I believe that explanation was actually from an Expanded Universe novel, not authored by Lucas.
Doing some searching it looks like it’s from The Han Solo Adventures
I edited the title to warn people that the OP contains unboxed spoilers.
I, for one, appreciate it.
The complaints people have about the new Star Wars are the same ones you can find in the original trilogy.
RotS is a very Star Wars-y movie. Random violations of the laws of physics? Check. (Obi-Wan and Anakin aren’t sweating in the lava! There’s a giant worm living on an asteroid in outer space! They’re breathing in a hangar with no airlock! Han survives carbonite freezing with no long-term ill effects!) Plot holes you could drive a truck through? Check. (So…Lando just sort of became one of Jabba’s guards because he asked nicely? The Jawas on Tatooine knew where the Lars family lived? Luke can fly an X-Wing with no formal training whatsoever?) Bizarro bad dialogue? Check. (“I felt his presence. He’s come for me. He can feel when I’m near. That’s why I have to go. As long as I stay, I’m endangering the group and our mission here. I have to face him.” “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”) Kick-ass, strung-out lightsaber fights? Check.
If that’s not your thing (like calm kiwi, for example), then OF COURSE you’re not going to like it.
But ya know, I could pretty much buy the plotholes in the series up until Jedi, because most of the writing was good enough that you didn’t notice such things, and even when you did, they weren’t horribly glaring. With Jedi, they were annoying, but not to the point of causing the bile to rise in my throat. In TPM, the worst thing, IMHO was the video game, err, pod race. In AotC, I didn’t care for Yoda fighting Count Dooku, or the Death Star plans showing up, but they didn’t ruin the film for me. With RotS, though, everything just came together as a crapfest I felt. Nor did I seem to be the only one, several times the audience erupted in laughter at some of the dialog in the dramatic parts, when it was clear that Lucas didn’t want people to laugh.
Eh, sounds to me like you were predisposed to dislike it.
WTF? Okay, that’s it-- no more giant space battles in SW after 1983. You know what? How many times do we have to see lightsabre duels? And ground wars with lots of blaster fire? That is so over. Uh… okay.
Hello, it’s Star Wars. It’s never been realistic, and it’s never been meant to be realistic. Get over it.
Agreed, there. I would have liked to have seen more done with the Wookies, too. But listen to what you’re saying. A massive space battle is too much like ROTJ. But they didn’t make the fighting on Keshyyk enough like ROTJ. We needed to see Clonetroopers or Droids getting their asses handed to them by crudely-equipped forest-dwellers? Whatever. All that it did was establish (as far as the films are concerned) that Wookies have considerable longevity and that Chewbacca and his people had been fucked over by the Empire from the beginning, and had been with the rebellion from the very start.
That’s not much of a criticism. Anakin was attached to Palpatine because he was a father figure – and it’s strongly implied that Palpatine was Anakin’s father, in the sense that his manipulation of the Force caused Anakin to be conceived.
Sorry about that. Can’t really argue with something as subjective as “That sucked!” The scene seems to work for most people, though.
Why is there anything to let slide?
I didn’t notice that. That’s a pretty wee continuity error. If you want to criticize that scene, why not complain that Jedi apparently always carry rebreathers in their robes, just in case they have to spend a bit of time under water? 
(Sorry.)
Sweating? Dripping wet? If they were standing over the surface of molten rock like that, their flesh would have cooked and they would have quickly burst into flame – in the real world. But again, Star Wars has never been about the real world. It’s comic-book fairy-tale space fantasy, of the sort written for juveniles in the '30s and '40s. It’s not supposed to be realistic. If that bothers you, either avoid it or STFU.
Obi Wan had just reviewed the security hologram in which Anakin pledged himself to Palpatine and the Empire. Of course Obi Wan knew that Palpatine was the head of this new Empire. It’s a bit weird that everyone just started using what amounts to an honourific from the moment he proclaimed himself Emperor, but it’s not an impossibility.
This one’s a bit fakey, but it gets a pass. Luke and Leia are from an extremely force-sensitive stock. Anakin was bred to be strong in the force. I don’t like the whole “midichlorian” thing as much as the Force being pretty much a Tao sort-a concept, but that’s where George took it, and even by ROTJ it’s established as a hereditary trait. The infant twins are special. The impressions they received after (and maybe before) the delivery stayed with them. Leia took away “feelings.” Luke took away verbal information, which is even more remarkable, since it was before that whole language acquisition thing. This is very much the kind of thing someone who’s into Joseph Campbell would grok. Lunar and Solar consciousness. Yeah, if someone in the real world claimed that they had vague memories of their first hours, I’d call bullshit immediately, because that’s obviously impossible. Like moving things with your mind, and stuff like that.
