Oh, I agree. I think you can get away with it more with imperials as you never see Imperials not wearing their helmets in movies. If the Imperials are like the first order, then they have issues with their members removing heir helmets without permission. I think if you really want to point out what is odd, it's them letting Sabine take her helmet off. But we know they did it so the viewer can identify the characters.
My problem is more that little things keep getting us a little further away from what John Mollo gave us in the first couple films. It's a problem whenever there's more than one brain working on something. Star Trek suffers from it, too. Over time, little misinterpretations and miscommunications work there way into the fabric of things. It bugs me. *sigh* The pilots we saw in Star Wars were Stormtrooper pilots. The AT-AT drivers we saw in Empire were Stormtrooper armored-vehicle operators. The black uniforms, officer, enlisted, flight ear, or big goofy kabuto helmets were Stormtroopers (they wear other things than the white battle armor at all times).
We saw Clonetroopers in the same sorts of gear, and distinct from the regular military forces that were being assembled for the war.
We also saw non-Stormtrooper armored-vehicle operators in Return of the Jedi. The EU gave us similarly outfitted pilots -- grey jumpsuit, soft flak vest instead of body armor, slightly different life-support gear... Yeah they had red bloodstripes and wore Stormtrooper-style flight helmets, but that was because it was an elite fighter wing, and they did that to show that they were badasses. I was really hoping we might see the cadets in non-Stormtrooper flight gear inspired by that, even if it meant they had gray Rebel-style helmets with smoked visors and air masks that they kept on to streamline production issues.
We
also saw, later, and also in the EU, Imperial non-Stormtrooper pilots wearing Stormtrpper-style flight gear, just with the upper part of the faceplate flipped up into the helmet so we could see their faces. This would be that lack-of-communication thing coming up again.
If I could have it my way, I would have liked them to establish individual pilots for Phoenix Squadron. Allow viewers to get to know them a little so that when they get killed off, there is more of an emotional connection. They did this with the various clones in Clone wars.
And Star Wars and Empire. We had some sense of Dutch and Tiree and Pops. We had some sense of Red Leader and Porkins. We
definitely had a connection with Biggs. We had a connection with Zev -- he rescued Han and Luke, for crying out loud. I wish they had left in the rest of Hobbie's part, but we still had at least "two fighters against a star destroyer?"... Jedi kinda dropped the ball on all that. We just had faces we'd never seen before declaring they'd been hit before vanishing in a fireball. This feels a bit like that.
--Jonah
