Nah. I want 'em to be Paladins: noble, good, true, passionate. The sort who wouldn’t leave a woman in slavery even if the rules said they should. The sort who wouldn’t let a kid go out on a dangerous mission without forewarning him of the devastating, demoralizing secret that the enemy is certain to tell him. I don’t want 'em to be the boring, robotic, moronic Jedi we’ve seen or heard Yoda say to strive to be. Heroes have passion.
But I’ll grant you, the criticism was extremely nitpicky. The only reason I said it is that that scene is so damned perfect and so perfectly shows what I want Jedi to be, that any flaw, however tiny, stands out.
As Hamish’s explained it to me, don’t they mention that Amidala was hereditary royalty who decided to run for elected office? Something like this just happened in Hungary (?) where the former king was recently elected president.
“And that transmitter that they hide in their bodies so they can blow them up? Well, we’ll just secret her away and do some extensive scanning, hoping we can find and remove it before someone decides to push the little red button and >>>BOOM!<<< Whoops! Anyone have a Handi-Wipe, or a wet cloth, or . . .?”
But the Jedi were right, and she was wrong. She wasn’t being targeted because of the potential of her vote–she was being targeted because the Trade Federation wanted her dead. The vote was incidental–Palpatine was going to get those powers and that clone army one way or another. Meanwhile, the Trade Viceroy explicitly tells Dooku, “I will not sign that treaty until her head is on my desk.” Dooku wants the Federation’s armies to add to those of the other commercial guilds, so that when the Republic’s clones come sweeping in, it won’t be a complete rout.
And it was working, too. Until she showed up on Geonosis, she had, as far as Jango and Dooku knew, disappeared from sight.
What would that have accomplished? They couldn’t be entirely sure that Vader had figure it out, or that he would tell Luke. If Yoda and Obi-Wan had told Luke beforehand, it might have weakened his resolve to face Vader at all, and made him less effective. It’s only after further Jedi training in the period between “Empire” and “Jedi” that Luke is able to face Vader on his own terms.
Who sai that “death sticks” were cigarettes? And more importantly, who cares if they are? Smokers right here on Earth have referred to them as “cancer sticks” and “coffin nails” for decades. BFD.
Who the heck says he’s there voluntarily? We don’t know what happens in Episode III. He might get dumped off there by the Sith and effectively exiled. He might get chased there and have no means of escaping.
What if Hitler had honestly repented of his sins and attempted to make amends? What if, in a Judeo-Christian world, Hitler had accepted Jesus Christ and truly repented? Would he have been “redeemed”?
Let’s face it, when the chips were down, when it really came down to it, Vader did the right thing–he destroyed the Emperor. And he isn’t even the one who destroyed Alderaan. Tarkin came up with the idea when Vader’s work with the “mind probe” failed, Tarking signs Leia’s execution order, and Tarkin goes ahead and blows up Alderaan after Leia lies to them and give up Dantooine. Vader is certainly complicit, but let’s remember just who did what.
Maybe - - just maybe – Leia is the Princess of Alderaan? Nah . . . that’s ridiculous, right? Except that StarWars.com says that Bail Organa is “head of the Royal Family of Alderaan.” If he’s head of the Royal Family, and he adopts Leia, well, gee, I guess that makes her the Princess of Alderaan, doesn’t it?
Oh, and by-the-by, the criticism about Anakin killing the Tusken Raiders and Amidala showing him compassion? It’s exactly what Brin says should have happened in “Jedi”:
I always kinda figured that this force thing was pretty inscrutable. Since the Jedis seem to see in the future, and have superior intuition, they often do things that don’t seem to make sense from a rational perspective.
Fenris:
Quigon couldn’t buy Shmii because they didn’t have any moolah, hence the whole pod race thing. They couldn’t rescue her because of the transmitter.
Finally, I understand the dark side/light side of the force perfectly fine.
Mostly I play tennis using my dark side powers. It’s all strife and effort.
Once in a great while I play with effortless perfection. The light side is being receptive to the Zen moment, and I think Lucas borrowed heavily from Zen in the whole force business.
That’s the whole point of this trilogy - to show that what we think is good can have bad consequences. What we think is bad has good intentions.
The Jedi are not a paragon of goodness in this stage of their existence - they’re making tons of stupid mistakes, blind to teh chaos they’re directly involving themselves in or causing.
It takes Luke, as you repeatedly said, to be the one Jedi, the New Hope, who actually saw what was right, the only true way to behave, which was to rescue his friends, and to try and redeem the evil man who was his Father.
The Jedi have become greatly flawed by the time of the prequels. So much so that they are blind to the Sith Lord taking over the Senate, they agree to train the kid who eventually becomes the most evil man around (second most?), and they get themselves all killed except 2. Some flaws in their thinking are par for the course - just what is required for the shitty state of affairs in SW to come about.
Luke gives in to the Dark Side (which constantly battles to envelop him) to defeat Vader, but then chooses to throw down his saber and reject the dark side when it is time to finish the job. He travels to the brink, looks the decision in the face, and then chooses to be a good person. This is the right hook that gets the force back towards balance. Vader rejecting the dark side after all these years is the uppercut that restores balance and ends our wonderful fairy tail.
As far as the quality of Yoda and the Jedi Council’s decisions, truly the dark slide clouds everything.
It’s all lookin’ kosher to me. Daddy likes. Perhaps if we saw some of the 1000 years before the prequels we would see the Jedi making better decisions. As it is, they are about to fall hard, so they must make mistakes and show some serious weakness. If Yoda and Ben didn’t hide, they would have been destroyed like all of the other Jedi. Someone needed to be around to train the one from the prophesy when he arrived (since they would assume they were wrong about Anakin being “The One” when he becomes Vader - even though they end up being right - He is the one who ultimately restores balance to the force).
It’s all good in my book. Even the part about the Tusken Raiders. She accepts that they are just animals. No need to be any more upset than if someone destroyed a pack of wolves who killed somebody. Instead she tries to comfort the man who just lost his mother to a pack of wild primitives. It probably even turns her on that he is able to do that as wella as all those neat floation tricks.
If Vader’s kids need to be taken away to be hidden from their father, how smart is it of Kenobi to take the boy child back to Vader’s home planet and give him to Vader’s half-brother to be raised, while not even changing the kid’s last name to Lars?
Lucas gives all kinds of clues about the Jedi’s failings throughout AOTC. The old librarians insistance that “If it isn’t in the archives, it doesn’t exist!” Yoda mentioning the arrogance that young jedi have these days. Add to this the fact that the Jedis abilities with the Force seem to be weaking. Yoda blames it on the Dark side, but perhaps it’s the Jedi’s own failings that are causing it. The Jedi order has become stagnant, and arrogant in its power.
Along some of the same lines as what I presented in my Why wasn’t Luke evil? thread: it’s the extremes that are bad and somewhere in between, the balance, is the secret to life.