It bothers you that the first steps taken with multiple prosthesis and ambulatory life support are awkward?
It’s the Death Star. The ability to pulverize planets is a good thing to have if you’re a power-crazed Sith.
The Trade Federation is not the rebellion. The Trade Federation was set up as a “Phantom Menace” as a political maneouvre to establish dissatisfaction with the political process and the current Chancellor, while creating sympathy for the oppressed world (Naboo) and more importantly, its representative in the Senate, Palpatine. The Trade Federation was then parlayed (by Sidious) into the keystone of a Separatist movement, the purpose of which was to justify a vast increase in the militarization of the Republic – specifically beyond the traditional peacekeeping forces maintained by the Jedi. The eventual aim was for the new miliitary branch to wipe out the Jedi altogether, clearing the way for an amoral Empire. The Trade Federation and the Seperatists were dispatched after they served their political purpose. The Rebellion was a new development, in response to the Empire – and their aim has always been the restoration of a proper Republic.
Okay, the main reason we have the beginning of the construction of the Death Star is to set up the threat in Star Wars. It’s cool. It’s not too hard to take that it takes a couple of decades to become operational. It’s being built concurrently with an Empire, while dealing with scores of rebelling systems. At the time of the first Star Wars, the Rebellion has been reduced to a few diehards who manage to take out a space station that would put the final nail in the coffin, with the help of Luke & company.
Well, pooh-pooh on George for not writing about something you imagined. In 1977 he wrote a movie in which the Republic existed within the lifetime of some fo the principal characters, the Imperial uniforms were very similar to Nazi uniforms, and which repeatedly references (along with many other '30s films) Triumph des Willens. How dare he make the film about a Republic that falls due to the political machinations and military ambition of a single charismatic but unspeakably evil leader who uses deception and fear to reorganize the political structure into a new order with himself as a supreme dictator, instead of making it about gradual social changes over hundreds of years.
Ya think?
I always thought of Yoda as a little green guy who was all philosophical but dealt with combatants by unleashing legions of rabid flying monkeys in sequined stockings from his butt. I, too, feel bitterly betrayed.
I don’t think laughing at the dialogue means you think it’s a crapfest. Again, it’s a freaking space opera, not Tolstoy. Star Wars movies have always been that way. Because, you know, they’re Star Wars movies. “Ooh, what a campy title! What a crap writer.” “Ooh, what stilted dialogue, why isn’t it realistic?” “Ooh, why the hell does Obi-Wan comment that they’re ‘re-entering’ the atmosphere after the saboteur-droids were shown standing on the wing (A wing, dammit!) of his fighter, reacting as though to ‘wind’ from the rushing of the ship? That’s so stupid!”
Aaaagh! It’s Star Wars. It’s not real. It’s fun.
You know what? I hate Star Trek – because it has pretensions to seriousness, which makes the ridiculous elements of it unbearable. I’m not going to spend any time watching it and itemizing everything about it that I don’t like, though – because I know that there’s nothing wrong with Star Trek, and a lot of people get real pleasure from it. I don’t like Star Trek because, to me, it’s neither fish nor fowl – it’s not hard science fiction and it’s not fantastic enough. It doesn’t appeal to me. But I don’t imagine for a second that why it doesn’t appeal to me is a subject that anyone gives a rat’s ass about, because I’m not that egotistical.
Wah! It hurts my feelings when folks notice that this movie I love unconditionally has dialogue that reads like a ten year old wrote it, and a romance between lead actors who obviously loathe each other in real life! Wah!
I didn’t hate the fact that there was a giant space battle. I didn’t like the fact that that particular battle looked so much like the one in RotJ. There was even that whole bit when they were rescuing Palpatine and you could see everything going on outside the window and I kept expecting Palpatine to say, “Oh, I’m afraid that this battlestation is fully operational.” Lucas has got the bacon to do a better job than that. It’s not like he had to crib old film footage and sets to save a few bucks.
I’m not asking for it to be solidly realistic, but I would have liked many of the things to be better done.
