Luke knows of “Ben” Kenobi as a weird old hermit who “lives out beyond the Dune Sea.” I would presume that Owen does too–the implication is that he’s something of a local character. And I would presume Owen knows that “Ben” is really Obi-Wan. It’s not exactly the most baffling of pseudonyms, after all.
I agree with you, though, that “I don’t think he exists” is a strange way to talk about a person, as opposed to just saying “I think he’s dead.” And Owen doesn’t seem to like Kenobi–he’s trying to keep Luke away from him–so he has no reason to speak elliptically about his true identity.
George Lucas’s dialog is stilted at the best of times (as Harrison Ford once said, “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it!”), but even worse when he tries to write romantic scenes. These lines from Attack of the Clones made my skin crawl:
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… and smooth…”
“From the moment I met you, all those years ago, a day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t thought of you. And now that I’m close to you again, I’m in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over - my mouth goes dry. I feel dizzy. I can’t breathe. I’m haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything you ask…”
The recent crane accident and the hundreds of resulting deaths leads me to wonder if the line by the “Local female scientist” might have been changed to:
“But level 4 is the chapel and they are saying their prayers right now.”
That might either be a great time to evacuate or a great time to let them get nuked and die. If they were saying their prayers at the time of death, maybe that might help them go directly to the Promised Land?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my favourite films, but always wince at this dialogue near the end, when the mothership turns up, and the un-aged missing people get out:
Scientist 1 “Einstein was right”
Scientist 2 “Einstein was probably one of them”
I mean, really, that’s just clunky and nonsensical as hell.
This is probably unfair to the spirit of the OP’s question, but I can’t help but recall an old Japanese scifi/disaster movie with English dubbed in. The 3 ‘heroes’ (and I use that term lightly) were trapped in the only building not yet destroyed by the aliens running around outside, pretty miraculous when you consider the room they were standing in was walled in glass all around…
“Come, we must go”
“No, I am afraid”
“Come, go now”
“No, I will not go”
“You must go. I am Dr. Whatsisname.”
“No.”
After this painfully dull exchange was completed, the good doctor rushes out the door, leaving the young couple to meet their immediate fate as the suddenly alert aliens notice their glass-walled building.
I wish I could remember the name of the movie(or maybe not), but that dialogue and its attendant stupidity has stayed with me.
One astronaut unbuckles his seatbelt and begins floating around the cabin.
ASTRONAUT: [Very surprised] Oh! Hey! What…?!?
CAPTAIN: You have to be careful! There’s no gravity out here!
ASTRONAUT: [Understanding] Oh…
Whereupon the rest of the crew get up and begin walking around normally, with no explanation. Guess they all had magnetic boots or something… :rolleyes:
I thought it was common knowledge that traveling to Kessell past the Maw Black Hole Cluster required a wide berth unless you had good engines, guts, or wanted to be swallowed whole.
This stilted exchange between Dr. Josef Mengele ( Henry Stram) and Dr. Miklos Nyiszli (Allan Corduner) in “The Grey Zone”:
Honorable mention goes to multiple characters lack of and/or inappropriate accents. New Joysey don’t belong in Auschwitz! Neither, Steve Buscemi, does copius amounts of the F word!
Phantom Menace: “They must be dead by now. Destroy what’s left of them.”
That whole scene was ridiculous. They are ordered to kill the Jedi. Then they blow up Captain Littlekid’s ship. Then they pump in gas. Then they open the door while it’s still too cloudy to see and send in a bunch of dumb robots to “destroy what’s left of them.”
Here are some better suggestions:
<1> Do not blow up the ship before trying to kill them
<2> Serve them tea again (which they drank no problem already) with poison in it this time
<3> Send in a protocol droid to serve tea again that has a bomb in it
<4> Pump gas into the room for several days, decompress the room, pump in liquid nitrogen, pump in fire…you get the idea
<5> Turn off the air and the artificial gravity in the entire ship except the control room the minute they escape. That whole thing is mostly robots, so who cares?
<6> Send Droidekans to “destroy what’s left of them” and have them open fire the second the door opens
<7> Send so many droids up there shooting that their sheer number overpowers them
<8> Crack the door open and throw a bunch of grenades in there
<9> Pretend that everything is fine, let them board a ship down to the planet, then blow it up
“Are you an angel?” Not just the line but also the way it was delivered, yuck. I really wish Lucas had gotten someone else to direct the prequels. I like them, but they do get cringy at times.
That “wizard” line always sounded strange to me as well. I wonder if it was a victim of editing. Perhaps Luke had a line where he called Obi Wan a wizard to set up that reply from Owen. The production of Star Wars was pretty tumultuous, and it’s possible that they didn’t have enough usable footage to get rid of that clunky line.
Then again, there are many examples of Lucas writing very clunky dialogue.
