The “Imperial Senate,” yes. I assumed it had been so for centuries.
Regardless, an Empire one generation old is a lot less impressive and scary than anything I could have imagined.
It is now my understanding that bureaucracy has been in place for centuries/ millennia. Empire or Republic, Sith or Jedi- ‘leadership’ has changed often over time, but the systems just keep going. Isn’t KOTOR supposed to be 2500 years before TPM?
I voted for TPM but I felt that RotS pulled the trilogies together so well that my opinion of it actually improved and over time the inevitable disappointment I felt back in 1999 (really no movie was going to meet my expectations in hindsight) has faded.
It may have implied that, but the original film pretty much explicitly sets the start of the Empire to somewhere slightly before or after Luke’s birth. Consider the following dialogue:
So, right there, we have it in a nutshell: there used to be a Republic. The Republic was protected by the Jedi. Darth Vader murdered the Jedi. Luke’s father was one of the victims. The destruction of the Jedi heralded the beginning of the Empire.
Say what you will about the prequel trilogy, as far as the Empire’s timeline goes, it’s completely in keeping with what was established in the original film. Per what Obi Wan said in the original film, the Empire can’t be more than a year or so older than Luke himself - maybe slightly longer, depending on how long the purge took, but probably not by more than a few years.
That said, I agree that the first movie gave a strong sense that what Obi Wan was talking about was ancient history, and that sense is lost when after you watch the prequel trilogy. But in this case, I can’t help wonder if that might be a function of the age you were you first saw Star Wars. When you’re eight years old, the difference between two decades and two centuries is largely academic. When you’re thirty eight, two decades doesn’t seem all that long ago.
Good point. Still, it only works as long as you assume Darth Vader is human with a human lifespan. We didn’t know that in SW.
No, it doesn’t matter how long Darth Vader has been alive. The data point that lets us establish how long ago these events happen is the death of Luke’s father, which (of course) had to happen after he fathered Luke, but before Luke was old enough to have any memory of him. And Luke is around eighteen to twenty years old at the start of the film. The only real fudge factor here is how long it took Vader to kill off the Jedi, and how early in the purge Luke’s father died. It’s conceivable that it took Vader several years to hunt down Anakin, and that he didn’t start his family until he was already on the run from the Empire, but even then, it’s not likely that that would push back the events further than a few years to a decade, tops.
Damn. I thought the vote was for favorite, so I hit ESB. Should have put in TPM.
It’s winning, but I voted for “Attack of the Clones.”
TPM was an absolutely horrible movie, but it had at least three things going for it:
- As jumbled as his character was, Liam Neeson was very good.
- The pod race was mildly exciting.
- Darth Maul was cool.
I honestly cannot think of a single good thing about Attack of the Clones.
I’ll also disagree with the common claim that “revenge of the Sith” was a bit of a comeback. It wasn’t. It was a flat-out bad movie. I would agree it is not AS bad a movie as its two predecessors, but it is still, on its own, a very poorly made movie in every respect.
If you asked me to rate the six films on a 1-to-10 scale - which is not a perfect way of looking at it, but just for fun - I’d say:
10 - The Empire Strikes Back
9 - Star Wars
6 - Return of the Jedi
3 - Revenge of the Sith
2 - The Phantom Menace
1 - Attack of the Clones
…
…
Those planar bombs used by the Slave I were pretty cool.
And it introduced Christopher Lee to the Star Wars universe, and adding Christopher Lee to something always makes it better.
Only half marks this time, though, for naming him Dooku.
There are only three Star Wars movies.
The Phantom Menace is clunky in parts, but I find it still strangely appealing overall. Attack of the Clones, on the other hand, frustrates me no end: the Obi-Wan portion works incredibly well for me, while the Anakin portion… doesn’t. It’s like a good film and a bad film joined at the hip, which is somehow worse than being mediocre.
As an aside, not only is “Dooku” a really stupid sounding name (it sounds like something a toddler would accidentally do in his pants), but it’s also probably linguistically impossible. The vowels in the first and second syllables have the same sound, but different spellings. Now, that can happen in a bastard language like English, which draws words from many different sources, except that even in that case, all of the syllables of any given name are going to come from the same source, and thus will spell the same sound the same way. If they were going to absolutely insist on that name, they should have spelled it “Duku” or “Dookoo”.
Eh… maybe. I guess my interpretation of that was that the hunting down of the Jedi was itself a generations-long process, only (all but) completed well after the establishment of the Empire.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether my interpretations were right and subsequently subverted, or just mistaken all along. The important thing is that my imaginings were a lot more impressive and interesting to me than what the prequel movies actually presented.
I agree
[ul]
[li]The one where baby darth vader gets noticed by saving a power-hungry poltician’s planet.[/li][li]The one where older darth vader helps the politician unite the galaxy.[/li][li]The one where injured darth vader still managed to crush the rebels and fought off his traitor son.[/li][/ul]
What about Mooshu?
What’s sad about Hayden Christiansen in the Star Wars prequels is that he’s actually not that bad an actor. He was decent in Shattered Glass, and I’ve heard good things about him in Life as a House. Which leads me to believe that George Lucas is at least partly responsible for his suckitude in SW.
Phantom Menace certainly sucked hard, but I did see the fan-made Phantom Edit, which made it marginally better. The guy who did it removed a lot of Jar-Jar’s more annoying bits (including that stupid “planet core” scene), cut out a lot of Anakin’s “accidental hero” parts (because Jar-Jar’s supposed to be the accidental hero, not Anakin), and cut the droid army’s dialogue in half (the effect of this is actually quite creepy, because it makes them look more like an organized, highly efficient hive mind). If this edit had been the actual movie, I probably would have voted for Attack of the Clones instead.
Who the hell voted for “The Empire Strikes Back???”
Hey, here’s another thing. What about the bit where the Imperial officer refers to Vader’s “sad devotion to that ancient religion”? That guy is certainly older than Luke. Under the prequel-revised timeline, he would have been alive when Jediism was in a prominent, privileged position in the galactic Republic. He ought to remember it; calling it “ancient” makes no sense at all.
But he is [del]politically[/del] Imperially Correct.
As he must be, to rise in rank in the Empire.