Again, it doesn’t have to be cribbed from the same pages as RotJ. And it’s not like the wookies were using big sticks to smash the storm troopers, they were flying ships and firing crossbow blasters, so the comparisions are hardly similar.
Yeah, I know, and most people hate the whole business with the midichlorians.
I would have liked an “Oh shit!” look on Mace’s face right before he died, or him getting killed by huge masses of clone troopers as he bravely goes down fighting.
Well, I didn’t really get the impression that Obi Wan had to spend a long time under water.
Actually, you can stand unprotected in such an environment for a while without bursting into flames. Your clothes do start to smolder though. I could have bought the scene if they were just a little more affected by their environment.
This was a minor annoyance to me. I could have let it pass if some of the other things that bothered me hadn’t been in the film.
Yeah, I’ve read Campbell, but I still ain’t buyin’ it as far as this film goes.
No, just the way it was done in that scene.
Yeah, but I just can’t picture the need for such a thing occuring to Palpatine quite so early on. I mean, he’s made with power, so he ought to think that he doesn’t need such a thing, until the star systems start rebellion. You know, hubris and all that.
yeah, I know, but it just strikes that Lucas’s idea behind it was to lay the ground work for the other films.
And a couple of power mad nutjobs with supernatural powers ain’t enough of a threat?
Oh yeah, I can totally see that. What I can’t see is that it then only takes them from the end of Star Wars to the beginning of RotJ to get another one up and going so quickly. If you’ll recall, the original DS became operational just as the film opened, whereas in the second one, it was capable of firing immediately. Now, I can see them taking some short cuts to make sure that the thing was up and running as quickly as possible, but they still would have started working on it immediately after they bgan construction on the first one. Again, if you’re a power mad nutjob, chock full o’ hubris, why you gonna think that you’re gonna need more superweapons, when you’ve already got the ultimate power in the universe?
But we’re never really given much information as to what kind of state the Republic was in, prior to the current trilogy. It could have very well been much like Rome, a republic in name only, with people having fond memories of the beneficient emperor previous to the current one.
I didn’t feel bitterly betrayed by it. I just took it as a sop to the gushing fanboys.
Yeah, but this time, the crappy dialog was overwhelming in spots, which wasn’t really the case with the first two in the original trilogy. Yeah, they had their bad moments, but they were still better done than this one.
George, however, seems to take it very seriously. A little too seriously, IMHO. And it stopped being fun when Greedo shot first.
Didja miss where I pointed out that I liked Jar Jar? I didn’t mention it earlier, but I saw freakin TPM on opening day and was giggling like a school girl afterwards because of how excited I was over the thing. And hell, I like the look of the Star Wars franchise as far as things like spaceship design, costumes, and aliens go. And I’ll agree that in a lot of ways Star Wars is superior to Star Trek. If for nothing else, then the fact that Star Wars fans are willing to calculate how powerful turboblasters are in comparison to phasers. Trek fans just seem to do a lot of, “Nuh uh! Phasers are better than turboblasters!” in their arguments.
If you don’t like the symmetry with the original trilogy, then I can see that it would bug you that there’s so much of it. Personally, I think it’s fun – and it seems like that’s the consensus. Of course, the consensus might shift a bit as folks who don’t want to deal with the crowds, (or just aren’t that into the whole Star Wars thing) get around to seeing it.
There is a very distinct “Oh, shit!” look on Mace’s face, right before he dies. I also think that Mace being done in by masses of clone troopers would have sucked donkey balls, compared with what was done with his death, which makes for perfect symmetry between Anakin’s fall and his redemption. In other words, it fit the story.
Actually, I meant that he literally busted out a rebreather (or the Star Wars equivalent, whatever they’re called) that he happened to have tucked away in the folds of his robes. Just like in The Phantom Menace, when they swam to the underwater Gungan city.
Okay. I’m not sure how “magic” is okay in some contexts and something to complain about in others, though.
He said himself that the only thing that the powerful care about is hanging on to power. Why would he pick daisies, waiting for a threat, before beginning work on a Doomsday Weapon? For that matter, why would he (or you) expect the rebellion to be something that comes along later?
It’s not like you build a battle station by whittling it out of rock, or something. There was over a decade between the beginning of the B2 Spirit program and the delivery of the first operational bomber. How long was it before the second one was ready? Less than a year. Now they can crank half-a-dozen of those puppies out a year, if there’s a demand for them. Why? That’s how manufacturing works. Before you build a machine, you have to build the machines to manufacture your components.
