I dunno. That’s what made the emperor seem so utterly brutal to me - the way he killed them all, and quickly. The scene wouldn’t have worked had it not happened so quickly and had their deaths not seemed so pointless. I mean, maybe he took some license, but (and again, I’m not into the “expanded universe” so I dunno what the conventions are on Jedi abilities) it didn’t seem impossible to me that a swiftly executed surprise by people they trusted would catch them off guard. I don’t see why that’s so hard to believe. And it worked quite well from a movie-making standpoint, from my perspective.
It was much worse than the slaughter of the “younglings”, which seemed to me like a hamhanded response to test audiences not feeling sad enough or something.
Earlier, I had a nice little post that addressed these issues and your earlier question to me. I go to post and the dope done blowed up. :smack:
The problem that I have with the surprise theory and with how quickly the jedi died is that it was entirely inconsistent with their colliseum battle in Attack of the Clones. Surrounded by emotionless droids, they block every shot and chop of bits left and right. A couple of clones sneak up from behind and pop go their heads?
Bear in mind, these were jedi masters and not padawans. They are taught to go with their feelings. That means for all intents and purposes they don’t get surprised.
It’s just my opinion, but for my eight bucks the sudden drop in power and abilities was weak. Convenience vs. consistency. He needed them to die so they went from badass jedi pimps to chumps with flashlights.
But how is that at all inconsistent? When the Jedi went into the colliseum, they were expecting to be surrounded by enemies. And they still took major losses. When Luke was training with the little floaty droid thing, he knew he was fighting a little floaty droid thing. When he was parrying blaster bolts on Endor, he knew who was attacking him and from where. On the other hand, when he was on Jabba’s skiff, he did slip up and get shot in the hand when he was distracted shouting instructions to… was it Leia? And he got completely blindsided by that snow monster on Hoth. He didn’t do so good at avoiding the trap door to the Rancor pit, either. Or the entrance to the carbon freezing chamber on Bespin, although that time he had the reflexes to jump to safety after he’d already fallen in.
I don’t know the prequels nearly as well as I know the original trilogy, so maybe you can point out where in either of the first two movies the Jedi showed themselves to be impervious to a total surprise attack?
I dunno - I haven’t rewatched the prequels (probably won’t, either) and it’s been too long since I saw the original trilogy as well. Need to dig out my videos. But IMHO, there’s a big difference when the attack is a total surprise and it’s so swift. Blaster shots zoom through the air - they take time to travel, and when they’re shot from two feet away, when you’re not in position to deflect them, it takes time to respond no matter how magical you are. I just don’t buy arguments that Jedi should be virtually invulnerable, because that seems like a much bigger assault on believability. There’s reaction time - they’re still biological beings with biological brains - and then the time to actually move to block the shot. Those are not zero, no matter how much Jedi training you have.
Clairvoyant doesn’t mean they have a closed-circuit camera in each direction showing what’s going to happen for the next twenty minutes. Their abilities are not perfect, and like any being, they are not perfect and can fuck up. Badly, sometimes. I think folks are taking an overly-deterministic view of how they operate: a set of parameters like a chess game, and you can rely on them always to perform a certain way in a certain situation, and you’re watching with a detachment that ignores the fact that they’re in a real life situation, around their trusted soldiers, and probably tired after a battle and distracted by the bigger problems around them. To top it off, it’s not realistic if they can’t block a blaster fired at their kidneys from two feet away?
I see their Jedi abilities as something akin to intuition and good reflexes, only better. Not as some fundamentally different “evil radar” that works perfectly all the time. After all, if they were as virtually invulnerable as a lot of you guys seem to think, then why would there ever be a threat to the Jedi? Just sneak some onto every ship in the galaxy if you have to and they’ll take it and use it to fight Teh Evil Power. There, all the galaxies problems are solved.
I like the way the Jedi were killed overall, but I do wish at least some of them took a few clones with them on the way down. The long-headed Master guy especially should have had at least a good number of clone limbs in a circle around him before the entire regiment opened fire.
The vast majority of the Jedi at Geonosis died. All of them would have died had Yoda and the clones not arrived. And that was WITH knowing where the attack was coming from. Having no reason to worry about an attack from the clones, and not sensing betrayal from them, virtually all of the Jedi Generals would be caught unawares.
