The Mystery Of The Hammerhead Corvette Crew

Anthony Breznican from Entertainment Weekly raises the question of What happened to those Rebel Soldiers who gallantly drove their Hammerhead Corvette starship into the crippled Star Destroyer in Rogue One.

Rogue One executive producer and Industrial Light and Magic visual effects supervisor John Knoll tells EW: “There was some talk about, ‘Hey, is this a suicide mission? Are all these guys going down with the Star Destroyers?’ I started pushing for this idea that maybe in one of the shots we could have all these lifeboats, the escape pods, shoot out of it.”

Picture this: As the mid-sized Rebel starship smashes the two Imperial goliaths together, driving them toward the planet below, a plume of small objects erupt from its undercarriage.



“We did an animation of that, but Gareth [Edwards, the director] thought it was a little distracting, so we turned that off,” Knoll says.

But the VFX team kept fighting for the lives of those Rebels, using some of the cutaway shots to justify an unseen escape.

“The last shot you see of the Star Destroyers crashing down through the gate — it’s a very subtle thing, and it would probably be hard to tell this – but the lifeboats are all gone on the Hammerhead,” Knoll tells EW. “It’s my story that the Hammerhead crew got into the life boats and made it out.”

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