Star Wars Rogue One - Are The Rebels The BAD GUYS?

hey guys I'm max Lasser and I'm do so thanks for having me when I was watching Star Wars rogue one I find myself wondering whether the rebellion were really the good guys in all this right off the top I know that I'm about to say some pretty terrible things about the rebellion and it's all in good fun I'm not a member of the Darth Vader Uther Devo colonialist I just thought there were some interesting elements of stuff the rebels do that is a little weird and now obviously this video is going to be 98% spoilers so if you hadn't seen it turn away now first of all the Empire is definitely pretty bad I mean we find out in this episode that Darth Vader lives in a lava castle I'm not even sure how you would describe his vision for that building to his architect without using the word evil yeah so we'll go with a sloping modern neo brutalist evil vibe and for the bathroom I was thinking just one giant two in the center because of the movie is darker tone they were willing to admit that it's pretty hard to keep a rebellion comprised largely of assassins and criminals from doing some pretty morally questionable stuff and it also seems like they don't have a great plan in place for when they win I mean it would be a shame if all those brave heroes risked their lives for the Death Star plans just so that Luke Skywalker and some more brave heroes could risk their lives to destroy it and everyone on board just to create a power vacuum that would only be taken over by another all-black wearing military dictatorship led by a red lightsaber wielding sadist not to get three and a half episodes ahead of myself now admittedly the Empire kills billions of people and controls the entire galaxy so you could argue that it's worth doing anything to bring them down but I just wanted to consider for a moment how the rebellion might have looked to a random shop owner or bantha herder living in peace in the Galactic Empire planet in the center of the galaxy who just wants to feed their family and send their kids to a good Empire school one early example of just what the rebels are willing to do for the cause is casseon shooting his samwell tarly s friend the informant in the back just because he might want to talk to the cops this poor guy was literally out of breath from running to tell kasi in a secret and I know he was written to be whiny and annoying but aren't these the people the good guys are usually trying to protect not shoot in the back now you might say well Han shoots Greedo first but Greedo was an assassin sent to kill him not a rebel informant who thought he was on Kassian side if Bodhi was a hero for smuggling Imperial information isn't this sweaty guy a hero too meanwhile jyn erso daughter of imperial scientists and architect of the Death Star which at this point is actually under its codename Stardust's which is adorable has been captured by the empire for being a general criminal type now in a major strike against the are the rebels the bad guys gin is on her way to a labor camp and I don't think there's any example of a noble or not absolutely monstrous labor camp but hey we never get to see the inside so maybe they just spend their day making TIE fighter license plates anyway Jin is rescued by the rebellion well rescued by force some have call it sort of a benevolent kidnapping okay they went through all this effort to rescue her the least Jin could do is sort of come with them and hear them out and hey we're all good guys here so you didn't fear on different pages if we disagree we can just go our separate ways no hard feelings or not rebel command informs her that the choices are she goes along with the plan to help find her father or shall be sent right back to the labor camp where they found her and it's a life of snoring tentacle face roommates and TIE fighter license plates for her and this is actually even more sinister than it sounds because we find out later in the movie a Jinnah has been recruited so that the rebellion can secretly kill her father right under her nose and sure they don't tell her that at the time but from the rebel commands perspective the plan in the secret rebel war room was to force a girl who hasn't seen her estranged father in 15 years to find her father so they can kill him while she watches thank God later in the series these guys color code themselves as good guys with blue lightsabers because I otherwise I might forget who I'm supposed to be rooting for now seems like a good time to go back and talk about Palin as a father because it turns out he is a member of the rebellion and this guy is some weird parenting strategies first of all he calls his daughter Stardust and he calls the death star Stardust which is a machine that destroys entire planets and turns them into dust and I'm not a therapist that seems pretty screwed up to me and sure maybe he called that on the off chance that she would be a part of a secret rebellion mission to seal the Death Star plans like 20 years later and you'd have to know which tape to pick out from the Imperial library but that can't be good for the psyche of a child to be called the thing that's left after daddy's machine kills everyone and I mean that stormtrooper doll she's playing with a stormtrooper doll while Galen is making elaborate plans of what to do when the stormtroopers show up to kill them all which as far as I'm concerned would be like Anne Frank playing with a little Nazi doll and sure he used to work for the Empire and she probably had the toy for a while and my cry when it get to take it away but talk about mixed messages I mean it's no surprise to me the gin grows up without an interest in politics when at age six life-sized versions of her dolls kill her mom after being forcibly hired for the help us kill your dad mission step one is to find Sagar arrow now sagar era is a rebel leader whose methods are so extreme that he's been forced out of a regular rebellion which has already made it clear that they're willing to murder their friends in the street and trick recruits into helping murder their dads but saw is even more extreme than that sort of the isis to the rebellions taliban the guy that maybe enjoyed killing stormtroopers so much they start to make everyone feel weird but he wouldn't stop talking about it at dinner and they kicked him out of the noble rebellion announced they wanted to have nothing to do with him until they needed him for anything saw then immediately lives up to his reputation when defecting imperial pilot Bodie rook shows up at his