The Dumbest Part of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [Spoiler]
I wanted to comment on what struck me as the dumbest part of this movie, I just couldn't believe how it didn't make sense given the context.
Not much of a spoiler, but still is ;)
So the two main characters get to their objective, a huge data center:
Sweet. Looks good right? Now they just have to get it.
So a search starts up... easy... going smoothly...
But then their robot companion informs them:
"I can locate the tape, but you'll need to use the handles for extraction."
What?
Spaceships, light speed travel, laser weapons, and a Death Star, a frackin Death Star!... and you need to manually go get a data tape HDD, because a computer system can;t do it on it's own. That's just too high tech...?
To prove why this would actually be necessary, keep going.
So the character gets onto the handles not sure how to operate them:
Then wait for the robot compatriot to find the disk and signal it's location:
Now, look at how big this is:
It's idiotic in the first point that they would manually do it, but now this shows that it's not even feasible.
The device rotates around the column, and there are 3 columns we can see.
I can propose:
1) These columns go far down and up, where your visibility is reduced, making accuracy of grabbing a disk very difficult as you go down or up more.
2) These columns likely have data all around that you can't see.
If a data tape was somewhere very low or high, or possibly around, it would not be easily accessible.
So that's my rant. There is an advanced technological society that makes data retrieval by robot arms through human hands where the data is in almost impossible to access locations. It just bothered me a bit, and seemed dumb to have :P
What do you think?
@krnel
2016-12-18, 1:01pm
Yeah, there were a few silly little blips like that. I mean, here's another. Galen never included the project codename in his holographic message. How the fuck was anyone supposed to know which tape to grab? lol Oh well. I Loved the movie overall but its not without the occasional hiccup.
Haven't seen rouge one yet, but I had the same basic problem with the beginning of the force awakens. The best way to get the map to the rebellion is for Poe to fly a spaceship through emipre-controlled space to jakku, get the map, then manually shuttle it back through empire-controlled space to the rebel base in a space ship.
Like, do they not have PGP in the future?
I noticed the same thing. At least three times in the movie it was a really big deal for a character to throw a lever. Ummm... their technology is so advanced yet they need to throw levers? It didn't phase my 11 year old son though. So I guess the target audience was happy. I still really enjoyed the movie though. Oh and my son reminded me of this...
Haha. Nice catch.
Took the words out of my mouth. I went to see this movie last night and was thinking the same. Lack lustre performances and although the film was Okay but really nothing startling at all but one things for sure it will make money.
Yup, big bucks. It's opening was already the 2nd largest opening in December, after last years #1, and even ahead of Avatars opening in 2009(?), so yeah, mega bucks.
I have an explanation! It's all about automation-system permissions:
The droid (K-2SO) only has the equivalent of Read permissions in the data vault. He can look up where the tapes are, but he doesn't have the permissions to access the automation system to activate the retrieval mechanism. The rebel operatives, of course, don't have the permissions either.
Fortunately, K-2SO is able to enable manual control of the retrieval mechanism so that the rebel operatives can do it themselves.
It's a hack, but I have a long and successful history of hacking my way through the plot holes in Star Wars movies. :)
I see. That would help. Thank you for that explanation. But the design of the chamber still leaves much to be desired in terms of feasible manual retrieval of any of the tapes/disks.
True. Wild to think that if the disk they needed wasn't in plain view that the whole Episodes 4-7 would have completely collapsed! haha
OMG a retroactive collapse of history, back to the future style.
I saw the movie before reading this (saw the spoiler alert and saved it for later...).
Well I can’t disagree with you about it, but can offer a hypothetical guess that the low tech was some attempt at a security feature. Although the good guys made it look easy (movie rule), perhaps it was supposed to be a difficult thing to do manually to limit access.
That's all I got though...
Seemed like one of the arcade games where you try to pick up the stuffed doll with a crane. A little ridiculous for Star Wars tech. I'm with you.
Good catch. I see a lot of these silly tech things in Star Wars - here's another one:
The guy on the recon tower is shown in a few of the movies. Why not have a droid, or have the tower just be computerized? :)
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Well, maybe they have advanced computer security in the long, long time ago.
In order to keep computer AIs, or viruses, or sloppy code from getting at the data, a human actually has to go down there and control the manual-robot to get it. No computer interface to this means that it is safe from hackers.
Kinda like putting your bitcoin in cold storage.