EPISODE 3 Discussion

Complaining about something you didn't like is fine. We all do that. The problem is when people try to legitimize it by saying what they wanted was better or more important than what was made and they refute it simply because of that.
 
The beginning of the yoda - palapatine fight when yoda drops the two crimson guards was very funny. as it was stars wars there will always be cheesy moments. overall I thought it was great. I liked how as much as possible was linked and in an obvious way (Kenobi picking up anakin's lightsaber after the fight). Good linking of the episodes
 
Dundradal said:
I liked how as much as possible was linked and in an obvious way (Kenobi picking up anakin's lightsaber after the fight). Good linking of the episodes
I actually preferred the less obvious links - Palpatine's offhand explanation of Anakin's lack of a father, and the way some of the scenes mirrored episode 6 scenes. All in all, I think that's one of the best things about episode 3 - it didn't try to surprise anyone (which it couldn't anyway), and instead referred to all five other episodes at every opportunity.

(some of the more obvious links were annoying, though, because they seemed so artificial and inappropriate. Ugh, Chewbacca?)
 
I see now that using EU stuff would create a big problem for the SW community since you can't put in everything anyway. In that respect I understand Lucas his decision to put his own stuff in. Still though, you have to agree that that Half Tie Fighter - Awing looked bad and not functional. The starship with that observation room didn't make sense too, functional wise. That Xwing look-a-like was good though.

Although we will never know how the movies would have turned out if Lucas didn't direct them, drawing the comparison with the original movies that were not directed by Lucas (exception ANH?) it would seem that the movies could have been a lot better. Especially in the scene-flow, dialogue and the use of characters and effects for the children. Lucas seems to have aimed for a new audience, but he forgets the audience that grew up with the old trilogy who are easily turned off by Jar-Jar and the weird droid sounds. There were a lot of times where the theathre cracked up at the foolishness of some scenes.

Lucas is a great story-writer with amazing imagination, but I think he should have left the directing to someone else.
 
Fellentos said:
Still though, you have to agree that that Half Tie Fighter - Awing looked bad and not functional. The starship with that observation room didn't make sense too, functional wise.

I'd like to know how it is that the Jedi Fighter and the starship were non functional.
You can explain it wiht geek-ism if you want.
 
I agree with Ghost. If anything, the fact that they made a less-than-obvious insinuation about where the design was leading would tell you that its a VERY functional design.

(Except maybe TIE Fighters, which come apart really easy)
 
Well even TIE Fighters make sense for the Empire's original ideas for fighting the rebels. TIE Fighters has what a fighter needs and nothing more, so its probably relatively cheap compared to standard rebel fighters. The Empire basically just threw as many of these things as they could at the rebels, hoping numbers alone would win. Once they realized this wasn't working, they began designing better fighters overall, like the Interceptor.
 
LeHah said:
Complaining about something you didn't like is fine. We all do that. The problem is when people try to legitimize it by saying what they wanted was better or more important than what was made and they refute it simply because of that.

Finally, something can be said that I agree with. My problem with the Movie isn't what the could have, or should have done. My problem with the movie is what they did. Some of that is Lucas' fault (He shouldn't write or direct - he should produce. He makes better movies that way) some if it is the actors fault (Again, this is part of Star Wars - taking no-name actors and making stars out of them) and some of it is just the a problem with the idea of Episode III.

It's supposed to bridge the trilogy, and I understand that, but I wish it hadn't tried so hard. It seems like, at times, there was such an effort to bridge the triologies that the myhtos of Star Wars got rejected to preserve continuity. Lucas is also on the record as saying he had his hands tied with alot of this movie BECAUSE of the fan base. People wanted him to explain things like "becoming one with the Force". He talked about this ALOT at the Celebration III in Indianapolois. Rick McCullem mentioned it too, he thought that the last thirty minutes of the movie were slow and contained alot of uneeded connections with the movie. And Lucas even said some of it he didn't want to show but he was being forced to explain by the fan base.

