PT An Analysis of the Final Battle in TPM... Mirroring or Rehash?

Death Star in AotC even remotely not a McGuffin. McGuffin is something heroes try to get in order to move the story forward. Deat Star plan in story of Episode 2 doesn't serve much purpose - it was just very nice connection point between trilogies. Just like Death Star in Episode 3. This connection was very important because you can see that this Superweapon doesn't just appear from nowhere it was in plans of Emperor for a very long time.
In Episode 6 I've always saw Death Star 2 as actually genial ruse by Emperor. Resistance has already destroyed Death Start once so they thought that they can take this one easily too. They don't even think for a second that station was ready to fire in incomplete state. Uses of Superweapons in Star Wars by Lucas (we now have to mention this) was justifiable for me.

It is crazy that people still trying to push idea that Phantom Menace is rehash of ANH. It's clear that end battle in Phantom Menace is mirroring of end scene in ANH (and as author of the post mention, beginning of the Revenge of the Sith). Same themes but this themes is used differently to show new sides of them.
Even by facts: unlike ANH - there is no superweapon in TPM that can destroy Republic. Droid Control Ship is not even similar to Death Star exept sphere in center of construction. It has completely different function - to control droid army on planets. And even Droid army not a superweapon. There is no capture of evil leader hiding in palace or huge 2v1 jedi fight in ANH. I didn't even thought about similarities between end battle in TPM and ANH untilI've read about it.

However end battle in TFA is clearly reuse of ANH with few ideas from RotJ and even TPM (and I like TFA). There is even trench run, come on people. Come ooooon

 

So you're saying neither Lucas nor Lucasfilm are very imaginative, given both of their repetitive use of Death Stars. Interesting.

That's why I called the DS in AotC a "mini-McGuffin". It was just a brief reference but they made a point that Dooku had to get the plans to Palpatine. The one in RotS could certainly be considered fan-service & pandering though. It's questionable that the DS in ANH took 18 years to build. Esp when the even bigger & more powerful one in RotJ is knocked up within a year or two. The crawl in RotJ implies that the Empire had recently begun constructing it. Also it's implied that they're not too far away from finishing it. Maybe just a few months, & it was already fully operational.
There was no need to show such an early start to the first one in RotS. Yet more unnecessary OT pandering in the PT

"People" aren't pushing it. George Lucas & the OS are: http://www.starwars.com/news/parallel-journeys

 

Maybe Empire have less resources before events of ANH. Maybe it's faster for them to build second Death Star because they now know how to do it more effectively.


I'm actually not against fan-service. I like fan-service. I like mention of clones in TFA and some musical themes.
But Death Star in all episodes was in it's place and have clear purpose. While in TFA it was a bit too much. In the movie even heroes said - yeah it's death star but bigger. Nothing more.
I can explaine it for myself only by assuming that First Order tries to imitate Empire in everything just like Kylo Ren tries to imitate Vader. However I don't know if it's just me and in next episodes authors don't even touch that subject.
Still planet that destroys systems is kinda cool but they should make operation to stop it more different than Episode 4. Trench run was the point where I've shaken my head. They should try to make new spin on that idea. What if this Planet was inhabited by some peaceful creatures for example? Like ewoks. And resistande couldn't just destroy it - they would have to use a different plan this time. Much more interesting.

This article exactly about mirroring not rehashing. Similar events but meaning, place, time, characters and purpose is different.
Perfect example is battle on Geonosis. Similar to battle on Hoth but it's has different context and meaning. "Good" guys now on the side where Empire was. Or is it they really good guys?

 

And for what purpose? To set it up for A New Hope so that the Death Star actually gets a proper introduction in the saga and doesn´t just suddenly appear out of nowhere in it´s fourth chapter. And he never made a prequel movie with the main plot of the movie revolving around heroes trying to destroy a giant space station/super-weapon the bad guys want to use to conquer a universe as that would just a cheap, lazy, uninspired rehash of A New Hope.
Either way, nice job exaggerating and telling BS.

 

Admirable hand waving. I could understand if they cut the time from say 18 years down to 15 years. Or even 10 years. But to go from 18 years to then only 1-2 years to build a far bigger & more powerful version? Come on.

Didn't need to be set up bcs everyone understood there was an 18 year gap between eps 3 & 4. More than enough time to build a space station.