doorstep and gets dragged around in a burlap sack and then tortured by a tentacle truth-seeking monster named bore gullet which by the way everyone in sauce camp cannot wait to see they keep chanting Bork all at Borgata like this is the best possible Tuesday night entertainment on the planet and they don't even bother to play bodis message that he's risked his life to bring them before they knowingly drive him temporarily insane and throw him in a Cell man have you guys noticed what it's like to inform for this rebellion you either get shot or dragged around and laughed at as you're part of the day's shied show entertainment this is all taking place on the Imperial occupied moon of Jeddah and this is another really important point to me this moon is basically under imperial martial law and if you believe rebel propaganda shouldn't that be like a hell escape on earth I mean that sounds pretty terrifying to me so let's see what it's like to live under imperial occupation versus say the neutral trading points on the rings of Katrine seems like martial law under the Empire is actually a relatively normal life in fact they let the blind Jedi Temple worker turret in way openly preach about the force on the ruins of his Jedi Temple I mean they pretty clearly have freedom of speech and he and Vaes are allowed to openly display their weapons these are people who kill 20 stormtroopers at the first opportunity and no one is bothering them under oppressive imperial rule and to cap it all off the Empire doesn't appear to have any rules governing open-air tentacle street food which is the same marie's of Catrin and in Jetta in fact when saw says to Jin that Imperial flags are now raining everywhere Jin simply says that she can't tell because she just look up like should you be able to tell at eye level that the evil empire is totally ruling your lives and mean these are the people were throwing morality out the window to overthrow and this is like they're doing a pretty good job at keeping the peace now sure maybe it's peace through terror as Galen says at the start of the movie but didn't Machiavelli say it's better to be feared than loved and I'm not sure Sagar era has a great high horse to stand on here since he's one of the few movie characters to enjoy a heroic noble death and a frequent use of burlap sacks while an empire squadron is on patrol they get surprised attacked by some of saws men and I'm not gonna fall anyone for using guerrilla tactics against a much more powerful and larger force but cassian sees one of saws men about to throw a grenade that might hit gin and just shoots him in the chest now caffeine might not have had a better option here because he was trying to save Jin's life but this is another example of a larger point I'll be making soon it's hard to keep the various factions of this rebellion together and probably if they had managed to drive the empire off it would have been arguing pretty quick about why some guy from corporate shot their friend in the chest and even if he was in the right maybe the good guys in this movie could like take a 10-minute break from killing and betraying each other even the titular rogue one mission is an example of how poorly run this operation is because it counts it decides that based on the unproven information they have they can't risk sending fleets to scare up to try to steal the Death Star plan so this whole thing only works because the rogue one team ignores the higher-ups completely and while are having this incredibly important debate who gets all the floor time to give the rousing speech about hope gin the arsonist and robber who they hired to kill our own dad I mean it sure would be great if anyone on this rebel council could display some leadership ability and maybe they're not the ones who are gonna be in charge once they take everyone down but if they are they're not doing a very good job so far another thing about all this it is really we see stormtroopers serving a lot of different functions tops prison guards soldiers and the rebels love killing them basically no matter what their job is some of these guys that got killed in the labor convoy probably spend a large portion of their day doing prison paperwork which is fine if like stormtroopers aren't really people and they're just evil white soldiers but a lot of these guys are probably normal Empire citizens who got drafted maybe even as children and we're sort of conscripted into service maybe even non-violently just kind of cleaning prison cells or doing paperwork or being doctors but as the rebels are attacking scare if at the end of the film we see them having a cute conversation about who gets the most updated equipment having completed stage one of the mission it's time for project killed this girl's dad to really get in motion here's the part of the film that really blows my mind first of all Intel's casseon that her father left her a message and they loves her very much and also left a glaring weakness in the desk Stardust because a he's a loyal member of the rebellion and B he knew that with or without him the Empire would finish the project eventually and we know that because we just watched them blow up a city isn't it time for somebody to update the mission parameters and casseon still wants to go forward with murdering Galen even after knowing he's been a spy on the inside the whole time and now they want to kill him while his daughter is a five-minute walk away now of course casseon backs out at the last second but still if I was Jim this guy would not have been my top choice for hand-holding on nuclear warfare beach but the rebel command who were hopefully could do a better job than the empire since they're trying to overthrow them decides they still need to kill him attacking a science base and loosing a bunch of rebel soldiers in the process and I really feel bad for Galen because if he is known he was going to be killed by a rebel soldier he would have given his daughter a rebel soldier doll to play with I cannot get over that doll up to this point what I've been trying to convince you of is that the rebels do whatever they want in the name of the rebellion and it's frequently not great but right before the rogue one crew leaves casseon basically says that himself they've all done kind of gross stuff in the name of the rebellion and if they ever had to stop like if the rebellion ever ends and they just go back to normal lives all that murdering the name of the rebellion is now just murdering and this brings me nicely to my second main point what everyone is doing