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Star Wars - Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith (SPOILERS)

  
  

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cusm
15:10 / 10.08.04
Like Vader actually being a clone of Anakin, who goes evil in classic clone horror sci-fi fashon and kills Anakin after he fathers the twins. See, when Obi Wan said "Vader killed your father", he wasn't being poetic!
 
 
Loomis
15:57 / 10.08.04
If M. Night Shamalyan was directing, it would have a TWIST! ending and Anakin would in fact not really be Darth Vader

If MNS were directing, then the twist *would* be Anakin turning into Vader, and MNS wouldn't be able to understand how everyone could see it coming ...
 
 
Benny the Ball
14:14 / 17.08.04
And he'd be afraid of water, that would explain why it took them so long to find Hoth.
 
 
Lord Morgue
07:12 / 18.08.04
 
 
_Boboss
08:47 / 18.08.04
imperial guardsmen in extreme close-up - cool
 
 
diz
12:58 / 18.08.04
all this is potentially spoiler-heavy:

i want windu torn to be pieces by general grievous

current rumor is that Windu goes down to Anakin-cum-Vader, possibly with help from Palpatine.

the duels are:

Dooku vs Anakin
Windu vs Anakin (vs Palpatine?)
Obi-Wan vs Grievous
(possible Yoda vs Palpatine)
Ob-Wan vs Anakin/Vader

rather worried about the incredible chewbaccy rumours, but just hoping it's balls.

they aren't rumors. Lucas has confirmed that Chewbacca is in the movie. supposedly he fights storm/clonetroopers to help Yoda get away from the Empire.

point: if padme doesn't die in this one,(i really hope she does) she dies off-screen of something other than old-age in between. that's a bit too big of a big to be left to spitextended universespit innit?

supposedly, she tries to get in between Anakin and Obi-Wan, Anakin gets pissy and uses the Force to pick her up and move her out of the way... by the throat.

yes, Padme is said to be the first victim of the Vader long-distance esophagus handjob.

he thinks she's dead, blames Obi-Wan for making him lose control, and The Big Duel To End All Big Duels begins. meanwhile, Yoda and/or Bail Organa show up and scrape her off the floor and keep her alive long enough to deliver the twins in some harrowing emergency fashion. she comes to briefly after the birth, holds Leia for a minute (which is why Leia has a vague emotional texture of a memory of her mom and Luke does not), then promptly croaks.

this is all after Anakin turns to the Dark Side but before he gets the lava bath and accompanying bad-ass wardrobe change.
 
 
_Boboss
13:14 / 18.08.04
cool, nice one diz. the chewbaccy rumours that scared me so stated he'd have like a terry-thomas style rotter accent, all naughty and posh, which anakin brings an end to with a sabre swipe. not a good idea, as the whole world screamed to those deaf, stupid, ugly, fat folk at skywalker house of horrors. if there's any truth to the padme stuff then this seems too samey to be so.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
14:58 / 18.08.04
I'm so looking forward to this. I'm like a puppy that doesn't know why it keeps getting kicked.

That's exactly how I feel too. I've waited to see Anakin become Darth Vader since I was three years old, and now I'm just terrified that this is going to be some kind of horrible ball-kicking.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:39 / 18.08.04
Maybe it's just me, but I've felt that the entire premise of the prequel trilogy has been screwy since the first one dropped.

Here's why: In IV, when Obi Wan's giving Luke the lowdown on his old man, we're given the impression that this is legendary stiuff we're hearing. "YOU fought in the Clone Wars!?" YOU? THE CLONE WARS? HOLY SHIZZLE!

Then there's the Empire. This huge, sprawling society of evil that straddles the entire galaxy. And Vader, too - he's given the presence of a mythological villain. Everyone's heard of Vader. Everyone. That dude who gets his arm chopped off in the cantina? He has to have a change of pants every time he hears the name. Boba Fett? Boba Fett tucks himself in tight at night so that Vader can't grab at him from under the bed.

You get the feeling that Dantooine (I think I mean Dantooie - Luke's home planet) is old, barren and dusty because all its resources have been used up by the inhabitants over the centuries.

Everything about the world that's shown in IV screams of history. The problem is that the timeline isn't established properly. The Empire's got a stranglehold, Vader's become a nightmare figure, the Clone Wars have become legend, Obi Wan is lost to the mists of time. It all sounds and feels like it happened an age ago - we're talking a century, maybe two here. "Obi Wan died a long time ago" and so on.

