At-At’s rule!!! they just need some razors on their legs, and that’s all she wrote! At least they don’t get destroyed by muppets with logs.
“Winning the battle” is a bit of an overstatement. The Rebel ground forces were fighting a delaying action to allow as many transports as possible to get away. They weren’t expected to defeat the invasion, just slow it down so the key personnel and equipment could get off-planet. Strategically speaking, the Rebels won at Hoth: their goal was to escape with a minimum of casualties, while the Empire’s goal was to capture and destroy the Rebel transports, and therefore a sizable chunk of their command staff. The Rebels succeeded at their goal; the Empire failed.
It’s important to remember that Alliance doctrine calls for you to run when you are discovered by the Empire. The Rebels know that, even if they can win the occasional stand-up fight with the local Imperials, the Empire can always muster enough force to crush any opposition. Simple attrition dictates that if the Rebels stay and fight to win every time, there will soon be nothing left of the Alliance.
Yeah, AT-ATs look cool. So what? Think of the difficulty in getting them down to the surface of a planet. We never saw an AT-AT transport ship, but it must have been huge. For the mass of 1 AT-AT, you could instead have several of the early walker artillery units and gunships from Episode II, and have a lot more firepower and mobility. IIRC, the Rebel gun emplacements took out at least a few of the AT-ATs, largely because they were so ponderous. Those guns would have had a harder time with the Episode II units.
i bet Vader just levitated them down…
Cap’n Crude: At best, Hoth was a draw. The Imperials weren’t able to capture and/or kill as much of the command staff as they had wanted, but the fact that the base got found at all was a loss for the Rebels. They lost a good deal of men and material, and had to waste valuable time regrouping and reorganizing, getting the word out to all their operatives that they weren’t on Hoth anymore. Meanwhile, the Imperials hardly lost anything, aside from that one Walker and poor Admiral Needa, and what they did lose, they could of course easily replace. The battle of Hoth was a disaster for the Rebels, just not as big a disaster as it could have been.
If there’s one thing the Empire doesn’t seem to have a problem with, its making absurdly large ships.
IIRC, the rebel guns were inneffective against the ATATs (“that armors too strong for blasters!”). Fortunately the rebel speeders were equiped with grapling hooks (WTF?)
What I don’t get is how in ESB the Obi-wan says yoda must train luke “the way he trained me”. Yet in PM, he is trained by Qui-gon, not Yoda.
Yeah, well, when you only get a few minutes worth of time to speak from beyond the grave, we’ll see if you don’t paraphrase a bit.
What I don’t get is how the whiney little brat in AOTC becomes such an incredibly badass motherfucker in Empire.
Somewhere along the way, Obi-Wan may take advanced training that promotes him from Jedi Knight to Jedi Master. Plus, Yoda has to teach him that little “disappearing upon death” trick, something Qui-Gon was obviously unfamiliar with.
He got P.O.'d at everyone who kept calling him a “whiney little brat”? 
All right, that does it, seemingly obligatory devil’s advocate jumping in.
I liked all three movies. Yeah, you read right. All of them. I thought each had something to offer. What you have to understand was that this was essentially Lucas’ version of a three-act play, so of course each one’s going to be different. I appreciated each movie for what it was.
I don’t understand how a “dark” movie is inherently better. I find a thrilling, every-second-counts climactic battle (New Hope) with everything on the line every bit as thrilling as a grueling duel in the bowels of a floating city. Furthermore, the idea that the rebellion was dealt a crippling blow in the second act is ludicrous. All the top officers lived to fight another day (yes, even Han). The morale of the troop was far from crushed. Lando slipped completely through the Empire’s fingers. Not the best of situations, but hardly a horrible setback, and it was clear at the end that they were regrouping.
I find the virulent arguments against Ewoks nonsensical. Could someone please explain to me about what is so inherently horrible about “teddy bears” that were “designed for the merchandise”? Of course there’s going to be merchandise. Of course they’re cute and cuddly and seemingly useless in battle…that makes what they do accomplish all the more remarkable. (Remember, too, that while Stormtroopers were powerful troops when they picked the fight, whenever the enemies took the battle to them, they were always caught flat-footed.) What, a hostile invasion force enters their homeworld and they’re supposed to just lie down and take it?
I don’t buy any of the arguments that Leia was sissified or whatever in ROTJ. She kills Jabba the Hutt, fer chrissake, and wasn’t exactly chopped liver on the Endor mission, either. Sure, she’s in love with Han. That’s been well-established. That doesn’t make her useless.
As far as I’m concerned, all the differences between the three movies are perceptible only if you go through them, scene for scene, with a fine-tooth comb and actively look for things that you’re supposed to like or dislike. Not something someone just out for a good movie would notice, and something that I NEVER noticed before it was pointed out on these boards.
Once again: I never got the impression, even after repeated viewings, that ESB was vastly superior to the rest. Never.
(One thing that would’ve made all the movies better was if C3PO was less damn whiny. You talk about a character with bad dialogue…)
Truth be told, I don’t find the Ewoks that gut-wrenching, either. It’s just that the original plan for Wookies would have been way cooler!
