I’m watching this on DVD again and I have a few poll questions for all of you (for the sake of arguement, let’s pretend eps IV-VI don’t exist and we don’t know everyone’s fate):
Is it just me or does General Grievous sound like a cartoon character (almost like Ren Hoek)?
Do you have any sympathy for Annakin?
Do you think Mace Windu’s death was worthy or was it a punk-ass way to go?
If they were fighting on level ground, could Yoda have taken Darth Sidious?
Would the “Noooooooo!!!” scene been less cheesy if Vader had said it immediately after Sidious told him Padme was dead instead of waiting a couple of seconds? How about if he destroyed more stuff?
1. Is it just me or does General Grievous sound like a cartoon character (almost like Ren Hoek)?
Are you kidding me man. The General was the first char in a while that had some potential. He was COOL.
2. Do you have any sympathy for Annakin?
Yes, for the first time in Ep III I started to feel for him. Mostly because he was so worried about his wife and children - and what father isn’t, really?
3. Do you think Mace Windu’s death was worthy or was it a punk-ass way to go?
I’m not sure about this. I mean, it wasn’t brave as dying in fair combat, but if Anakin had to become, he had to do it in a lousy way. So it was necessary.
4. If they were fighting on level ground, could Yoda have taken Darth Sidious?
No. And not because I think Yoda was weaker. The Prophecy is quite clear. The Light Side was on its way down. All of the SW world is like a druidic world - must have balance. No matter what, Yoda had to lose.
**
5. Would the “Noooooooo!!!” scene been less cheesy if Vader had said it immediately after Sidious told him Padme was dead instead of waiting a couple of seconds? How about if he destroyed more stuff?
No. He shouldn’t have said it…it was supposed to reduce the Great Darth into something human, to connect the dots so to speak, but it failed miserably. There had to have been some other way to depict angst and agony.
He sort of IS a cartoon character, though. He’s animated.
I thought he was the only cool thing about the movie.
Not really. It’s hard to have sympathy for him because his dramatic arc is so bizarre and inexplicable. He has bad dreams that his wife will die, someone tells him “Become evil and she won’t die” and he just goes along. What’s to be sympathetic about?
Had his wife or children actually been in danger, maybe you could construct a sympathetic decline around that, but she never was. She was in LESS danger in this film than in the previous two - until Anakin attacked her.
It was perfectly worthy for the character, if not even more worthy than he deserved. Mace Windu wasn’t an impressive figure; like Yoda, he was an easily duped fool and completely ineffective in the prequels. His suddenly being there to confront Palpatine was the first effective thing he’d done on screen.
Let’s be perfectly honest; people think Mace Windu is some super cool character because they think Jules Winfield is super cool.
He almost took him anyway. Fifty fifty.
No, it wouldn’t have been. A “nooooooo!” scene cannot be made cool.
He FOUR lightsabers! FOUR! And he can fight without accidentally chopping his own arms off! (But yeah, cartoon character.)
Never had much sympathy for him. He didn’t seem to have very many redeeming features at all.
Death by defenstration definitely wasn’t a glamorous way to go, but it also tops pretty much every other Jedi/Sith death.
Frogfucious–er, I mean–Yoda was cool. For about three seconds. Besides, he threw that fight knowing that the Jedi were finished and a dark age had to settle on the galaxies.
Probably a “realistic” reaction, but for better emotional impact he should have let the scene build up in silence for a moment or two. And if Vader had to scream, it shouldn’t have been in words. (Hm… would “AAAAAAAAAAAUGH!” sound better or worse than “NOOOOOOOO!”)
It was a coughing robot. A robot. That coughed. Yes, I know it had “biological components”. So did Data. Data did not cough. The prosecution rests.
Having sympathy for the character of Anakin would require that Anakin be a character. None of his motivations made any sense whatsoever, let alone the actions he chose to take as a result of them (“I must save my wife from…something…so I guess I’ll team up with Palpatine, even though he admits he doesn’t know how to do it, but he might figure it out. Gee, I sure am hesitant, though. Oh well, what the hell. Now, time to go kill all the children; after all, it seems a logical first step.”), so I am hard-pressed to feel empathy.
Who cared? Certainly not I. I was more interested in laughing riotously at Palpatine continuously shooting himself in the face while comically screaming “NOO, NOO, NOO, NOO!”.