all of this for what happen if the rebellion would actually succeed let's pretend for a second that the rebel command were actually geniuses and right the whole time and that killing Galen halted the progress of the Death Star and somewhere down the line they're able to defeat the Empire's fleet and take over the galaxy themselves or install someone else but we'll talk about that in a bit at that point soccer era would still be alive and we've seen in our world what happens when a violent rebellion throws out the current order without a solid plan for a transition of power that's frequently an absolute mess I mean if you look at the Arab Spring which is a revolution that's sought to unseat a dictator and it was sort of a coalition people who just wanted to see a new government in place by the time all the dusted settled the Muslim Brotherhood had managed to take power and probably Sagar era faction would have been pretty loud in the discussion of who gets to run what the guy with two tubes on his face probably would've ended up being under secretary of agriculture and when sauce faction used their naturally brutal methods to stay in power they would have faced their own rebellions and how much different are you from the Empire at that point if you're willing to work with these kind of people in order to maintain control and reach your ends like what is the rebellions Rand plan they do succeed who is the plan for who's gonna govern when they win yes they very heroically managed to get the death star plans and Luke Skywalker very heroically manages to blow up the Death Star but it's a lot easier to kill people in charge than to leave after the rebellion finally succeeds at the end of episode six is it really any surprised by the time Luke Skywalker's an old man the dominant power in the galaxy is run by another guy who's so insecure that he has to change his boys and posts and I really want to hit this point again because it's not just that the rebellion is incompetent it's that when you'd oppose a violent dictator with no plan for what's going to come after him frequently it can be worse than it was before when a rebellious faction conspired to assassinate Caligula in Rome within two generations he was replaced by Nero who is yet another megalomaniacal status which by the way is pretty much what's happened so far in Episode seven and there might have been some pretty positive side effects to the entire galaxy being under the Empire's rule it's no longer canon but in the Star Wars extended universe novels the galaxy is frequently under attack from extra galactic forces like the Yuuzhan Vong there's even a theory that the reason Emperor Palpatine was uniting the galaxy and creating all these machines of war in the first place was to fight off galactic invaders because if evil bug monsters from beyond the outer rim come to kill everyone it sure would be good if we were all on the same team in fact threats from other planets is probably the only thing keeping a lot of these planetary governments together earth is currently 270 countries so before all doramas going to get blown up by the Empire the planet of Alderaan was probably 270 Alderaan countries so again the fact that the Empire has all of the galaxy's resources consolidated in one place does have some positive side effects it's like they always say any can blow up a Death Star but it takes a carpenter to build one and if you take away to genocide it's a pretty impressive feat of military engineering so yeah why is even worth taking down the Empire anyway the rebels in the bag guys end of story except that the empire are Nazis whoo hey alien so even though a lot of what I said is true you got to kind of give them a pass on whatever they want to do because the end of the day they're trying to take down Nazis if you notice the Empire has basically no aliens in it at all the Empire looks like your stepfathers golf friends and to the rebellions credit they have aliens in the army aliens on the council and they even have a little alien Admiral and they make them a chair so we can see the battle so you can sort of think of this movie as the Star Wars and glorious bastard a bunch people doing a lot of screwed up stuff does it innocent people but who cares because they're doing it to Nazis and we have to live in concert with our alien brothers et phone home and I know what you guys are gonna say you're gonna say they do have an alien what about Admiral Thrawn but who asked me being the one alien as part of a group is trying to kill and discriminate against aliens makes you a little bit of an uncle frog so anyway what we've learned in this video is that even though eight-year-old me thought that if I was in the Star Wars universe I'd be Luke Skywalker 25 year old me is more of a concern galactic citizen writing an op-ed for the Corazon Times which probably isn't great I've been max placer and I don't have a Twitter but if you want to leave comments trying to convince me to join the light side you can find me on Facebook or at Lasser max on instagram and leave a comment guess I missed something terrible that the rebellion did because much like the Galactic Empire we encourage free speech and please if you're trying to convince people to the dark side go ahead and hit share like the video send it around and subscribe to new rock stars for all kinds of Star Wars and non Star Wars stuff bye you

Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 263,932

Rating: 4.3088007 out of 5

Keywords: star wars, rogue one, bad guys, villains, the rebellion, rebels, jyn erso, cassian andor, saw gerrera, terrorists, isis, empire, the empire, a new hope, new rockstars, newmediarockstars, analysis

Id: aEuqe47BH0U

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/SulliverVittles]

Don't have to watch it to answer the question.

Yes. They are.

[u/StripeyMiata]

Don't forget that Scarif wasn't a military base, it was an off site tape backup library. So those terrorists murdered thousands of innocent IT guys.

[u/[deleted]]

Note to content creators: don't title videos in a way that they can easily be answered with "yes"

[u/imlyingdontbelieveme]

hm. this 'wanted' hologram has a question mark instead of exclamation.

[u/Windows_is_Chocolate]

I'm surprised you are even asking that question, even their name "rogue one" shows where their priorities lay: terrorism and general destruction of peace.

[u/Communist_Norwalk]

Yes definitely what kind of question is that

[u/TheNerdDude]

The real question is why he creators of this transmission are asking this only now.