“You can kill robots all day and still get a PG rating.”
—Kevin Murphy (Rifftrax)
Lots of good observations in this thread:
I agree 100% with the particulars of the OP, but if you want to enjoy the films you have to suspend your disbelief with the above principles in mind. The book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe spends a good number of pages explaining where Lucas was coming from. I read that a couple of months ago and have a more forgiving appreciation of the movies (and to a lesser extent, the toy commercials that are the prequels) as a result.
But if you don’t have time to read an entire book, this will suffice:
Also remember that Tatooine is a dirt poor backwater hell planet. If there’s a bright center of the universe, Tatooine is the planet it’s farthest from. This is why Jawas and moisture farmers scavenge droid parts like vehicles in Cuba. Over on Naboo, or Coruscant, or the Trade Federation things are different.
In the Star Wars universe there are a lot of backwater planets that are nothing more than rocks, ice, sand, swamp, and monsters. Technology isn’t very evenly distributed. Lots of planets have advanced technology, but it has to be brought in from offworld, and maintained by sweat and baling wire.
What planets did we see in the original trilogy? Tatooine, Yavin, Hoth, Degobah, Bespin, and Endor. None of them were advanced planets, in fact out of all of them Tatooine was the most vibrant. The others had a couple of military bases or mining colonies, and that’s it. Every place else is on a ship, or a Death Star.
How is this different from Earth right now?
I can see a modern pricey SUV with a in car computer entertainment system pass a guy using a rickshaw to haul stuff every day.
Well, we did see Alderaan. Briefly.
How fucking crazy was it that Lucas didn’t set The Phantom Menace on Alderaan? That’s such an obvious choice: it’s major name from the original trilogy that’s barely fleshed out there, it’s got major ties to one of the characters whose origin the prequel trilogy is trying to establish, and making new viewers familiar with the planet in the prequels makes seeing it blown up in the originals that much more emotionally effective.
Instead we get Naboo. Goddammit, George.
We know from the earlier movies that the technology involved droids that can hover and around at the speed of sound as well as literal walking tanks.
If the invasion force of flying drones isn’t capable of acting as an occupation force (and you never explained why), then you build two forces. You do not build a substandard invasion force that is so easily defeated that it never needs to function as an occupation force. That is as stupid as the US military in 1941 enlisting most of their recruits into a diplomacy force, because they will need to occupy the axis powers eventually, leaving the actual military forces too weak to win a war. Dum, dumb, dumb.
Which is just dumb.
First off, a technologically advanced society doesn’t just “go with what it knows”. It does research. My society hasn’t fought a war with swords for hundreds of years. But if we had to build robots to fight such a war, we would start by researching the history books about how such wars were fought, and start from there. Amongst other things we would endeavour to make them immune to swords. Which brings me to:
These worlds are seen to have droids that are “tanks with tracks”, or rather quadrupeds with cannons and force fields that make them immune to lasers. They are highly effective in combat. There is no reason why they wouldn’t be perfectly effective as an occupation force. The idea that they had to go with bipeds because they didn’t know anything else is just silly.
Then you need to explain why they didn’t hire someone who was good at military tactics. The robots use tactics that are inferior to a group of frogs. It was obviously possible to find someone at least that good.
They weren’t designed to fight clone tropers. They were deigned to fight the people of Naboo, who are never shown with armour.
And of course if we accept that these robots were deigned to face down armies with high tech equipment, then your argument that the people making them had no experience of warfare becomes patently untrue. You need to make up your mind, were these robots designed by somebody who knew they would be facing an army of well-equipped clone troopers, or were they designed by somebody with no knowledge of warfare who designed them accordingly. They can’t both be true.
But they weren’t. They were still alive at the end of the movie, and under arrest, and the droids were inactive.
Arguing whether they should care about some other scenario is just silly. They should care about what was obviously going to happen.
But it wasn’t a complete failure. Until the killswitch was accidentally active by a child, the mission was going to plan. It only failed because of the killswitch.
Great point. Any wrong turn he could take, George surely took it.
Just wanted to say, great OP.
I always knew the mass firefights between organic beings and droids were really stupid, but I’d never thought about it enough to enumerate all the reasons why. Well done.
