian and advocate for disarmament this is important.#star wars#rogue one

I’ll ve over here, reblogging your tags because they’re awesome and should be read.

I was so ‘eh’ about Starkiller Base because the movie didn’t make us care one bit about the destroyed planet. But Rogue One, man, I cared a LOT.

Yes! The blast on Scarif looks very much like a South Pacific nuclear test. And while destroying an entire planet is something we can only imagine, destroying a city with one bomb blast is something we actually have a context for.

There’s also a perspective shift going on here that I think is really important. In ANH and TFA, we see the blasts from space–more or less from the POV of the people firing them. (Yes, we do get one quick shot of some people on one of the planets Starkiller Base destroys, but we don’t know them and it happens very fast.)

In Rogue One, we see the Death Star from the point of view of its victims. While we do see what’s going on inside the Death Star, we primarily experience its effects on the planets that are being targeted. The destruction of Jedha City is given a lot of visual weight, and our protagonists are placed right there in front of it. And because we’ve been on the ground on Jedha, when the Death Star appears over Scarif, we have a true sense of dread.

Bombs are a lot scarier when you’re under them.

Bombs are a lot scarier when you’re under them.