One more thing: Did Sidious somehow know what was going to happen to Vader, and have that black suit made up in advance so that it would be ready to go when the time came? I hardly think that was a Republic-standard burn victim suit out of a first aid kit 
Or was it designed on the spot? And what was up with the smoke coming out of the suit when it was being put on him?
I made neither of those complaints about Star Wars. If more time would’ve made the story make sense, all the better. If characters served any function beyond video games and action figures, let’s have them.
And yes, you did just compare Dostoyevsky and Lucas… which I think is perfectly legit as both are storytellers working with the medium technology allowed at the time. Fyodor was just better at it. 
I love how the Lucasfans are making up all sorts of possible covers for what are obvious big ol’ plot holes he just bungled. There wasn’t a continuity editor in the budget?
Crap… Tolstoy. I meant Tolstoy. Who was also a better storyteller…
Don’t suppose I’ll be living that one down any time soon… :smack:
I had that same reaction, although it’s quite easy to resolve… heck, how do we know Obi Wan and Yoda didn’t stop and check cnn.com after resetting the beacon and before looking at the security videos? It’s not like the formation of the empire wouldn’t be Big News, however, Big News was communicated in those days.
There’s a big difference, to me, between a plot hole where you say “huh, that’s odd… well, here are 3 or 4 very plausible explanations, I just wish he’d mentioned which one it was, as noticing that apparent discrepancy kind of pulled me out of the movie” and “huh, that’s odd… ummm, gee, OK, here’s a hilariously contrived explanation that almost comes close to explaining it, Lucas is my God, lalalalalalala”, which no one is doing.
And if your idea of a plot hole is that Vader’s first steps, after being almost killed, having 3 limbs amputated, learning that the love of his life is dead, and betraying everything he believes in, are stumbling and awkward, or that a light saber battle between two old guys in a movie made 28 years ago isn’t as cool as a light saber battle made today, well, then I guess we just disagree.
Yeah, most of the detail stuff people are complaining about is crappy and pointless, or simply ignorant. Fortunately, some people don’t claim to be other than ignorant. Like the smoke out of the suit - if I remember it was explained in RotJ that DV needs the suit to live, and it’s quite clear in RotS that as his skin is fully burnt he’ll be needing some help consuming oxagyn through his skin (people generally die from full scale burns for this reason - they suffocate, anyone remember Goldfinger and the paint scenes?).
If you get a bionic limb for only part of your body, then there are all sorts of things at play. Since they’re only part replacements, they are tied into the muscles and nerve endings of real limbs, so when you move these limbs you are still using part of your own body. Also, your brain needs to relearn interpreting the nerve signals feedback from the bionic bodyparts as I assume they are stronger than what they replaced, as well as typcially being heavier, or lighter (the impression given in all animations of robotic parts in SW is almost always that they are heavier), but in any case of different weight.
To me, I think its the people, the characters. Only Yoda has that spiritedness that made characters like Han Solo and Leia so likeable. The other characters are flat and passionless almost the whole time. You could argue that part of this is as it should be, with the whole impending doom and evil triumphing, but all in all there were too many characters that were too bland, and with so little time to develop a relationship with any of them except Obi Wan, Anakin, Lord Sid and Yoda, it just doesn’t work very well. (even less because a lot of time was used for showing off beautifully rendered citiscapes - it was better when they’re just used as backdrops to the story development rather than as a theme park ride)
People with burns do not die from failure to skin-breath oxygen. Shock and infection are the primary concerns. Believe it or not, you can paint yourself gold with relative impunity. It’s been proven several times that this is an urban legend. You may prevent perspiration and raise your body temperature, but you won’t suffocate.
Two cyborgs.
One has one set of meat components. One has a different set of meat components. They’re both different species at the beginning.
They act differently. Completely differently.
How is that a “continuity error”?
A continuity error is Padme having twin girls.
-Joe
Most of the Geonossians that Anakin constantly cuts in half in Clones are “unarmed” (though still obviously attacking).
Who knows how big their claws are? Not really the point, though. They were attacking. Self-defense and all that.
You know what I meant by helpless. Dooku was helpless. How many other helpless types do we see killed by a Jedi?
-Joe
He probably designs Sith costumes on his quiet evenings at home. When they were flying Vader back to Corusant, he just faxed a design ahead with a note reading, “Have the droids make a new enviro-suit that looks like this.” 
