I can accept that. It’s simple and cheesy as hell, just like the rest of the movies. 
Defensive always. 
I don’t like your explanation because it is overly fancy and runs contrary to jedi training. They were supposed to trust in their feelings and these were jedi masters, not padawans. Doubted, they should not have. Also, the pink guy with the skyscraper head and Colonel Sanders facial hair saw them coming and only blocked a few shots before going down.
Sorry, I like Waverly’s explanation better.
Yep, you can clear up just about any plot question with a combination of Yoda wisdom and syntax.
I’ll have to try it on my expense reports. “Needed the most expensive wine, I did, to combat the sobriety of the dark side.”
If that works, then Great Debates is going to be a much more entertaining forum.
I note that no one else has complained about this, so I must rail into the darkness by myself. From Star Wars:
Now, did Darth Vader “hunt down and destroy” the Jedi Knights? No. No, no, no. There was no hunting down going on there. Palpatine gave his dinky order and then we get our Godfather-esque montage of Jedis dying. They’re all dead, they died like punks, I’ll grant you that.
But where was the hunting down, eh? That phrase lends itself to the conception that we’d see Vader … well, you know … hunting down the Jedis, not having them all die at once due to a preprogrammed clone order.
I’m sure someone can explain this by focusing on the “helped the Empire” part and claiming Vader didn’t need to track the Jedi one by one and kill them off, but there was no hunting down at all. Like other people have posted, it reeks of laziness on the part of the writer.
[sub]Hmm, I’ve already used up 90 minutes, and I have to squeeze this into two hours, and I still have my 20 minute battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin … oh, let’s just have all the Jedi die at once. No one will notice.[/sub]
Umm…you know the part where Anakin went into the Jedi Temple and (…wait for it…) HUNTED DOWN all those Jedi in the temple? The part where they went from room to room HUNTING DOWN the Jedi, Padawans, and Younglings?
I’m guessing that part.
-Joe, going to be HUNTING DOWN lunch soon.
Except for an oh-so-brief hologram, we never see Anakin kill a full-grown Jedi. We see clonetroopers shooting them in the temple, but we only see Anakin save his blade for the most helpless, least talented Jedis-in-training. Which is a plain and simple cop out (and perfectly consistent with how everyone yammers on about how “powerful” Anakin is, but we very rarely get to see it in any impressive way).
Nitpicks. Completely and totally.
First of all, you start off with a contradiction to your entire point.
Allow me to nitpick back - Obi-Wan never specified that Anakin killed Jedi Knights or Jedi Masters. He said “Jedi”. Padawans and Younglings would count then, wouldn’t they? There you go. Stupid complaint solved (stupidly).
This is like the montage Jedi dying “like punks”. If each one of them had gotten four or five minutes of fighting before being killed would there be praise? Of course not. Instead it would most likely be 'Lucas wasted twenty minutes on a bunch of characters we knew would have to die anyways! What a hack!"
-Joe
You are making the assumption that with the death of the named Jedi in the movie, you have seen the death of all the Jedi. In addition to what went on unseen in the temple, it is strongly suggested that there are more Jedi out there. After all, the Empire took the time to send out a beacon drawing additional Jedi back to the temple, and Obi-Wan and Yoda took the time to change the message and send the Jedi into hiding.
Seems to be that between the events of RotS and ANH, Vader might well have been doing some Jedi hunting.
This was one of the most compelling and tragic sections of the movie. I understand why Sweetums is upset about Aalaya’s death. It was tragic. It was supposed to be tragic!
Yes, that is true, and is a much better explanation than Merijeek’s comments about killing little kids counting as hunting down and destroying the Jedi. Vader chopped up a day care, he didn’t track down the elite guardians of order in the galaxy and kill them one by one. However, the impression that I got from Obi-Wan’s comments did not imply a simultaneous murder of Jedi by clone troops, and that’s my complaint.
But … he did. I quote again from the same source:
It takes cartwheels and convoluted explanations to reconcile these, and that’s all that bugs me. I would have much preferred it to be a smoother transition between the two movies.
Certainly, Lucas shouldn’t have had five minutes per duel—there was already too much overly-flashy lightsaber combat already—but I would have been a little happier had the movie fit a little better with what was already established.
Waverly, I noticed that too. And yes, it’s just one more instance of the story being revised later so it doesn’t match what we were originally told. The “she’s just stunned” thing is the same, and while I don’t know anything else about the Jedi in question and I don’t care to, I find that much more annoying. He’s already revising what I just saw in the movie last Thursday! What kind of an idiot would intentionally mislead the viewers of the movie in this minor way in order to tie into some minor fan extended thing?
I’m sorry, it was lno, not Waverly. As with a lot of things in Star Wars, you can create a more complicated, backward-reaching explanation that’s technically correct if you want to, but there’s no point. The fact is that the movie leaves the impression that the Jedi are all dead save two, who of course never get hunted down (nevermind). It’s not worth the effort of a length explanation.
Obi-wan said that Darth Vader helped the Empire destroy the Jedi, not that he did it all himself.
