Am I the only one that thought that Princess Leia being on the Admiral's ship was weird? IIRC there was absolutely no hint of that, but I hope I'm wrong.
Really enjoyed the movie. The CGI was stellar. I was squinting at Tarkin the whole time because he really was a little off, but he looked as good as he possibly could have, I think. It's way better than only showing the back of his head or using a lookalike, and the quality is miles beyond anything we saw in the prequels.
It was a stupid idea to blow up the place. At worst, they could have starved them out/used chemical weapons. At best, with the manpower at their hands, it becomes a slaughterhouse, but they still reclaim the area.
They wanted it gone NOW, not a week later, because the death star plans were being stolen NOW. Obviously Tarkin doesn't care about the facility or the people down there. He wanted the data not to fall into the hands of the rebels, and was willing to sacrifice the facility in order to do it, as he demonstrated by blowing the shit out of it. Not to mention he probably didn't mind killing off the Director in the process. The destruction of that place didn't matter to him one bit, and he had everything to gain from doing it.
- Where were those dark troopers during the original trilogy? They would have made perfect sense on Endor, more than the white Scout Troopers.
- For that matter, what about the Imperial battle droids? I find it hard to believe that droids like K2SO are just a logistical aide, given his strength and range of motion. At least K2SO kind of resembles some background robots from the original trilogy, if you really squint and believe.
They're not
dark troopers, the Director just calls them his "elite" troops, but even if they were, how does the appearance of dark troopers in this movie somehow justify their presence on Endor, or anywhere else? Going back to the elite troops, if they belonged to Tarkin or Vader, sure I could see that introducing a problem in the canon, but they're the personal forces of the Director, and they all get blown up by the Death Star.
If you mean just elite forces in general and not specifically these troops, how do you know that elite forces wearing regular storm trooper or scout trooper armor weren't present on Endor? Why would dark troopers be a replacement for scout troopers?
He was a reprogrammed
security droid. This could also imply alterations to hardware, seeing as how we don't have an unmodified KX droid performance to compare it to. The only other Imperial KX droid we see doesn't perform any of the feats that K-2 does. We have no idea how much of his capabilities were added by the rebels but needless to say he's extremely capable and proof that it's possible to make a really impressively lethal and intelligent droid when you drop Imperial hardware into the hands of rebels.
E: According to this wiki article, the
failure of the Dark Trooper Project led to good old Palpatine withdrawing funding for all battle droid projects.
Under orders from Mon Mothma, Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors continually sabotaged the production facilities. Kyle Katarn quickly infilitrated and sabotaged a number of key facilities-
Furious at the time and credits wasted on the project, Palpatine ended all productions of the dark troopers and even went so far as to withdraw funding for all Imperial battle droids being developed at that time.