This is yet another of my many points of contention with this movie. Yoda didn’t lose; he ran away. Then, when he was done running away, he decided to run away even more. (“Failed I have.” [No, you haven’t; you were getting things thrown at you and you ran away.] “Go into exile I must.” [Why? To be absolutely certain that your side is completely doomed?]) Who knows who would have won; they never actually fought, so there was no way to determine it. Palpatine shot Yoda, Yoda hopped around, Palpatine threw Senate seats, Yoda hopped around, Yoda ran away. (He probably hopped around a bit afterwards, but they didn’t show that part.)
The only way this would have come close to being anything other than patently ridiculous would be if, instead of having a multi-line exchange between Vader and Palpatine, they had simply made it a one-two punch. This:
Palpatine: “Your wife is dead.”
Vader: “NOOOOOOO!!!”
…makes a lot more sense than this:
Palpatine: “Your wife is dead.”
Vader: “No. She is alive. I have felt it.”
Palpatine: “Um…no. She’s dead. You killed her.”
Vader: “NOOOOOOO!!!”
At least with the former, he has an actual motivation to express his emotion, clunky and cliché though that expression may be.
1. Is it just me or does General Grievous sound like a cartoon character (almost like Ren Hoek)?
Not just you. It sounds like the guy who did the voice was the guy to do it in preproduction and they never dubbed in the real voice. Instead they just added a light flange.
2. Do you have any sympathy for Annakin?
Nope, he was pretty much just a brat until the end. He should have been a teenager (at least) in ep I, an adult in ep II, and an adult in ep III. That way he could have shown a dark side earlier and thus been more convincing in his turn.
3. Do you think Mace Windu’s death was worthy or was it a punk-ass way to go?
Punk-ass, kinda. I liked everything until he got his arm cut off. Instead of going flying out the window, he should have been cleaved in half or something. Hell, even Dooku got beheaded.
4. If they were fighting on level ground, could Yoda have taken Darth Sidious?
I’d say so.
5. Would the “Noooooooo!!!” scene been less cheesy if Vader had said it immediately after Sidious told him Padme was dead instead of waiting a couple of seconds? How about if he destroyed more stuff?
There’s no way that could have worked. Just way too hammy and over the top. Sometimes subtlety is key.
After looking at my answers, you’d think I didn’t like it, but I actually did. Quite a bit.
Is it just me or does General Grievous sound like a cartoon character (almost like Ren Hoek)?
Yes, but how is that a bad thing?
Do you have any sympathy for Annakin?
No. Annakin thinks that the other Jedi council members hate him, and are jealous. He has no appreciation for the fact that they xplicetly point out that he’s the only person to be on the council without first being a master, and I would not be surprised if he were the youngest member in their history. Time and again, Annakin turns a situation that reveals how powerful and fortunate he is into an excuse for angst.
Do you think Mace Windu’s death was worthy or was it a punk-ass way to go?
If they were fighting on level ground, could Yoda have taken Darth Sidious?
To answer 3 and 4 together, the idea of Yoda fighting is silly. He’s supremely wise. It would have made more sense for Yoda to have left for a remote world with a cadre of Jedis, and have distributed them around the galaxy, in an attempt to save jedi knowledge. Yoda fighting was extremely silly. Why didn’t we get a fight scene with Mace Windu vrs Yoda that lasted five minutes? Consider that Mace Windu is a sith hunter. Cheesy dialog, in the vien of The Princess Bride, or most martial arts movies of Palpatine using an exotic sith attack, and Mace knowing the exact counter attack developed for it millenia ago by an ancient sith hunter would have been a lot more fun than what we got.
Would the “Noooooooo!!!” scene been less cheesy if Vader had said it immediately after Sidious told him Padme was dead instead of waiting a couple of seconds? How about if he destroyed more stuff?
[Close up on PALPATINE, looking somber.]
You know, I expected that exchange to go like this:
PALPATINE: “Your wife is dead. You killed her.”
[Cut to close up of Vader’s impassive, inhuman mask. Hold frame as he breathes laboriously.]
[Cut back to Palpatine]
PALPATINE: “…and you are stronger for it, my son!”
[Extreme close up of Vader’s mask, His breathing become the classic, machine like respirator we know and fear.]
I’m still surprised at how insensitive Anakin/Vader is when it comes to telling that Sidious is lying. (Who’s the more powerful of the two, I wonder? And when Vader tells Luke in Ep. VI that “the Emperor has foreseen” that he and Luke will oust him, is he bluffing?
And why is it that today, in 21st century America, we can tell if a woman is pregnant with twins but on a planet where technology can completely rebuild a quadraphlegic lava victim it’s a total surprise to them that there’s another baby on the way?
Maybe Padme knew, and was too scared to tell him? He wiped out a tribe of sand people, is a very powerful jedi warrior, and has a hair trigger. I would try to avoid giving him surprises.
