Number one. Palpatine. That dude was such a bad ass. One of the best screen villains EVER. His skills of manipulation and depict and cunning are really unsurpassed by any other character in any other book or movie. The fact that he is a grand master super wizard swordsman is just an added bonus.
Number two. Darth Maul. Darth Maul is like the coolest villain ever, right after Palpatine.
And both of them died like bitches.
A “great” villain does not die because his Death Star didn’t have safety railings installed yet. A “great” villain does not stand around like a rock while his “at his mercy” opponent takes 5 minutes to remember he has Jedi powers.
Losers, the both of them.
Yeah, well, that type of things is EXACTLY why Lucas is such an idiot.
On that we heartily agree. Maul could have been a great recurring baddy, and he was totally wasted.
Darth Maul is a cool design, but I’d hesitate to call him a character. He’s got no evident personality, no clear motivations (besides “Argh! Jedis!”) and nothing even remotely resembling a character arc. The Millennium Falcon is a better defined character than he is. And has almost as much dialogue.
I actually have a question about the Darth Maul/Qui Gen/Obi One fight. When we see Qui Gen meditating when he is behind that force field it seems to be implying that mediation, peace of mind, etc, will rule the day,in battle and by extension, in life. But then Qui Gen gets killed. So… WTF was going on here from a script/story POV???
Agreed. PS please take a look at my post about Qui Gen and meditating…
I think the point is just to contrast the Jedi and the Sith. When waiting to fight, the Jedi calmly meditates, while the Sith paces back and forth like a caged animal.
Actually not a bad bit of visual shorthand, there.
Lucas’ Jedi talk about how destructive anger is, and then Lucas turns around and shows an angry Obi-Wan winning the fight against Darth Maul while the supposedly wiser Qui-Gon is cut down. One of the many things that lead me to suspect Lucas doesn’t really understand his own creation.
In other words, Boba Fett. People who talk about how “cool” he is are basically talking about how cool his helmet is.
I’ve never been sure what was happening there, but a possibility is Qui Gon knew he wasn’t going to win, and he was making peace with his own death.
Also, while joking about the lack of safety railings in RotJ is fun, if you go back and watch the final fight, there is a safety railing right there, and Vader throws the Emperor right over it. Go to about 3:20 in this video, and check it out.
Ahhhh…
Hush, you.
So, I know the problem with my question will be that one group of movies was made before the other, but, does the fact that Palpatine doesn’t use a lightsaber in the ROTJ that he is so bad ass in the force now that if Vader or Luke tried to strike him down he would just levitate them or force lighting them or whatever???
The Emperor has no day to day reason to carry a lightsaber. It’s probably on his knickknack shelf, covered in dust.
Ummmm… there are plenty of good reasons he’d want a lightsaber. Most of them involving some type of attack on his person.
Why bother with a lightsaber when yo can just go Zeus on anybody’s ass that annoys you?
That’s kind of what I thought. Also, if you can levitate really really heavy rocks why can’t (a dark side force user) crush skulls and crush bones from distance?
We don’t actually know that Palpatine doesn’t have a lightsaber on him in RotJ. He could be hiding all sorts of things in that robe.
That’s pretty much what the force choke is, isn’t it?
But that aside, in the new Star Wars comics that Marvel’s putting out now, a Stormtrooper accidentally sees Vader with his helmet off, and Vader uses the force to twist his* head 180 degrees. In an earlier comic when Dark Horse had the license, he force squeezes a Stormtrooper’s head until his helmet shatters. (They happen to be on a depressurized spaceship at the time.)
*The Stormtrooper’s head, not Vader’s.
Ah, cool. This could get kind of graphic if we wanted it too. My next dark force power: Fry your insides by just staring intently at your abdomen… seriously though, why do you think Lucas had so few powers for Vader to use? Is it too keep the story focused and make the powers he does have really really cool?