But that’s not even important. What’s important is that it was cool to see the Death Star being built.
Yes we are. In the first movie, Obi-Wan tells Luke that the Jedi were the Republican Guard – “before the Empire,” not “before this most recent Emperor, who’s sort of a bad egg,” and that Darth Vader helped to destroy the Jedi. The Republic has always been held up as an ideal. The Empire has a fascist chique that screams “Nazi.” Clearly, the Empire is modelled on the Third Reich. Don’t bitch that the story of the downfall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire isn’t how you imagined it. It’s how Lucas imagined it from the start. After Jedi was released, Time magazine interviewed Lucas for what was mainly an article about how he was taking a break from Star Wars. The article touched on Lucas’s thoughts about the possible prequels, though:
It’s perfectly clear from the original trilogy what the deal with the fall of the Republic was. So you somehow missed that and made up some other hypothetical situation that you like better. That doesn’t make Lucas’ decision to stick to the original concept instead of picking that idea out of your skull a valid criticism of Revenge of the Sith. Sorry.
Anyway, this is silly. I can’t make you like Revenge of the Sith, and you can’t make me not like it. I have plenty of bile for (what I consider to be) the missteps in ROTJ, TPM, and AOTC, but, for me, Revenge of the Sith was pretty much a perfect Star Wars movie.
Again, sorry you didn’t like it and feel that a few hours of your time could have been better spent – but if Lucas had you as a script advisor and took a third of your criticisms to heart, the movie would have suffered a lot, in my opinion.
It’s not that I don’t like the symmetry, I mean for fucks sake, it’s not I didn’t know what the damn thing was abouyt before I went into see it, I just didn’t like the fact that Lucas seemed to lack the imagination to stage his battles a bit differently. I’m not in the least bothered by the fact that many of the ships obviously hinted towards the later designs. That was enough for me, I didn’t need to see a space battle which so closely resembled one I’d seen before. One fo the things that I like about the Star Wars is that it took many ideas and presented them in new and original ways.
Sorry, but Jackson and damn near everyone else in the film seemed to have rather blank expressions on most of their faces the whole time.
Except, of course, there really wasn’t the kind of development of Mace’s character like there was with Anakin over six films.
Hey, Jedi’s are like James Bond, only cooler.
Well, how about Luke in RotJ knowing that Leia had two different mothers, but it never having been mentioned prior to that?
Yeah, but if you’re so damned powerful (“The power of this station is nothing when compared to the Force.” Darth Vader) then what the hell makes you think that you’re going to have to need something like a planet destroying space station?
A Death Star is a lot bigger than a B2, and if the first one gets blown up, you’re going to want to know how it happened and design a way so that it doesn’t happen to the next one. That’s, after all, one of the reasons they had to attack the DS II during construction because they knew the Empire was going to fix the design so that the Rebellion wouldn’t be able to use the same tactics to blow it up again.
I saw it years ago in a movie called RotJ. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
Except that there’s any number of countries who call themselves “republics” without actually being one for ages. And don’t forget that there wasn’t very much “socialism” in the National Socialism that was the Nazi party which ran the Third Reich. Just becomes something is called a “Republic” or “Socialist” or “Fascist” or a “Rose” doesn’t make it so.
I wish I could have liked the film as much as you do, but this one just didn’t work for me.
Well, there’s certainly no danger in Lucas ever listening to anything I have to say. If he did, I’d be bitching about how the untouched original films need to be on DVD more than anything else.
Yeah, but what has that got to do with the black-and-white world of Star Wars, where it’s explicit that Republic=Good and Empire=Bad. From the first movie, it’s clear that the Empire is something that rose up in the last generation, and that the last vestiges of the old Republic were just being wiped out around the time of the Battle of Yavin. Sometimes a Republic is just a Republic, and when it’s contrasted with an Evil Empire in the context of an adventure film, it’s a safe bet it’s a “Republic” republic, and not, like, a Soviet Republic, or something.
I don’t understand a) what in the original series made you think that the Empire went back more than one generation, or b) why you think it would have been better, storywise, if it did.
There was no doubt – or at least there shouldn’t have been – the whole “rapid rise of fascism” thing wasn’t exacty nuanced.
Hey there!
It’s just a movie, good/bad/soso, depending on your mentality.
