Rose Tico is the best character in Star Wars

Warning: Spoilers for The Last Jedi

Rogue One

I want to talk about AT-ATs.

There are a lot of other things I love about the trailer for Gareth Edwards' upcoming Star Wars spin-off Rogue One: the grounded aesthetic that harkens back to the original film's "lived-in" universe; the shots of Jyn that bookend the trailer, one in cuffs on a Rebel Base, one disguised in the Death Star cell blocks; the use of handheld cameras that give it a more personal feeling than we're used to from the series; Mon Mothma's smirk at Jyn's "I rebel" joke.

But I want to talk about AT-ATs, because the way Edwards uses them in this one brief shot at the end of the Rogue One trailer says a lot about why I'm excited for his take on this universe.

The best film in the Star Wars saga (so far) is The Empire Strikes Back, which is also the first place we saw Imperial Walkers.

During the Battle of Hoth, a number of these barely-mobile artillery platforms attacked the rebel base on Hoth, targeting it's shield generators. Impressive in scale but lumbering, they didn't seem to pose much of a threat to troops on the ground, and were eventually defeated using ropes.

It's difficult to see them as scary, mostly (I believe) because of the way they're shot.

Gareth Edwards, for my money, made the best Godzilla movie since the 1954 original (this is a hill I'm prepared to die on - fight me, scrubs).

Few other directors are as good at communicating scale as effectively as Edwards; even as blockbusters ramp up the "disaster porn", they get more and more clinical about it. We're watching cities being ruined, but it all lacks dramatic weight because the scale isn't relatable.

Edwards always puts his camera ona very human level; the kaiju in Godzilla are almost always shown with known objects in the foreground or through a bus window, which tells you immediately just how terrifyingly huge these things are. He avoids putting you on Godzilla's eye level because that makes the buildings look small rather than making the monsters look big, which would diminish the awe.

Sorry, I'm supposed to be taking about AT-ATs.

It's a very short part of the Rogue One trailer - Jyn and her band of rogues are running across an open battlefield; at first we can only see the lower legs of the Imperial Walkers, but the camera pans up just in time to show the lead AT-AT turn towards (and open fire on) the ground troops.

That's exciting, in a way the AT-ATs never were before. They're a threat to infantry, not just infrastructure. Instead of walking slowly towards a target on auto-fire, waiting to trip, these machines are reactive - and they react fast.

Rogue One has taken these walking punchlines - big, slow, expensive and easily-defeated - and done something unexpected: it's made them dangerous.

Droid Rights

I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic II, on and off, for about six months. I'm still embarrassingly early in the story, having just arrived at Telos, but a few of the conversations I've had in the game so far made me curious about the way droids are treated in the Star Wars universe.

Droids appear to have some form of artificial intelligence; although some are clearly designed for specific tasks (and are therefore unlikely to have any form of sentience), protocol droids and R2 units (or T3 units in KotORII are capable of dialogue, reasoning, and appear to have strong self-preservation instincts. In the original Star Wars trilogy there's some indication that droids can feel emotions - C3P0 alone shows fear, guilt and happiness in one scene of Episode IV.

It seems a little offputting, then, the speed at which organic characters recommend just reprogramming any personality defects out of droids¹. It reminds me of the hospital scene in the Futurama episode "Bendin' In The Wind": faced with a horribly disfigured robot, the doctor's advice to the Professor is simply "I'm sorry, you'll have to get a new one".

And that's not to mention the constant barrage of derogatory language used about droids. Referred to as tin cans, snide remarks about their colour and appearance - I can't think of any species in Star Wars that's as essential to the smooth functioning of the entire galaxy² that's dismissed as mere equipment.

Is there any expanded universe stuff about droid rights? Have they ever demanded fairer treatment, and have they ever received it?

¹ We're obviously supposed to react to their treatment, though; when C-3P0 is blown apart on Cloud City, the music at least implies that a dramatic, terrible thing is happening.

² Can an X-Wing fly without an R2 unit to perform astronav calculations? During your journey from Peragus to Telos in KotORII, T3 is the only thing keeping your ship on course - after he saved the ship and everyone on it - but he's still belittled and insulted at every turn by your companions.

Steampunk Star Wars

Drawn by Björn Hurri at Gorilla Artfare.