And the prequels fuck that feeling up. This shit didn't happen in the distant past - it happened fifteen years ago. More than anything else - more than the CG muppets, more than the sheeeit acting, scripts and direction - that strips the original film of its myth. It strips Vader and the Empire of their legend. They've only been around for a decade or so. Whoo. Me so scared.

Sure, the family revelations in V and VI also go some way to doing this, but get away with it by asking the audience to play along. Hey, it's a different galaxy. Maybe they've got longer lifespans than we do. And no, they never provide dates or a point of reference for this stuff in the original trilogy, so it could be argued that it's my fault for reading something into it which wasn't there.

That's the direction that A New Hope pushes you in, though. A galaxy that's ruined, dusty, ravaged by time. People who've been under the rule of the Empire for so long that there are few left alive who remember anything different. That's all fucked as soon as the curtain goes up on Episode I.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
08:13 / 19.08.04
E Randy Dupre = so on the fucking money everyone else should be ashamed.
 
 
_Boboss
09:01 / 19.08.04
'And Vader, too - he's given the presence of a mythological villain. Everyone's heard of Vader.'

i dunno - there's never any sense that vader's history or personality is even known to the wider public - you know about him if you're a rebellion-sympathising diplomat or a jedi's half-brother (??), but maybe not if you're just a spice smuggler (whose best mate's been playing you for years). people don't think very highly or very often of the force or jedi at all, since before the start of ep1, and probably make little distinction between good jedi and ones who wear a lot of black - you still just do what they say.

'Then there's the Empire. This huge, sprawling society of evil that straddles the entire galaxy.'

as far as the populace is concerned palpatine has been in power for about the last twenty-five years. he's always (irrelevantly to a most people) had a shrinking number of jedi backing him up and providing security, sjust now in ep4 time his fave jedi's a cyborg who sounds like he smokes too much. it's not until ep4 that the senate is dissolved and alderaan is destroyed, which is the point that marks the empire's first exoteric break with the traditions of the old republic.

and tatooine's decline doesn't seem too implausibly marked - yr dead right about the planet being leeched, but this is clear in ep1. the planet's run on a gambling economy that's hardly likely to be self sustaining.
there's also something of the conspicuous splendour, economic backstabbing and overcrowding of 'life' in the first two prequels which suggests i think that the rot has been set in for some time. it's tempting even to think that things on tatooine to take the example again have improved since the emperor took over - slavery is far less conspicuous there for one thing, imperial security is reasonably established there, and the Hutt's prestige seems to have dimmed from the podracing glory days. luke may hate his life there but it's not as cruel as his dad's was. technology may look less pretty in luke's day, but actually it's more advanced, and has a hands-on texture that you know we're meant to approve of over the too-cool swerves of nabooan/trade fed -styled ships.

'Here's why: In IV, when Obi Wan's giving Luke the lowdown on his old man, we're given the impression that this is legendary stiuff we're hearing. "YOU fought in the Clone Wars!?" YOU? THE CLONE WARS? HOLY SHIZZLE!'

well y'know, luke's seventeen, the clone wars happened before he was born, and as far as he knows was fought by clones and robots, not crazy local desert nutters.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:26 / 19.08.04
technology may look less pretty in luke's day, but actually it's more advanced, and has a hands-on texture that you know we're meant to approve of over the too-cool swerves of nabooan/trade fed -styled ships.

Oh come ON - talk about reaching - we're not "meant to approve" of the more hands-on texture. That texture's there because that 'technology' is made of solid plastic-and-polystyrene objects rather than being computer generated, surely?
 
 
_Boboss
09:54 / 19.08.04
no, i think that's one of the meta-themes of the narrative - you could always program a 3d modelling program to put lumps and bumps on the ships. one of the marks of the new era that luke, han and leia usher in is one where folk aren't as alienated from their technology as they were previously - the best ship is the falcon, because it is 'the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy' and requires constant, loving attention to keep it going, and can't be operated by droids but requires a sensitive, instinctual human pilot. luke turns off his targeting computer.

you really don't think the battered but dependable x-wings are meant to be warmer, more imbued with their own histories and personality than say the yellow naboo fighters, or obi wan's shuttle with the hyperspace add-on? i'm surprised.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:30 / 19.08.04
I think the difference is there, but I don't think it's intentional (although I've not seen AOTC and probably never will): surely what happens is that whilst the lumps and bumps could have been included in the prequels, they're not because shiny clinical perfection is what's being aspired to by the filmmakers by this point. Don't the "special editions" suffer from the same ironing out of imperfections in many ways?
 