The Nooooo would have been cheesy no matter how they did it.
But you know what really bugs the crap out of me? That damn Wilhelm scream. I am so sick to death of hearing it all the time, and every time I hear it, it totally takes me out of the movie.
I want someone to invent a device I can hook up to my TV that will somehow detect, and then delete that god-awful scream every time it occurs. I’d rather listen to Jar-Jar narrate half the movie than hear that scream one more time.
Someone in the original SWIII thread said that the infamous “Noooooo” scene should’ve been Palpy telling Vader that Padme was dead, followed by a wide shot of Vader, unmoving, but everything in the room would be in the process of being crushed, as Vader releases his aggression visa the Dark Side, rather than a ten-year-old’s tantrum.
It was being bounced back, but the point is, he kept shooting it nonetheless. I may not be a padawan, let alone a Sith Lord, but I do believe that if an attack I’m initiating is doing zilch to my opponent and permanently disfiguring me, I might be inclined to stop doing it after, oh, thirty seconds or so.
Absolutely, over-done voice acting and all. Any semblence of menace he got from being a robot bug with lightsabers went up like smoke just due to the voice. And the moment he started coughing, I started laughing.
Not really. His character arc is basically: whiny-ass kid becomes whiny-ass teenager because whiny-ass Dark Lord. No thanks.
It was suitably flashy, but it didn’t have any emotional punch because Mace Windu was quite possibly the one character more one-dimensional than Jar Jar Binks.
Yeah, Palpy wouldn’t have had the big Senate thingies to throw. He’d be bisected mid-cackle.
Nope. Nothing could make “NOOOO!!” anything less than the cheesiest moment of an already ludicrously cheesy movie.
IMO, there are two ways this scene could’ve worked. One is the “crush everything in silence” mentioned earlier. The other would’ve been a simple, matter-of-fact, one word response to Palpatine’s claim that Anakin killed his wife (delivered after a suitably Vader-breathey beat):
Data was an android who had biological components (well, if you say so, I’ll go with that), but Grevious didn’t. Grevious had robotic components. He was a biological creature of some sort at the core of his armor, there just wasn’t much of it left, some internal organs and his head, apparantly. Think Darth Vader, but moreso.
That said, I thought he sounded like Evil Carne from the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Didn’t particularly mind, but that’s what he sounded like.
On the one hand, I had sympathy for Anakin because he wanted a way to keep Padme from dying in childbirth, and because, let’s face it, the kid’s confused and had no father figure after Qui Gon Jin died, except for Palpatine.
On the other hand, he did have that uncanny ability to take any honor bestowed on him by the Jedi council and interpret it as a backhanded insult. On yet another hand still, the Masters on the Council didn’t exactly go out of their way not to be asses to him.
It was punk-ass, but that was kinda the point. He had gone through all that trouble being bad-ass only to get his saber hand chopped off at an inopertune moment by another Jedi who should have had his back in the fight. Most of the Jedi ended up going out like punks in EpIII (as did most of the Sith who get taken out, actually)
Still coulda gone either way, Yoda’s got his green pinball of doom thing going on, Palpatine isn’t exactly lead-footed himself, and has ranged attacks thanks to Force Lightning. And of course, if the fight lasted long enough, Chancelor’s Guards and Clone Troopers would have shown up and further complicated things for Yoda.
Noooooo was gonna be cheezy regardless. I think the least cheezy execution of it in the SW movies was Luke in EpIV, since it was just a quick spur-of-the-moment outburst rather than an actual angstventing. An incoherent cry (“AUGHHHHHHHHH!”) would have been more effective here.
I just wanted to further this point some more. In the beginning God created the…Whoa, wrong theme.
At the beginning of the film we see Anakin not wanting to kill Dooku, as it’s not the Jedi way, but at Palpatines urgings he does. So, there it’s established that killing unarmed combatants isn’t the Jedi way. Then further to the Windu/Palpatine conflict where Windu, a master, is wanting to kill an unarmed combatant. I think those two incidents confuse Anakin as to the nature of the Jedi council, going against his previous teachings. Furthermore, add in that once he’s in the council, he’s urged to spy on Palpatine, something that is again against the Jedi teachings. So at that point in Palpatine’s chamber’s he’s questioning his previous teachings, and then you throw in the dream and the lies told to him by Palpatine and you get one very confused individual. I think those incidents explain very well his motivations in that scene.
Three comma’s in a row in that last sentance, is that even grammatically correct?
As an aside, cool stuff on that Wilhelm scream. I see if frequently on the IMDB, but didn’t have a clue as to what it was.