I finally saw this damn movie, so now I can participate in these threads instead of feeling all left out.
I liked it. I mean, it had a bare minimum of Jar-Jar, what’s not to like? No movie could ever live up to the original trilogy, but that’s more because of nostalgia than anything else. It’s definitely the best of the prequels, but unlike the other two it’s actually good. The only things that really bother me, now that the prequel trilogy is completed, are some consistency problems.
First, the line that has already been mentioned: Leia talking about her real mother being “beautiful, but sad”. It would have been perfect if that had turned out to be Padme. She had a lot to be sad about.
Then, the Yoda - Qui-Gon deal. In the originals, Obi-Wan calls Yoda “the Jedi master who instructed me” and says of Anakin that “I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda”. It certainly appears that Yoda was Obi-Wans main teacher, not Qui-Gon.
Vader’s line “When I left you, I was but a learner” to Obi-Wan. He didn’t leave Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan left him for dead.
The Death Star deal, that has been mentioned. It’s pretty clearly new and unknown in A New Hope. They should have skipped that bit entirely; it wouldn’t have hurt the movie none.
Plotwise, there’s little to complain about. I think the turning of Anakin would have been better if they’d just cut the whole “Padme dying in childbirth” thing. Anakin trying to uphold democracy while realizing that sometimes it is difficult, wanting to give Palpatine a fair trial but running into the problems of a corrupt government (“Palpatine controls the courts”), and eventually turning against the Jedi to ensure that the proper procedures are followed (Palpatine is duly elected, after all) would have worked on its own, without the Padme thing, and I daresay it would have been more powerful my way.
Also, Hayden Christensen was heaps better in this movie than in Attack of the Clones, which really helped.
All in all, a great movie, a worthy inclusion in the Star Wars saga. I think the best praise I can give it is the fact that when I got home, I got up in the attic and started rummaging through boxes (I’m in the middle of moving house) to find my A New Hope tape. I’m going to watch it right now, and I expect it to look quite different now.
When I was little, I always took this to mean that Obi-Wan trained Anakin all by himself. Never even told Yoda about it. He realized he gave an incomplete education, didn’t want to repeat it, and made sure Luke went to Yoda.
Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it. My main gripe:
Anakin was turned to the dark side a little too easily. How do you go from, “gee, I don’t want Padme to die during childbirth” to, “I think I’ll ruthlessly slaughter a bunch of children?” In one easy step, apparently. I didn’t sense much inner conflict during the process.
“You’re on the dark side of the force, I want kill you now.”
“If you don’t, I’ll give you a cookie.”
“OK, be right back, gonna go kill all my Jedi friends first, and maybe I’ll slap around that traitorous bitch wife of mine while I’m at it.”
But all in all, still a pretty good movie. A fairly satisfying end to the saga.
Well, technically, Vader left Obi-Wan when he stopped being his apprentice and became a sith lord. That’s even the way I took it when I was little - that he left the side of good for evil.
Forgive me, my Masters, for replying to this post without slogging through the thread to see if someone else has said it first, but I just gotta say this.
Lucas seems to have a real problem with the whole time passage thing. It was glaringly obvious in ESB, when you have Vader’s fleet pursuing Han and Leia around the Hoth system’s asteroid field for what seems to be a matter of hours, ,at most a day or two (and brining in bounty hunters for the pursuit, no less), meanwhile, Luke is undergoing what appears to be weeks, if not months, of Jedi training with Yoda on Dagobah. It wasn’t so obvious in ANH, but after you’ve seen it a few times, you realize that Leia seems to have only been on the Death Star for an hour or so, during which time she was brutally interrogated, had her death warrant signed (Tarkin does not strike me as the type who would make a snap decision to execute a former senator) the Death Star has been moved from wherever it was to Alderaan (even in hyperspace, that trip should have at least taken some days), then recovered enough to look nice and fresh for the Blowing Up of the Home Planet ceremony and dumped back in her cell to await rescue.
Meanwhile, if the goings-on on board the Millenium Falcon are any indication, that trip seems to be taking at least a week or so.
The problems of time passage aren’t as obvious in ROTJ, but you’d think that, somewhere in the intervening coupla decades, somebody would have sat down with George and said, “Dude, you really need to work on the pacing before you go and make the next trilogy.”