 
_Boboss
10:49 / 19.08.04
maybe - the x-wings are a bit battered looking in the extra cg shots of ep1- they're the most obvious example of my point

there are structural issues here sure, but i think it'd be unfair to claim that the difference in look between the two sets of films is just an fx one - there are still people behind those computers trying to tell the story how they like it - they may be twats but i doubt they're stupid stupid twats.

congrats for not having seen attack o the clones btw - yoda has a lightsabre and it's awful, r2d2 can fly and it's awful, there's a cg enhanced romance and it's awful, there's a sadistic edge to the final battle where jedi show themselves to be very unzen, and it's awful. there is this kind of silvery boba fett dude though - he's pretty cool, but he gets done in a particularly vindictive slice of the afore-mentioned sadism.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
11:35 / 19.08.04
It's funny, I don't know how serious you were being with "congrats" but I really do feel that it was some sort of achievement to draw the line after I saw the predecessor and it was awful, the trailer looked utterly awful, and all the half-competent reviews said it's awful. Yeah, I know that in 99% of circumstances boasting about not having seen a film = tres lame, but I was genuinely appalled by the number of people here who said stuff like "this is bound to be awful: off I go to see it!" and then, to my incredulity, in some cases said things like "it was truly awful: I'm seeing it again next week!" This is what I meant when I said people get the movies they deserve.
 
 
_Boboss
11:45 / 19.08.04
i was being pretty serious really - i'm not exaggerating how poor the film is, even to a forgiving, almost slavering fanboy. i was very apprehensive about watching it on my way to the cinema, but knew even then that it'd prey on my mind too much not to go. i got it on video that christmas and every now and again i sit and watch like the last twenty-five minutes where there's just this massive ground war, bigger in scale and tech and bodycount and lightsabres than any star wars ruck we've seen - and it's awful.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:31 / 19.08.04
you really don't think the battered but dependable x-wings are meant to be warmer, more imbued with their own histories and personality than say the yellow naboo fighters, or obi wan's shuttle with the hyperspace add-on? i'm surprised.

Well, no. Not really.

JG Ballard is quite interesting about this. He is fascinated by Star Wars (A New Hope, that is) because he sees it as the first time technology had advanced to the point where a futuristic civilisation *in decay* could be represented successfully. So, the spaceships are pitted and patched because you can't get the parts, you have to get droids on the black market - it's actually not unlike one of the old command economies in that respect. By contrast, the Naboo fighters and Obi-Wan's ship are the products of a golden age of spaceship design. The Millennium Falcon is probably going to turn up in the third film - it would be missing a trick if it didn't - but its unlovely lines can be explained by the fact that it is a Corellian freight transporter, not a fighter. The fact that it was used as the flagship of the attack on the second Death Star always struck me, in those terms, as a bit silly.

So, no, I don't think we're meant to think "isn't it so much nicer that Han Solo spends his Sundays tinkering with the Millennium Falcon", but rather "gosh, how much shinier and richer the Republic is than the Empire"...

It seems a pretty steep curve for 15 years, mind... but yes, the Republic is clearly portrayed as no longer functioning in AoTC and TPM - there's some interesting stuff about parallels wiht the Roman Republic, but maybe later.
 
 
Lord Morgue
13:16 / 19.08.04
I think Vader was still building his rep in A New Hope- note the smartarse mouthing off at his "devotion to that ancient religion", and the ensueing slapdown. By Empire Strikes Back, Vader has neatly filled the power vacuum left by Moff Tarkin, and everyone is nicely terrified of a man who can reach out between ships and kill you with motherfucking MIND BULLETS! Makes you wonder why he didn't do that to Luke in New Hope, or maybe he couldn't, that's why he mutters "The Force is strong in this one.".
As for the technology, I get the impression the difference between the beautiful, hand-crafted Naboo technology and the rough-and-ready, bare-bones, ugly-ass junk in the middle trilogy is the same as pre-WW2 design philosophy compared to the 40's and 50's. Just look at the Thompson submachine gun, with its wooden grips and crafting compared to the wartime Sten, made from machine pressings and crudely welded together. It's Art Deco v.s. Functional Minimalism. Craftsmanship giving way to the assembly line. And most of the technology in New Hope and beyond is Clone Wars- Era and it's deriviatives, army surplus and decommissioned, retrofits and salvage.
The Falcon was flagship because it was unique, a souped-up cargo ship with overpowered weapons and nearly as fast as a fighter, the equivalent of a Q-ship, or the Dirty Pair's Lovely Angel. It just LOOKS like crap, unless you're Boba Fett, who knows his ships.
I can understand Luke marking out for General Kenobi, it'd be like meeting Churchill or Monty or Patton.
 