There are a few bits that are just saccharine slapstick, like the Ewok trying to pilot the speederbike and the one that clubs himself with his own bolo. In small doses, they’re tolerable, even comical. The lasting hatred of the Ewoks stems, I believe, from that horrific Christmas special, when it became clear Lucas was pandering to the kiddies.
Yeah, but the Ewoks are not an actual alien race on an actual alien planet actually getting attacked by storm troopers. As characters in a story, their make-up is totally up to the writer, and the writer chose to create a bunch of stupid, cute, worthless creatures who were better for merchandise than for the story. The ewoks were dull.
I can’t wait for the next one, when we get to see how that whiny brat transflorms into James Earl Jones. Now that man is the biggest bad-ass in the galaxy.
I think the appeal in Empire (and this may have been said already) is the way the story shifts. Empire establishes how powerful the Empire is; losing the Death Star was in no way a setback for them. It also establishes that the Empire is playing all the cards, and pulling all the strings. The rather anticlimactic ending sets up for the final instillation in the trilogy, leaving the audience to ponder how things could get any worse for the Rebels. You also get to see Imperial promotion policy and job security
I believe the series of films is properly broken up into two groups:
Group One: “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (It’s not called “A New Hope,” for Christ’s sake.)
Group Two: “Return of the Jedi” and the last two movies.
The first two movies are unquestionably superior to the last three. Between them, I’d say “The Empire Strikes Back” is better, largely for a lot of basic cinematic reasons:
- It’s better paced. Scenes flow into other scenes, and splitting the story in two tends to help with the pacing. It’s the best written of the films, by far, in terms of interspersing action with exposition and characterization.
“Star Wars,” while a great movie, was a bit more stilted, especially in the transition from the Death Star escape to the Battle of Yavin. If you have the movie at home, try watching from the moment they shoot down the TIE fighters to the beginning of the attack on the Death Star; there’s a lot of extraneous crap there and it’s not well written.
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The dialogue is much, much better than in “Star Wars.” It just sounds like the dialogue was written by a professional.
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The movie looks better. I’m amazed with what they did in “Star Wars” on a limited budget, but “The Empire Strikes Back” was even better.
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As already mentioned, more Darth Vader.
Now, as to why those two movies were better than the other three, I wrote a long message about this in another thread I think was lost in the crash. To sum it up, though: the first two movies were made for adults, the last three were made for kids. The first two films were made based around STORIES; they told a cool story about some interesting characters fighting a battle against interesting evil bad dudes. The last three were made as part of a franchise, which is why they seem endlessly derivative; as is already pointed out, they couldn’t even come up with new endings for “Return of the Jedi,” instead borrowing elements of the endings from both previous movies.
As to why people hate the Ewoks - again, I think it’s because the Ewoks are a departure from what made the first two movies so wonderful. “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back” are fun, and at time they’re funny, but they are NEVER frivolous; there’s a constant sense of dread in terms of what those Imperial baddies will do next. Having a climactic battle in which Imperial soldiers are defeated by a band of clownish, childlike Muppets who have a cute little way of talking and hit themselves in the head with their own weapons don’t fit in, atmosphere-wise, with the rest of the films. It doesn’t even fit with itself, since at the same time it’s happening there are deadly serious battles going on both in space (the Rebel fleet trying to stay alive) and on the Death Star 2.0 (Luke fighting Vader & Palpatine.)
There wasn’t any comic relief in the final battle in “Star Wars,” and there wasn’t any comic relief in the last sequences of “The Empire Strikes Back,” except for Lando’s insistence it’s not his fault the hyperdrive won’t work, which at that point is more of an ironic, sickening “oh no, they can’t escape” bit of black humor. Having comic, Muppetesque relief at the end of “Return of the Jedi” just sticks out like a sore thumb (And before anyone calls me on it, yes, I know a few Ewoks get killed and the music gets sad. It’s still for the most part a farcical scene.)
I would say, however, that “Return of the Jedi” WAS a better movie than the last two, both of which I thought were boring, poorly made films.
I dunno… Empire was certainly good, but I like the original better. It’s the only one which can really stand on its own: Empire isn’t really a completed work.
My only gripe with the Ewoks is that the way they defeated the Imperials wasn’t convincing enough.
Or, as the old saw goes, “Oh no! Small furry natives armed with clubs and rocks! Our armor and advanced weapons and superior training are useless – RUN AWAY!”
Plus, Empire was the movie where Williams introduced the bad-ass Imperial March (aka Vader’s Theme).
Simply because Endor was originally scheduled to be a moon full of wookies. Wookies, dammit!
TheeGrumpy wrote:
Somewhere in the extended Star Wars universe, it is established that most lightspeed-capable spacecraft carry a back-up hyperdrive in case their main hyperdrive goes out. The backup hyperdrive is smaller and can’t propel you at nearly as high a speed as the main hyperdrive can, but it will enable you to limp over to the nearest inhabited star system so you can get your main hyperdrive repaired.