Obi-Wan did leave him for dead, but I think the duel was about seeing if Anakin could be brought back. I think Obi-Wan didn’t lose all his faith in Anakin until after some dueling. Then that faith remained well and truly lost until Luke redeemed his father a couple of decades later.
Well, once Anakin leapt, Obi-Wan had little choice. He had to strike or take an enormous risk. But I still don’t think he wanted to do it.
I didn’t realize that King… was the serial title. Cool.
I do know that Lucas is a big Campbell reader, which makes this sort of thing more disappointing to me. It’s perefectly acceptable to put this sort of thing in a movie, but you have to tell us that in the movie itself. After paying $10 for a few hrs of entertainment, no one should have to be bringing additional knowledge gained from background reading in order to fully follow the plot. The average person coming into the theater, hearing the Luke/Leia exchange, is going to assume that Leia was older or seperated later.
Last night I was discussing the movie with a few friends who aren’t big Star Wars wonks, and they drew a conclusion that the Jedis were able to be killed by their own troops because they were in battle situations which made them too Force-fatigued to use the Force to detect danger. They assumed the Jedi had it “turned off.” In this thread people argued that a sort of overload of use of the Force was in play; that danger was being sensed all around anyway and one couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So those are two different interpretations that people have come up with to get around that issue. When you leave the audience to work that sort of thing out on their own, I get the feeling you haven’t really done your job.
For that matter, it does seem odd that a single Jedi can defeat tons of stormtroopers and droids firing at them in unsportsmanlike ways in the other movies (and in this one except for that scene), but this one time when we really need them killed off they go down quickly.
except - according to the novelisation (I know I know - stick to the films) Anakin and Kenobi were huge stars across the galaxy - as heroes of teh republic…
surely someone would have known something - when “most of the best freighter pilots can be found here” - {obi-wan on Mos Eisley - Episode IV }
at least enough to correct Luke from his opinion that “my father didn’t fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter”
sorry - but I just re-watched “Star Wars”, as I like to call it, last night…
I don’t care what people think - but you can almost see the panic in Obi Wan’s face when he realises it’s R2 D2 and C-3PO… (No… he says to himself - there are thousands of these droids built that look identical… then C3PO says something stupid and R2 makes a semi-intelligent noise… oh bugger! )
by the way - I love all these threads that try and go in-depth - - I really do - they’re entertaining - - almost as entertaining as the “Movies” that inspire them… and lets not forget they are movies… there’s no need to justify why sometimes people are stronger - or why there’s thousands more driods and people in the new trilogy… if George thought he could get away with it - I BET he’d remake the OT so that it had more action, and more consistency - and so that Vader starts thinking… “hmm… she looks like a woman I once Loved… hang on… Love??? what the hell… I must sit in a box and lift my helmet…” but then how many times do we ALL see people who remind us of ex-girlfriends…???
anyway - IMHO - George’s big mistake with Episode I was to try and make it familiar to the OT too much… Obi-Wan, Yoda, R2-D2, C3PO… none of them NEEDED to be in EPisode I… however - I have a theory…
it wasn’t until I saw Episode II that I realised the significance of Padme…
with that information - you take out the 4 characters I mentioned above - and basically Anakin would be the only thing to link Ep I to the rest… so it would have been… “WHat the F? was that all about” - - oh yeah - except keep Palpatine - I liked that…
I’ll go now
I’m truly not understanding your problem with Luke and Leia turning out to be twins. There’s never been anything to suggest Vader knew in TESB that he was baiting a trap for his son with his daughter. Clearly, Vader did not know that he had fathered two children. So, if he knew about Luke, but not Leia, the only non-multiple birth option is for Leia to be younger. This makes for even more problems in re: Vader’s losing contact with Luke, not knowing who Luke is in ANH, etc.
See, I don’t think that the average person is going to have much of a problem with getting that Leia’s “images” of her mother come through the Force. It comes in a conversation where Leia is being told that she has the freakin’ Force. “Why didn’t Luke have the same visions, then?” is a hypercritical question. Within the context of the movies, every time a “Force” vision comes up, it comes to one person.
Still, I disagree that every tiny detail has to be explained in a movie – especially a fantasy movie. Probably the single most common criticism of George Lucas is that he’s unsubtle. Any time he is subtle, the same people complain about that. (Unless they’re totally oblivious to it, as with the little references to masonic lore and more obscure stuff.)
Again, this amounts to “You know what would make this movie better? More exposition!” It’s not necessary, and it sure wouldn’t make for a better story.
No need for speculation. As the dark side grows, the light side diminishes. When Anakin joined the dark side and Palpatine worked his darkside mojo with a Shock and Awe display, most of the of the jedi were effectively blinded, for long enough to catch them unaware. Only the most powerful jedi sensed something was amiss – and only after he felt the other jedi snuff it. That should be enough justification for the events in a fantasy movie. Literally, a wizard did it.