 
_Boboss
13:23 / 19.08.04
shinier, richer, and doomed: as opposed to rugged, hand- made (-maintained) and with a bright future. have you seen american graffiti? solo tinkering with the ship on a sunday is definitely intended to be the preferred choice, given the alternative is sending the plucky r2 units out onto the hull to get evaporated.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:28 / 19.08.04
I can understand Luke marking out for General Kenobi, it'd be like meeting Churchill or Monty or Patton.

Except that he's never even heard the name Obi-Wan Kenobi before he meets R2.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:36 / 19.08.04
I remember reading (back when I was all excited about Episode 1... ah, happy, more simple times) an interview with one of the designers where he said they'd deliberately made the ships look more Flash Gordon than anything, the kind of design ethic that could be believed to have later been refined into purely militaristic shapes (or something like that)- the scene with the clones at the end of AOTC, where you've NEARLY got a Star Destroyer, illustrates that.

So- not sure which you're SUPPOSED to like more- as far as I'm concerned, it's X-Wings all the way, baby.

And, much as it was fairly poo, I'm not entirely in agreement with the total smackdown being laid on AOTC- it was far superior to PM (okay, not saying much). The script was fucking diabolical, yes... the romance ineptly handled, and vast quantities of it just plain silly. But the idea that it's ALL JAR JAR's FAULT made me feel a bit better about the first one. The Jango Fett fight in the rain actually FELT like Star Wars; hell, I even liked Yoda and Dooku bringin' it on.

The thing that upset me about Phanton Menace was that it SHOULD have been a fuck of a lot better. What got me about Attack of the Clones was that it COULD have been a fuck of a lot better.

Fool that I am, I'll be jostling for the best seats for the first showing of Ep3, however. Somebody shoot me now.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
13:51 / 19.08.04
So, no, I don't think we're meant to think "isn't it so much nicer that Han Solo spends his Sundays tinkering with the Millennium Falcon", but rather "gosh, how much shinier and richer the Republic is than the Empire"...

I think that Haus is absolutely correct about this - when I see the new films, I'm always finding myself noticing how opulent and decadent that society was. The technology is more omnipresent, super-pristine and shiny. The two main settings for the Republic are Coruscant (super-clean urban megasprawl with a dirty underbelly literally buried under its surface) and the classically beautiful Naboo, which is obviously meant to evoke old Europe.

The thing is, I think that we're meant to lament the destruction of this culture, even though it is made obvious how clueless, effete, and ineffective the beaurocracy of the Republic and the Jedi was, and that the scrappy, working class, individualistic heroes of the original trilogy are the ones to make things right in the end.

One of the major failures of this prequel trilogy is that it never really gives us any reason to feel empathy for the protagonists, even though it ought to, if we're meant to care about what is going on. Attack Of The Clones just made me hate the Jedi and the Republic. Yoda is a fucking asshole, you know?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:58 / 19.08.04
The Republic has definitely entered a decadent stage; a kind of Weimar Galaxy, or something. Slavery is tolerated on the gambling worlds, everything's show and bluster- this (as a friend of mine has always argued, and now, post Eps 1&2, I'm more and more starting to agree with him) is what makes the Empire almost inevitable.

Not being familiar with the books, comics and assorted malarkey (other than the games) I wonder how the New Republic shapes up? Do Luke et al try to take things back to the way they were BEFORE Phantom Menace? I'm guessing at the very least they build up the Jedi again.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:15 / 19.08.04
Flux> Ignoring the issues of structure and history, yeah, you're right. 'Swhy I've got no intention of paying cash to see the new film in the cinema (I'll wait until somebody else gets the DVD) - I absolutely do not give a shit about how Anakin gets turned into Vader. I don't even care from a sadistic point of view - the characters in these last two films have been so bland and one-dimensional that their ultimate fate doesn't matter.

And hell, did we ever need to see Anakin become Vader anyway? Did we need to know his life story? The fuck we did. We were told everything that we needed to know - everything that was important - in IV and V. The fact that we never got to find out what the Clone Wars were made them that much more impressive. There's one fundamental lesson that Lucas doesn't appear to have any grasp of: trust the audience. Allow them to create that backstory for themselves, because chances are that whatever you show them is going to be seriously underwhelming in comparison. Especially if you're so obviously making it all up as you go along. Same applies for Anakin's eventual fall from grace.