Thanks for all the sordid details and brickbats.
Remind me not to waste my time and money to see it till I’m bored silly with whatever else is available and it is on the small screen for free.
Well, for one thing, there was mention of “the old Republic” which I took to mean that there was a period of time when the Republic was, in fact, a true Republic, though perhaps with a figurehead royal house at the top, similar to England is today. Gradually, however, the royal house took over more and more authority and became more corrupt. Another thing was that you never really had an idea of when the Clone Wars happened or how old Anakin was when he fathered Luke. Nor did we have an idea of how long the Clone Wars lasted. Admittedly reading more into it than Lucas ever put in the original trilogy, I always figured that it happened more than twenty or so years before Luke was born, and that the Clone Wars was something like the seige of Troy which lasted ten years.
As for what made me think that the Empire had been around for a long time, was how run down everything looked. Again, I always had the impression that Tattooine was some place like England in the Roman Empire: The far edges, where the Empire’s presence was known, but because they’d over extended themselves, they didn’t have much of an impact on the daily lives of the locals.
And when I said I was willing to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt about it, I thought that he might be able to pull it off with the Empire being a relatively new creation, but IMHO he didn’t. Besides, it’s not like Lucas has always been open about what was going to happen in a film. Few people suspected that Vader was Luke’s father until Vader said it in ESB. Given Lucas’s hamfisted way of handling things since RotJ, were he making the films today, you’d know at the end of the opening sequence that Luke was Vader’s son.
The reason why I think it would be better for the Empire to have been far older than it turns out to be is that a galaxy is a big place, and it’s going to take a long time for people to even know that they’ve now got an emperor, muchless get so pissed off at him that they want to overthrow him. The USSR managed to have a pretty bloody and tight fisted reign for over 70 years, and the only reason it collapsed was because of the economic costs of trying to compete with the rest of the world which was organized into doing everything it could to contain the USSR. The Empire appeared to have no such competition and controlled most of the galaxy.
Can someone tell me what happened to the camo armor the Stormtroopers had on Kasshyk? Did the supplier go out of business by the time they got to Endor?
Obi-wan got the rebreather from the same fold in the robes Qui-gon got the dohickey out in the first movie. Batman’s got nothing on the Jedi.
Yeah, but the Empire sort of flowed from the Republic, which we knew from the first movie (Leia to Vader: “The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this!”). 20-30 years seems to me to be just about right for “Gee, this Emperor character is kind of a dick. Let’s do somethin about it, eh?”
In fact, it makes sense that with the Emperor building the Death Star as early as he did, more people/systems were tipped off to “uh oh, bad plan” and got on board with the Rebellion.
Yeah, but “Imperial Senate.” Leia strikes me as the kind of chick who’d dispense with that if it was a fairly recent term.
'Cept, of course, it’d prolly be pretty easy to take him out before he’d had a chance to really consolidate his power. Especially, if folks got wind of his plans to build a giant superweapon. And, how, could the Empire keep the building of the thing and the plans secret for so long, when our government can’t even keep shots of Saddam in his undies underwraps?
DS2 had a shield generator on the forest moon of Endor to protect it, which is better than no shields on the first DS.
The first DS had shields, but they weren’t designed to protect against small fighters, which is why they used them, rather than larger ships.
Oh, and I’d like to point out that I had a pretty good reason for liking the movie when I went in.
I’d just like to chime in and say that I’m a Star Wars fan and that I was quite offended that George Lucas slapped such a silly script on us. I think even 12 year olds will have the quesy feeling that the story doesn’t feel right. That their intelligence is being disregarded because they are die hard fans and millions have been spent to draw people to see the movie.
Great action movie of course… but christ stop those dialogues !
Regarding the beginning of Death Star construction at the end of RotS: Wasn’t Count Dooku fiddling around with some Death Star plans near the end of AotC? I can’t really remember the details, because I found that movie so confusing when I watched it.* I didn’t even twig to Dooku being a Sith apprentice until he threw down on Obi-Wan and Anakin on General Grievous’s bridge.
- I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Once I realized that not only was Jar-Jar not dead, he was a freakin’ senator fercryin’outloud, I just kind of gritted my teeth and sat through the rest of the DVD to satisfy my inner completist.
Anyway, what’s the deal-io? Did Dooku have the instructions for the HeathKit Death Star at the end of AotC, or didn’t he?