I just wanted another Star Wars movie. There's 20 years between ANH and ROTS, they didn't need to connect anywhere near as much as they did, IMO. But even if they hadn't, I think I still wouldn't have liked Episode III, because it is an attempt to bridge the Flashy-CGI-heavy Prequel Trilogy with the original mythical Star Wars Movies we've all come to know and love, and I just see that as another gross violation to the heart of Star Wars (something akin to the DVD movies, for example).

I was also told, prior to seeing the movie, by both Rick McCullem and George Lucas that Episode III was pure action. Sorry, that's a quote. "pure action" I wasn't told there would be a twenty minute seen in an opera house. Or thirty minutes of the Tantive IV flying around. Maybe in their mind that's what action is, but it didn't feel that way to me.

The more I think about it, it's not Episode III that bothers me so much, it's that Episode III tries to force a link between things that shouldn't necessarily be linked (like Chewbacca, and TIE Fighters) and that just feels wrong to me. Chewbacca, for example, is an unnatural link from EPIII to EPIV, but would Victory Star Destroyers have been? Not in my opinion. Though I think the movie fared much better without the VSD's, personally.

Regarding the EU Matieral...my specific complaint regarding the EU Material is that some of it IS included in the movie, and some of it is NOT. As you said, George Lucas had to decide to use all of it or none of it, and he picked some of it instead. Which I think is part of the conflict with the large Star Wars Fan base over the movies.

EX: Grevious Coughing - Clone Wars Cartoon Series, Incom/Subpro Creation of the ARC-170, Star Wars Vehicles and Vessles [Incom is not a "canon" company, because it never appears in the movie], Speratist attack on Kashyyyk - Republic Commando video game, Aldera on Alderaan - appears several places in Star Wars stories [Part of it was used in the movie, the city plans themselves, the location however, was changed]. There are numerous counts of "parts" of Star Wars lore being put into the movies, but never all of it.

PS: The "green Jedi freak" from EPII is Kit Fisto, and Star Destroyers carry 72 TIE Fighters (one wing, or six squadrons) broken up into one bomber squadron, one interdictor squadron, and four TIE Fighter Squadrons. It can also carry 10 Stormtrooper Transports and 5 Lambda-class Shuttles, as well as an array of ground assault vehicles. Most people who quote that figure are unaware they are quoting from The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, though similar numbers appear in The Black Fleet Crisis, Rogue Squadron: Bacta War, and Wraith Squadron.
 
Well, there's a reason to all that. The Republic didn't have a big military, but the Empire did. The design of ships was moving towards mass production, so they are not necessarely better then the ones made before. Well, at least that's the explanation given by the art department to why the ships were better looking before: the OT was more 'industrial'.

Besides, TIE fighters are not that bad. The game is tuned to allow the player gun down dozens of them, but they can basically hold out reasonably against X-Wings in the original movie.
 
I was also told, prior to seeing the movie, by both Rick McCullem and George Lucas that Episode III was pure action. Sorry, that's a quote. "pure action" I wasn't told there would be a twenty minute seen in an opera house. Or thirty minutes of the Tantive IV flying around. Maybe in their mind that's what action is, but it didn't feel that way to me.

I actually liked the opera house scenes. Some of the slower scenes were in my opinion better than the radically overdone CGI super effects scenes. The acting may have been a little heavy, but that is what Star Wars was supposed to be, a retake on the serials from the 1930s (the Flash Gordons and what have you).
 
Yeah, i really liked the scene where Anakin is in the Council thinking about Padme, and she is in her apartment thinking in Anakin.
There is when anakin choosed to go to the Dark side, i really liked that scene, the music everything, one of the best scene in the trilogy.
 
Darth vader should have been given shoulder pads or something, and at least use some tricks to make him look taller(they did that with obi-wan's master in EP1)he looks too funny being a small thin guy with a big head to be taken seriously.

from my head, the original darth was a real big guy, this darth looks like he needs food, a gym and growth hormons.

Also, i had expected to see Z-95 headhunters in the movie....
 
Starkey said:
Heh. Brazilian translators had a hard time with some of the names in the new trilogy.