Oh for the love of Christ.
You what what I had thought since 1983? That Leia was kept by mom. In absolutely no way does any dialogue anywhere necessitate that Leia was older. Nor does it require any non-movie brain-Yoga to come to such a conclusion.
It turns out 22 years later that the “seperated later” thing didn’t work out. Is it really THAT big a deal? Maybe Bail remarried and Leia’s “real mother” is the woman we saw at the end of ROTS.
These aren’t mental gymnastics, and they don’t make my brains hurt.
Maybe Leia has “images mostly” of Mom the same way Luke remembers (or at least uses and risks his life based on) Mom’s last words?
So? Tell me, in Casablanca, does Rick tell Ilsa to go because Rick is being selfless for Victor’s sake because Victor needs Ilsa, or does he do it because Victor can give Ilsa a better life? I guess the writer didn’t do the job there, either. After all, there’s two possibilities and the writer didn’t tell us exactly what to think!
In Raiders of the Lost Ark it’s implied that Indy and Ravenwood had a falling out because he slept with his sweet, innocent daughter. But since we’re not told with 100% certainty is that a plot hole or simply the writer not bothering to SHOUT IN OUR EAR TO REMOVE ALL POSSIBLE THOUGHT OR DOUBT?
Maybe they could have handed out reference cards to you or something? Maybe a little blue bar hovering over each Jedi’s head that would slowly decrease as they get more fatigued - you could even have a voiceover saying “Obi-Wan needs food, badly” once he gets down below 25%.
Because they’re all identical, right? I’ll bet the librarian lady we saw in AOTC was a total ass kicker. :rolleyes:
How about the Jedi that jumped up at Count Dooku on Geonosis? Two or three shots (from the front, while he was expecting a fight) and dead. All the shots from the same gun. What’s that do to your theory?
-Joe
My theory is that Anakin/Vader being so severely injured was actually engineered by Palpatine as a means of controlling him. Palp knew that his new apprentice would sooner or later become powerful enough to overthrow him, and he wanted it to be later rather than sooner. Even missing a few body parts and being on life support, Darth Vader is still an uber- powerful badass, but now there is a substantially reduced risk of Palp being offed by his apprentice prematurely.
I think if Obi-Wan hadn’t done the job for him, Palpatine would have found another way to arrange for Vader to be hobbled.
Spit Mountain Dew all over my monitor, I have.
I do what I can. I thought the thread could use a little levity.
Good to know I’m not the only one who had that little phrase burned deep, deep into my lil’ brain.
-Joe, not hungry right now
I haven’t seen this discussed, but he could have been quoting Jesus.
[QUOTE=Merijeek]
It turns out 22 years later that the “seperated later” thing didn’t work out. Is it really THAT big a deal?
[/QUOTE=Merijeek]
If you’re told for a couple of decades that there was a 9-episode story in Lucas’ head that flows linearly … but then we drop continuity later, that kinda bugs me. Ep III was supposed to be all about exposition, getting us to the Ep IV that people generally know and love. It looks like Lucas threw too much into I and II that was extraneous, largely to introduce new characters and sets to sell products, and then left himself little room to get through things in III. Corners seem to have been cut in bridging the stories (“let’s just have mom die in childbirth for no apparent reason, regardless of what we said earlier”), I happen to find it shabby. To each his own. If anyone enjoys the movies, great. I just think that a very loyal fanbase that was made to wait for 20 years deserves more than bad acting, rotten dialog, and what struck me as ill-planned storylining.
So when Obi-Wan responds “Only a Sith thinks in terms of absolutes,” the implication is that Jesus was a Dark Side practitioner? Oh yeah, that’ll go over well. 
“Thy right hand, O Sith Lord, hath become glorious in power: thy right hand, O Sith Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.”
Yeah, it’s all beginning to make sense.
In fairness to Lucas, though, “You’re either with me or against me,” is usually seen as an arrogant and evil viewpoint (unless the speaker really is Lord God Almighty, and isn’t just having an attack of hubris,) and has been since long before Mr. Bush let his tongue run away with him.Here’s a pre-Bush example that perfectly mirrors Anakin and Obi-Wan’s exchange:
I don’t think that everyone should now be obliged to avoid portraying this is as a dangerous and stupid attitude in general, just because a particular head of state uttered a similar phrase.
Continuing with the Bush-bashing thing… (Sorry, you know I have trouble letting things go…)
It might be a valid complaint if the situation were more parallel, instead of it just being the same attitude. If Palpatine made a speech addressed to the Outer Rim planets, implying a threat. “You will be held accountable for your actions in these times – you’re either with us or against us in our struggle against the Seperatists,” then I would be inclined to agree that it was intended to be a dig against Bush. As it stands, it’s in the same category as “ROTS is totally anti-gay!”