Having gotten that off my ample bosom, I’m going to say that I though ROTS was on a par with ESB. I was kind of afraid that Christiansen would ruin the movie with his overacting like he did in AOTC, but he was much more subdued this time out, and that was good. I really, really didn’t like Anakin a lot after the first two prequels, and Lucas turned him into a character that I could respect before the inevitable fall. I did think the seduction by Palpatine happened a bit too quickly, and I also wondered why the hell he wasn’t on some kind of respiratory support while the droids where attaching the cybernetic limbs, but outside of that, well, corny dialogue is something I’ve come to expect from Lucas (he really should have hired a writer who could, you know, write), so I just munched my Kettle Corn and enjoyed the show.
I finally got to see RotS today. I’m surprised at people saying Hayden was so much better in this one; I usually don’t notice wooden acting, but it jumped out at me this time. Maybe I was just sensitive to it because of all the stuff I read about how his acting sucks. 
Overall, though, I did really enjoy the movie. I remember complaints whem TPM came out about how the ships and cities looked all shiny and clean. RotS did a wonderful job of presenting things as they would look after a few? years of non-stop warfare. (Maybe they mentioned it, but I didn’t catch how much time had passed between AotC and RotS.) From pristine, luxurious civilization to gritty, worn-down utilitarianism. Star Wars tech has always been more fascinating to me than its characters, and I enjoyed all the small touches I saw.
The betrayal scenes were satisfactorily tragic; even knowing what happened, each death was like a gut punch. It wasn’t just the deaths of the Jedi, either. Since AotC all marketing and extra-movie stuff has been centered around making the clone army look like the good guys. Lucasfilms worked hard to separate nostalgic memories of the evil stormtroopers from the good clone troopers. Specifically, I’ve been playing Republic Commando and really getting into it, and it does an excellent job of making the clone troopers human. Seeing them all just up and obey an oblique order to instantly turn on their generals was as sad as seeing the generals die. I liked the clones as good guys, dammit.
As a related note, I’ve seen a lot of mocking aimed at the Jedi who blindly accepted the clone army without suspicion. Superficially, I agree. It was dumb of them. But, consider:
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The Republic was largely at peace, and had been for years. There was no standing army; any threats were usually small enough to be quelled by contingents of Jedi.
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Out of a seemingly minor dispute between the Trade Federation and a single planet, almost immediately there’s this enormous and deadly rebellion by the Separatists. It’s much, much too big for the Jedi to handle all at once. They need firepower, and they need it fast.
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Send in the clones. It’s suspicious, but it’s also a deus ex machina which the Jedi could not pass up, even if only temporarily. Perhaps they thought the fighting would end on Geonosis and they could then have some quiet time to investigate the army.
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The clones perform admirably, surpassing expectations by everyone in the Republic (aside from Palpatine, who’s about as omniscient as you can get). The Jedi Council still has some concerns, but the Separatist movement is growing too large too fast to sit and think. The clones passed their trial by fire, and the fighting just doesn’t stop. The Jedi have no opportunity to risk losing the only defense they have against the Separatists.
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As time passes, the clones continue to be wonderfully competent and reliable, earning the Jedis’ trust, and in some cases friendship. Jedi, being good guys with selfless interests, lose whatever concerns they might have about the clones stabbing them in the back. Unfortunately, as a famous dark-helmeted leader once said, “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
The Jedi probably should’ve tried to keep a side investigation going, but I’m not sure they had any real choice in the matter. Once the fighting began they had to see it through to the end or risk losing the Republic.
priceguy,watching the ot after 3 is very interesting. gl does have some minor cont. problems, but some things are really interesting.
re darth vader and his mobility. burn scars are not known for flexibility. he would have ended up with 3rd degree burns over 100 percent of what was left of him. between that and above the knee and elbows prosth. you don’t have a very graceful person even after 20 plus years.
when i watched 4-6 again this weekend i did notice how darth vader moved. he was a bit clunky. fitting in with his injuries and recovery from them. the parts that were would have to have climate control and air flow. burn scars do not do temp regulation very well. that would make the suit bulky.
so you’ve got diff. prosth.s, burn scars, bulky suite. gonna be a bit clunky moving, and rather difficult to get the force flowing through all of that.
From now on you will be known as Darth Ironic
Well, I think that Anakin “left” some time between chopping Mace Windu’s arm off and Palpy telling Lord Vader to rise.