Except for when they can’t feel the danger coming. Jedi get surprised all the time. Anakin surprised Obi-Wan at one point in Episode III. They can’t see the future at all times.
[Randall]Man, that’s your excuse for everything.[/Randall]
Somebody posted it a ways back in one of these threads (maybe even this one) that the jedi were butt kicking earlier because Lucas wanted great action scenes. Then he kinda got stuck when he needed them to die. That’s pretty much what I think happened as well.
It’s also worth pointing out that Yoda had no problem with the sneak attack and that the pinkish jedi that died first saw his attack coming and died withing the first five blaster shots.
Since the jedi were in battle at the time, wouldn’t their attack sense be up already? It wouldn’t matter where or from who the attack was coming from, just that it was coming.
And I’m not sure. Is this the geekiest argument that I’ve been in here?
Seriously, it’s like I said: human (and nonhuman) behavior is not deterministic. Of course they didn’t all react the same way. They are different people (or critters) with different reactions and even one person’s behavior will not be consistent from event to event. Being able to respond to a surprise attack is not a place where I’d expect to see identical behavior among different people under different circumstances. It’s not a chess game. There’s no rulebook that says that a Jedi will successfully survive X, Y or Z among all circumstances and will fall victim to A, B or C. Folks seem to expect everything in the movie to be magically quantifiable and perfectly predictable. That ain’t how life works.
But what of the Jedi who tried to take out Dooku in Ep II and got his ass handed to him by two lazer blasts courtesy of Jango Fett? He didn’t block shit, just got blown away.
I can’t answer for Mr. Forehead, but if you notice, Yoda was sensing all those deaths as they happened. So many powerful Jedi were dying in such a short period of time that it was affecting him, and by the time the troopers behind him got the order, he already knew there was something terribly wrong.
That actually didn’t play out the way I’d hoped, though. In the scenes leading up to the attempted attack on Yoda, I realized he was the only Jedi in a battle that was with non-clone allies. I had this expectation that one of the Wookiees near him would spot the clones’ intentions and defend Yoda for him. The way it played out was satisfactory, but having the Wookiees take a more direct involvement in ensuring Yoda’s survival beyond just giving him an escape pod would’ve been a nice touch, and would have given the Kashyyyk scenes an extra point of relevancy.
Yet another piece of evidence in the Jedi Are Stupid argument.
Dooku (surrounded by tens of thousands of Genoisians as well as a whole army of battle droids): “You’re hopelessly outnumbered.”
Mace: “I don’t think so.”
Uh, yeah, you are, idiot. Look around. :rolleyes: Morons.
Having "outed" myself as a geek anyway, the official (Star Wars website, force.net, supplementary books) explanation for the high Jedi casualties at Geonosis was that the vast majority of those that died were students of a lightsaber form known as the "diplomats form". Survivors, such as Obi-Wan, Anikin, Mace Windu, Aayla Secura, etc practiced more aggressive, combat oriented forms.
So one assumes that the Jedi who made it to order 66 would have been much harder to kill (more aggressive saber training, a few years of field combat time), than the arena casualties.
If Lucas had done that, I’m sure folks would have complained anyway: “Geez, Yoda is supposed to be a Jedi badass! He doesn’t need any Wookiees to save him! That was just a gratuitous fanservice to tie Yoda and Chewbacca together…”
Ditto on the beacon. What was the point of resetting the beacon if all the Jedi were dead? Why include that in the movie at all?
Of course, we do see most of the major EU Jedi die in the movie, which is sort of odd if this is a setup for EU stuff, since established characters are the best marketing draw.
I’d like to point out that Aayla’s former master, Quinlann Vos, is mentioned in the movie, but NOT shown. Further, it’s implied in most of the EU material that he actually survived the purge, so that’s some small comfort. I like him better than Aayla anyway…
I feel compelled to point out that, if your point is that “Jedi are too dumb to count,” it’s pretty clear that Mace is disagreeing that they are impossibly outnumbered. Which, clearly, they weren’t, as they didn’t all get killed.
Well, Jackson’s line delivery certainly doesn’t make him sound like he’s merely nitpicking about the adverb. And the only reason they didn’t all get killed was because of the Yoda ex machina. By the time they were in their final little defiance circle, they were impossibly outnumbered.
