Other than that, Tarkin was absolutely
>necessary. It'd be foolish to think a project of that
>magnitude wouldn't have his involvement. And Leia needed to
>end up with those plans.

We didn't need to see either of those moments. Jimmy Smits made it clear the plans would end up with Leia-- we didn't need to see her onscreen imo, which undercut what I thought was a beautiful sequence about the sacrifices made by ordinary people in the name of stopping evil.

And Tarkin could've been relegated to cameo duty (or a reference in dialogue, honestly) in order to give Mendelsohn a more fleshed-out villain. You've got a brilliant actor born to play an Empire officer. Give him more to do. And ditch the creepy CGI old man.

>Vader, isn't a necessity, but come on. That shit was lit.

The stuff at the end was fine (mostly, again, because I thought it served nicely to hammer home the point referenced above), but I was still cringing over the terrible joke they gave him in his intro scene. Since when did Vader become Schwarzenegger? Ditch that first scene with Mendelsohn in the lair and make Vader's first appearance when he pops up at the end.