Anyone nitpicking the fight scenes in AOTC is still missing the fact that the movie was an homage to those 50’s sci-fi serials (and a little bit of westerns.) C’mon, the Yoda/Dooku showdown was laughable if your taking the film as a serious adventure story in modern terms. The dialogue from the final showdown was not only cliched, it was a 50 year old cliche. Our heroes had to look doomed right before Windu appears, and what would be more ominous at this point in the series than destroyer droids? Conveniently eliminating a mortal danger to our heroes can be excused only if the whole ending sequence is taken as less than serious.
This was, in my mind, the weakness of the film. ESB managed to be dramatic, using familiar themes of the genre like power and betrayal, but still requiring less suspension of disbelief. It took you into the world of Star Wars and dropped you there. Yoda getting that stupid look on his face, doing a little kung fu hand movement, and challenging Dooku was ridiculous. “We shall have to settle this with our skills in the lightsaber!” Whatever. Lucas probably would have made a great screenwriter for Buck Rogers, so perhaps he’d have been better off making the whole trilogy of prequels in that vein rather than throwing the style into the film in an awkward place.
Actually, I was hoping that Yoda would control his lightsaber completely through telekinesis. The whole Yoda-Fu stuff was still cool, but a bit more disappointing than having Yoda just stand there while his lightsaber danced all over the place on its own.
Apologies for a brief hi-jack. I don’t think this question is worth its own thread, and this one seems to be wandering a bit here and there…
I have a question: In the big battle at the end of the movie, why no aerial bombardment? Why don’t the Jedis just come in, grab Anakin and co. and get the hell out of Dodge while the SW equivalent of B-52s come in and nuke/bomb the whole place? Ok, so Yoda is a bit late with the cavalry, but that still doesn’t explain the big fight after the rescue. I mean, why is it that in SW everyone wants to fight like it’s some kind of Napoleonic war where hordes of infantry line up in pretty lines and march towards each other blasting away with their semi-automatic blasters?? Where are the frickin’ machine-gun-blasters, eh?
Yeah, I know, Yoda and some others are flying around in some kind of ugly Hind/Huey/Blackhawk infantry transport thing with door gunners, and that is great, but where are the bombers!!!
At least in ESB the Empire had a good reason to send in ground troops to take out the shield generator, but the implication was, IIRC, that they would have much preferred to bomb the shit out of the Rebels from orbit. But even there, the rebels come out with their snow speeders, and the Empire, again IIRC, has no speeders of their own? WTF?
I am not a huge SW fan and I have not read any of the books etc, though I have enjoyed all the movies, so I am sure there are answers to these questions, and maybe someone can help me out?
Dunno if they had them. While such may have been orderd, whose to say it was available for such a swift action?
“The Falcon had no Hyperdrive so it can safely be assumed that a signifigant amount of time lapsed.”
It did have a backup. And presumably got the original fixed.
That’s the logical explanation, but doesn’t that seem pretty weak to you? They have intergalactic transportation and they have all these landing craft to drop the infantry on the planet, but they don’t have any air support to speak of? For that matter, why didn’t the Jedi bring their own fighters? Obi-Wan had one and it was fairly capable. In the ultra high technology world of SW I just don’t understand why they insist on fighting like they are stuck in the Civil War. Then at the end of the movie we see the clones being loaded onto (what appear to me to be) star destroyers, so they had those too…
There were instances in TPM when Destroyer Droids weren’t using their shields as well. One was when the Queen and her entourage were captured near the end trying to get to the throne room. And in that case, as in that AOTC scene, the droids were arranged in a circular, surrounding pattern. I would imagine that they are programmed not to use their shields when they are in that pattern so that their lasers don’t bounce off each other’s shields and go flying willy-nilly all over the place. Or, maybe the shields aren’t deployed in cases where the droid isn’t going to begin firing immediately.
What i remember from TPM was that Qui gon and Obi where surprised that the destroyer droids had shields, thats why they took off. Maybe not all droids come equiped with shields, doesn’t seem all that improbable to me.