Stoatie> I was going to mention this previously - do you not think that KotOR shows how it's possible to take the material provided in IV and, through focussing on earlier events, provide it with depth and meaning? I think it was playing that that really hammered home my main gripe with the prequels (the sudden shortening of the timeline and removal of any weight that the SW universe once held). Set 3,000 years prior to the films, yet you can already feel the tensions. You can see where those societies have come from, how various belief systems have developed.

Now, if the new films had ignored the saga of the Swiss Family Skywalker and instead delved back further into the history of the world in a similar fashion to KotOR, they would have been that much better from the very start. As it is, they're completely lacking in dramatic tension.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:18 / 19.08.04
Lucas doesn't consider anything outside of the films to necessarily be in official continuity, does he? Possibly his biggest problem, that.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
14:23 / 19.08.04
I agree with Randy in that the prequel trilogy is ultimately unnecessary because all of the important backstory is successfully introduced or implied in the originals, but I do believe that it was even less necessary for the prequels to suck hard. I think that with some thought and intelligence, they could have come up with a trio of films which were genuinely interesting and entertaining. There are inherant flaws in telling that prequel story, but nothing that would force the story to suck as hard as they have in the last two films.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
14:26 / 19.08.04
I actually think that it's a very good idea to keep all of the continuity limited to what is actually on film. That "expanded universe" bullshit just gets in the way and makes things more convoluted. It didn't do any favors for the Matrix series, right?

Apparently that dumb Clone Wars cartoon show is considered canon by Lucas.
 
 
_Boboss
14:34 / 19.08.04
did plenty of favours for the matrix - a couple of the cartoons and the lapham strip are the best things to come out of the whole franchise. ditto clone wars, pisses all over three of the five films. the backstory isn't being filled in an unconvincing or clumsy way there at all, it's far more clone warsy than i ever imagined the clone wars could be.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
15:03 / 19.08.04
Yeah, but then in the second Matrix, there's that whole sequence where the kid from the cartoons pops up and has this whole conversation with Neo, and we're supposed to know what's going on. It's totally superfluous to the actual film.

Essential plot points to a film introduced in a place other than the film itself = always a dud, never a classic. DUD DUD DUD!
 
 
_Boboss
15:13 / 19.08.04
that's true the way the films used the cartoons and game was very misguided - i think the general cross-media sales/marketing approach is validated because some of the cartoons surpassed the entire trilogy they were supposed to be supporting.
 
 
Lord Morgue
16:09 / 19.08.04
So, was the Star Wars Christmas Special canon? Cause that shit was GOLD. Chewbacca's kid, Itchy! A fucking Boba Fett cartoon! Luke may have sung, I don't know, I may be corrupting my files with the Star Wars Muppets episode. C3P0 definitely tap-danced there. And didn't he look butch all covered in grease in Attack? R2's bit of rough from Tatooine, eh?
 
 
cusm
17:36 / 19.08.04
So, was the Star Wars Christmas Special canon?

I've heard that the official word is that the Lot of it is all cannon. But having seen the xmas special, some of it best forgotten...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
18:30 / 19.08.04
And here we come back to the old "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" incest slash canon thang, don't we?

Personally, I agree that the Clone Wars cartoons piss all over the last two SW movies. (I also think that, even given that some of them are shit, taken as a whole, the couple of hours of Animatrix are a whole lot better than the several years it felt like I was watching those two sequels for. Apparently the Riddick cartoon shits on the movie from a great height too... perhaps cartoons are the new sequels? I dunno...)
 
 
Professor Silly
21:20 / 19.08.04
As far as I know ALL Star Wars products go through Lucas--comic books, video games, novels., and he has veto power over anything that doesn't "fit."

I agree that these two prequels haven't lived up to the legend of the original movie...how could they?!? And the lack of dramatic tension--we know basically what happens--truly kills any passion within these prequels. (Man, this film better kick ass.)

In that sense, Lucas seems like a rather intelligent (business) man: Each individual can choose the medium(s) that appeal to them. Of course all of us youngish men remember IV warmly...and while I haven't enjoyed the new movies or even seen the cartoons, I do very much enjoy some of the video games. The comics, on the other hand, seem intended for mature audiences (published through Dark Horse, who tends to market toward older audiences).

...ah shit, I'm just rambling.
 
  

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