Just pretend that every time they say “Naboo” in the prequels, they’re really saying “Alderaan”. Or vice-versa.
Thanks!
Great point.
In Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, in a decades-long interstellar war against an alien humanoid race, countermeasures against energy weapons get so good that Earth troops have to be trained in sword, spear and shield tactics. What was old is new again.
Naboo doesn’t quite fit Leia’s claims about Alderaan being peaceful, though. Not when xenophobia is alive and well and the Gungans keep an entire army around, just in case.
But of course, the prequels would also have benefited by editing out the Gungans as well. So we’ve killed at least two birds with this stone
There’s nothing plausible about “Star Wars,” but it’s consistent. The universe sets out some basic rules that are not the same as the rules of our universe - The Force, light speed travel, etc. etc. - and works within them. They’re judiciously used so nothing is openly preposterous. You’re gonna find some holes if you look hard enough, but you have to look.
The prequels are just openly preposterous. Of course they have other problems with them too - the illogical plots, lack of characterization, and on and on. But that just exacerbates the sort of silliness the OP pointed out. The battle droids are one of the first terrible things in the a movie full of terrible things - they just make no sense at all and they don’t represent a threat of any sort to the so-called heroes.
I basically agree with you, but you might be giving the original movies a little too much credit. For example, no part of AT-ATs make sense. They are even more preposterous than the battle droids for an advanced military. However, they carry the day through sheer coolness, and that’s something that isn’t true of anything in the prequels.
Anus-chin?
That’s an odd way to refer to Liam Neeson
Oh yeah, you’re right, that was Ep. I.
The timeline of the prequels and original trilogy is really creaky. Consider first the age of Luke vs. Obi-Wan.
In Ep. IV, Obi-Wan would seem to be in his 60s, Luke his early 20s. I think it’s plausible to say that Obi-Wan is 40 years older than Luke. So Obi-Wan would have been in his 40s around the time that Vader died, which would have been close to when Luke was born. Moreover, it’s not clear when the Clone Wars ended at this point. The Clone Wars could easily have been 10-20 years before Vader died. The upshot is that the Clone Wars, the fall of the Jedi, and the dismantling of the Republic could have taken place over a long period of time and seem like a long time ago at the time of a New Hope. The abolishing of the Senate is announced during the movie.
Yet, in Ep. III, Obi-Wan seems to be in his late 20s or early 30s, and the Clone Wars are ongoing. Luke is born, and the events of a New Hope are 20-25 years in the future based on Luke’s age in Ep. IV. It’s hard to square the old and weary Obi-Wan of Ep. IV with this timeline.
And it’s also hard to square pretty much anything in Ep. III with Ep. IV: technology, styles, etc.
There is a lot of capital in use in Ep. III, and most of it should still be around 20 years later. I mean, WWII era ships were still in use in 1980s (USS Iowa turret explosion - Wikipedia).
Even if we agree that the Empire didn’t run the economy very well, I don’t think a couple decades of mismanagement is going to cause all these shiny machines to be mothballed. In fact, you really have to wonder if the Empire is going to change life much for people on most planets. They got rid of the Trade Federation, which seemed to be a bunch of dicks anyway.
So yeah… the technology and look of I-III don’t match that of IV-VI really at all, and that’s all due to George doing a bunch of dumb shit and wanting to play with CGI. The irony is that the look of the original Star Wars, precisely because of the limitations of film technology in the 70s, ends up looking a lot more realistic and badass than anything from the fake-o prequels.
FWIW, Ewan McGregor was 36 when he was in Revenge of the Sith. Alec Guinness was 63 in Star Wars. Assuming a twenty year gap between the movies, that leaves a seven year age difference between the two movies, which is hardly excessive, especially by movie casting standards. And by the time Obi Wan shows up Star Wars, he’s been betrayed by his best friend, seen everyone he cares about murdered, everything he believes in destroyed, and has spent roughly two decades living alone in the middle of a desert. That’s going to age anyone a bit prematurely.
I would have liked to see Alderaan more but if it had worked that way people would have complained it was “Small Universe Syndrome”. Also Alderaan is about as pure and good a world gets in Star Wars so it would be hard to reconcile it was the birthplace of the Emperor.