Obi-wan never said that Dath Vader single-handedly hunted down a bunch of Jedi on various planets.
Not to mention how that whole speech is hardly Obi-wan at his most honest.
Uh, forgive me, but that was the entire point of that scene. The Jedi were killed like punks, because the clones probably couldn’t have killed them face to face. The idea was to illustrate the tragedy of the murder of the Jedi and the duplicity of Palpatine. It’s one of about three scenes in the movie where the pathos worked, in my opinion - no Lucas-style dialogue to trample all over the fourth wall.
I’m probably the only person in the world who hated The Godfather, so I don’t actually remember the scene being cribbed here. But if you’re pissed because a movie character didn’t get a heroic death, then you just plain don’t get it. There’s nothing noble or heroic about Palpatine; he will press any advantage at the cost of fairness or honor. I don’t understand how you could possibly read any other meaning into this scene, because it’s just so clear.
Their stories were told in books, then. I don’t understand why you would expect a filmmaker to try to reconcile his films with fan fiction, but he was the original storyteller, not some two-bit novelist. (That’s not to imply that Lucas is a particularly good storyteller, just that this is a nonsensical criticism.)
Can you explain why there’s some moral imperative to give a heroic character a suitably heroic death? (I say “moral” because that’s the clear implication of your use of the word “owed”.) Can you come up with an argument to support this view? Because it makes no sense. The story works precisely because the characters were murdered in cold blood. That’s the point of it. How would it have made a better story otherwise?
I guess I understand having a certain emotional bond to a fictional character, but you’re really not making sense here. The characters are not real, and there’s no obligation to give them happy lives, especially when it comes at the cost of decent storytelling.
Unless you can explain why it makes for a better story to see a character die a heroic death, then no, your point is obviously precisely the opposite of what you claim here. Under your direction, it would have been both less realistic and much less of a stark depiction of the emperor’s character. Why would that improve the story?
Care to explain? Like I said, for me it was one of the few effective scenes in the movie, which as a whole was less-than-stunning. But I don’t see why this is emblematic of lazy writing.
You can think what you want, but the narrative purpose of the scene was clear. If you really don’t believe that, you can try to come up with an argument to support it, but frankly, it’d be akin to arguing that it was a betrayal when the dude in Green Eggs and Ham tries, and likes, the green eggs and ham at the end. In that case, the message was clear: try new things before you declare that you hate them. So if you disagree with the clear message of that story, you’d have to explain why.
And in RotS as well, the purpose behind killing off the characters so casually is really quite obvious. How can you say that? It’s an extremely simple scene. I’m sorry you didn’t get it, but you might as well be arguing that the sky is green here, because you’re arguing a point that is so obviously wrong to the rest of us.
All I can say is that with events taking place over 2 generations, there’s plenty of action that doesn’t take place within one of the episodes. I’m not advocating contorted fanboy logic, but I do think the possibility of Vader personally tracking down and killing Jedi knights would be consistent with what we saw. The empire was trying to lure someone out of hiding with that beacon, and it appears they are out of commision by ANH.
Sure, Lucas manipulates these off-screen events in order to reconcile the multiple episodes and fit a vision that might not have been fully formed in 1977. But I don’t see that as a fatal flaw.
Corny dialog, and making artistic concessions in favor of merchandising opportunities are much better reasons to criticize Lucas.
I wuz robbed, I tells ya! (Yeah, he literally reached into my wallet and took out the $8.50. Twice.) Plus, who knows, perhaps he plans on an Episode 3.5 someday, or a miniseries bridging the gap.
And I’ll join you on the barricades for that.
Oddly enough, I understand he plans to do just that: a 4 season story arc, made for TV, based on post-RotS events. If and when this happens, he’ll have to find, or resurrect, a Jedi or two and you can bet your left nut that fanboys and fangals will be up in arms if he doesn’t 1) pick their favorite, and 2) do it in a way that is consistent with every line of every Star Wars comic, game, book, and movie ever written or conceived. For example, there are blogs claiming he spoke with the actress who plays the blue Jedi, Aayla, about the project. She’s lying underneath a giant shroom crispier than bacon forgotten on the griddle when RotS closes.
I only paid $5 at the matinee.
I don’t have a dog in this, but I’ll stick my nose in anyway.
I think what’s being said, is that the killing could have been done ala the Alamo, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the Jedi go down fighting, but still lose because they are simply overwhelmed. Their honour, their skills are nothing against a sea of disposible soldiers, that just keep coming.
Would it have been so bad to see them swinging against a sea of stormtroopers and then fade to white? The end. As opposed to being sucked punched and shot down like dogs?
I don’t know which would be honest to the character, that Palpatine was a sly dog and shot them in the back or that Palpatine was a sly dog and overwhelmed them with an unstoppable army of cannon fodder…that he can replace and keep replacing until the Jedi, like all his enemies are dead.
Yeah, that would have been bad. It’s a much less effective statement about Palpatine, and given how bad the stormtroopers have proven to be, over and over and over again, I don’t think anybody would have believed it.