You could make a much stronger argument that Illuminatus! is an indictment of the Bush administration, if you’re looking at parallels in the text.*
There, you have a book set around the change of the millenium, in which a supercomputer called GWB-666 calls the shots for the Pentagon. Some choice excerpts:
Part of the plot involves anxiety surrounding a weaponized strain of anthrax that a government lab loses control of, and people start dropping dead. The conspiracy to dominate people through fear is based, in large part, by extreme conservatives based in Texas. It’s totally exaggerated, paranoid Bush-bashing.
*Well, you would be able to make a better case that it was a specific indictment of the current administration, if Robert Anton Wilson didn’t write it at the same time that George Lucas was working up the first scripts for the original Star Wars.
fnord
Just because something may remind you of contemporary politics, it doesn’t mean that the author intended it that way. Sometimes it just can’t be helped.
The question, for me, is whether it was done out of laziness/sloth, or whether it was done because Lucas felt that having Padme die in childbirth made the movie better. If it was the latter, I have no problem with it.
And having a 9-episode story in his head (which, I admit, I’m skeptical of) doesn’t mean having every detail of that story… he could have known all along that padme died after giving birth, but not realized until he started writing ep 3 that it made the most dramatic sense for her to die immediately after giving birth, as opposed to 2 or 3 years later.
I’d rather have him make the decisions he feels are artistically correct rather than be a slavish slave to every conceivable detail of continuity, particularly for an issue as minor as this one, and one which is not a direct contradiction. Remember, ROTJ didn’t tell us that Leia had seen her mother, just that Leia BELIEVED she had seen her mother. If we had actually SEEN her mother, and then suddenly what we saw on screen was invalidated, that would be much more frustrating and harder to reconcile.
Crandolph, I really can’t understand your objection to Padme dying in childbirth, just because it contradicts dialog from Return of the Jedi. Obviously George Lucas didn’t have the script for Revenge of the Sith written 20 years ago. And it didn’t make any difference to the story of RotJ whether Leia’s mother died when she was one day old or 3 years old, Leia could have responded “Nothing really” instead and it wouldn’t have changed anything. That’s because the exact details of Luke and Leia’s birth are unimportant backstory.
Now, fast forward 20 years. You’re writing the script for Revenge of the Sith. Don’t you see that Padme absolutely cannot survive the end of the movie? It makes absolutely no dramatic sense for Padme to ship newborn baby Luke off to Tatooine, go to Alderaan with newborn baby Leia, and die of a broken heart over Anakin 2-3 years later. No, Padme has to die at the end of the movie, the last scenes of the movie have to be the babies being shipped off as orphans, otherwise it won’t work.
So George Lucas has a choice…ruin the dramatic arc of RotS in order to be faithful to a few lines of dialog in RotJ, or contradict that dialog and have a coherent plot to his new movie. Which makes the most sense? Don’t you see that it would be crazy to expect 100% faithfulness to the original movies if that 100% faithfullness would harm the new movies? Especially considering that the new movie doesn’t contradict anything actually shown in RotJ, just Leia’s dialog about her memories…which can be easily retconned into Force memories.
Yeah, ignoring events from the first movies for no reason would be bad, changing things that would invalidate the drama of the first movies would be wrong…but this is a slight deviation that improves the drama of Revenge of the Sith greatly. In cases like this, you drop the old and go with the new. The new movie has to work on its own, it isn’t just exposition for A New Hope, otherwise why bother making it? Padme absolutely has to die in this movie. You know it, I know it, the American people know it. Yes, this makes reconciling the dialog from the original movie a bit strained, but such are the conundrums of filming prequels.
My pappy said son, you’re gonna drive me to drinking if you don’t stop flying that hot. Rod. X-wing.
Also, why should we believe that she reeally died of a broken heart. It was the last thing necessary to complete Anakin’s fall. Obviously Palpatine killed her from a distance (with deadly midichlorians!).
Well, whether she “really” died of a broken heart, or Anakin killed her, or Palpatine killed her isn’t that important. The important thing is that she dies at the end of the movie and Anakin believes his actions brought about her death. Anakin can’t fully become Darth Vader as long as Padme is alive. The movie can’t end until Anakin fully becomes Darth Vader. And so Padme must die before the movie ends. QED.
Since they got all of that from 1977-83, why do they deserve anything better 20 years later? Me thinks this deification of the original trilogy must stop.
I loved the original trilogy, but to pretend it didn’t have bad acting, rotten dialog, and ill-planned storylining (Luke and Leia kiss on the lips and then later are brother and sister? Oops!) is just being blind.
Hey, it worked in Back to the Future!