Syfo Dias sounds exactly like "Fucked Himself" in Portuguese - They translated it as Sydo Dias

Dooku sounds like "from the a**hole", so it was translated as Dookan.

Panaka (from Ep.1) means "dumbass" in Portuguese, so they changed it to Pakuna.
My brother and me have already joked a little bit with those names. Here in Portugal the names remained the originals.
 
Jason, you are being stupid. The clone wars cartoons WERE made to tie in with the movie! They show us how Palpatine was kidnapped, for chrissakes. So were the games.

Please use your 3 or for brain cells a bit: The XWing and Dark Forces games started long before the new movies, but the ones you cited were made DURING the production of the movie. It's not that lucas used game and cartoon stuff in the movies, it is the other way around. Next thing you will say that the movie is a rip off of the Episode III game.

BTW, I just imagine Lucas writing episode II:
"Hey, we can show these cool clone soldiers, and then we can show how they became the Storm TRoopers!"
"Sorry sir, we can't, there is a game that shows a guy who was a stormtrooper but wasn't a clone"
"Aw, shoot. Scrape the title then. it is going to be 'Attack of the conscript regular soldiers' then."

Then you complain about the movie having some not epiletic scenes. Gosh. I hope you were kidding.

z-95s are ugly, stupid, and better left forsaken.
 
As noted by others, the Clone Wars series and General Grevious were tie-ins that were created while the movie was already in production - to complain about them being EU is like complaining that Ewoks are an EU creation because there was a cartoon about them as well.

The ARC-170 does NOT appear in the original Star Wars: Vehicles and Vessels book (and I do have the original, and have gone through the one that they released post-Ep I); they show the Z-95 Headhunter... whose design does not at all resemble the ARC-170. Complaining about the ARC-170 being an EU derivative in this case makes for an even more tenuous link than the one about Grevious or the Clone Wars series; at least the last two EXISTED in the quoted references; this one does not at all show up in the previously quoted work, or at least not in the versions I have.

As far as the Seperatist attack on Kashyyk is concerned, Republic Commando is a movie tie-in game, which usually means that it either ties into events which happened in a movie or else displays those that did not... but can be official anyways. If you had mentioned some of the missions in X-Wing: Alliance being suddenly included in Return of the Jedi Special Edition, then your complaint about movie events being derived from EU may have had more substance; that was a seperate production, authorized but not 'canon'.

I hate Star Wars geeks, especially ones whose sense of logic is about as strong as Lucas' romantic writing.
 
The ARC-170 is clearly part of the "beat them over the head" style of ship evolution implied by the prequel movies -- it's one step between the gunships seen in Episode II and the X-Wings in the original trilogy. It's not an earlier design... though the 'ARC' name may come from some expanded universe source, as I don't believe it appears in the movie itelf.

Expanded universe stuff can be fun, but you really really can't force it on any sort of discussion of the movies themselves -- it's great that every background character in the Cantina gets comic books and novels and video games based on their life stories, but nothing introduced in any of this has anything to do with the message or the story of the actual movies. They're fun extra stuff for us to geek out to and nothing else.

(Clone Wars Vol. 2/Season 3/whatever was really well done... although I kind of wish I hadn't seen it, as the idea of Episode 3 opening in the middle of a weird scenario that we don't immediately understand really harkens back to the start of the original movie.)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The ARC-170 is clearly part of the "beat them over the head" style of ship evolution implied by the prequel movies -- it's one step between the gunships seen in Episode II and the X-Wings in the original trilogy. It's not an earlier design... though the 'ARC' name may come from some expanded universe source, as I don't believe it appears in the movie itelf.

It's actually derived from the name of the file for that particular piece of concept art, according to the Starwars.com site. It's just a 'clone fighter' in the script for EP III. And, as noted, they wanted all the fighters here to show themselves as being the ancestors of the EP IV-VI fighters, which is why the new-model Jedi Starfighter has radiator fins/solar panels while the ARC-170 shows the X-wing form of the later X-Wing.
 
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