I'm sure with the future movies that % will start dropping significantly. Lucas on the other hand featured a Death Star in 3 or his 6 SW movies. Pretty sure current Lucasfilm will be well below that 50% after their next few movies

 

And I'm all sure that everybody, particularly before the making of the P.T., thought that the Death Star, 'Just suddenly appeared out of nowhere,' because it's not as if there wasn't a title crawl explaining it or a whole load of scenes dealing with it.
Particularly as seeing the so-called 'fourth chapter' was in fact the first chapter for about twenty years.

 

Why do I get the feeling that if it was a rehash people would be whining about it a lot less?

 

What do you mean?

 

Just to jump in here.

There's a lot to get through; but this for now...

The Death Star portentously embodies a unique symbolic struggle: conquering the sphere.

While we get numerous hints of the spherical conflict in the PT, the Death Star itself -- as an operational, all-male construct (it's like a hyper-enlarged female gamete completely masculinized via technocratic scheming (remember the Clone Wars)) -- is, or was, unique to the OT.

Conquering the sphere was uniquely Luke's battle. In ANH, he successfully overcomes the outer (the easy conflict). In ROTJ, after a painful, wrenching revelation in TESB, he is ready to face the challenge, again. This time, after some initial doubt (and almost sinking to base provocations), he is able to make peace with the father and master the inner.

That's what the two Death Stars represent. And Lucas even depicts them differently in a way that supports this reading: as a completed sphere in ANH and as a half-finished monstrosity in ROTJ with the "inner chambers" exposed and protected only by a thin (not even visible) shield.

The fact that the Death Star has only grown more massive in ROTJ not only speaks to the hubristic overreach of the Empire, but also of the expansion of Luke's own person-hood, becoming so machinic, cold, and determined in some of its facets (the Jabba palace sequence) that it begs to be subverted: Luke must overcome the worst aspects of himself.

At the end of the OT, reunification with the father, with one's own ancestral lineage -- making peace with the universe and one's own place within it -- has become nothing less than a cosmic imperative. Part of the reason the climax of ROTJ is so resounding is that it is underwritten with this deeper truth. People intuitively hanker for this kind of resolution in life. The OT offers both kenosis and catharsis.

TFA's heedless re-use of the Death Star, reconsecrated as "Starkiller Base", is troubling, I think. It is divorced of the paradigmatic conflict Lucas carefully constructed and tweaked across the OT (and masterfully alluded to across the PT). It is rehash for the sake of rehash. It truly is a "Star-" or "Saga-Killer". There is nothing cosmic about it. It isn't yoked to deeper truths. And that is why it falls flat.

IMO, anyway.

 

Great observations Cryo.

Although I think you are being a little hard on TFA.

 

I might be!!!

'Tis my way, I suppose.

Lucas already gave the Star Wars fanbase the chance to resonate to the Harmony of the Spheres.

And what happened? They declared him a fake, a copycat, a greedy hack, and gave most of their money and plaudits to The Walt Disney Company, instead.

 

I'm not sure I agree with some of this analysis. I feel that Anakin destroying the droid control ship didn't help the Naboo, but it may have served Palpatine. With the droid control ship Gunray still had a bargaining chip. A relative peace may have been negotiated. With the control ship being destroyed Gunray is imprisoned instead. This allows Palpatine to manipulate him by keeping him from prison and in power.

To contrast this with Luke, I feel that it's more of a sad comparison. Anakin didn't have a chance from the beginning. His first great actions were already serving the mechanism of his demise. Just look at how happy Palpatine was when we first see him at the end of TPM. He's overjoyed. Things went well, but I don't think he foresaw them going that well.

 

Shutting down that enormous army that occupied the planet was handy though.

 

Haha no doubt. Even though Padme had technically won Anakin sure made the whole affair much simpler.

 

Padme should've saved herself the trouble & just left it to Anakin. Then she could've waltzed in & arrested Gunray with no operational droids protecting him

 

I LOVE THAT!!!

Those ones had a backup power source.

Prove to me otherwise.

 

I´m sure the ones who saw the OT before the PT did. The others not so much.

 

Hopefully they'd be intelligent enough to understand that **** happens across 18 years.

 

About the independent power source, I think you're right.

Before the Neimodians give the signal to activate the droid army, we see other active droids in Theed.

Additionally, at the start of the film, the red security droids lack a backpack with an antenna, suggesting that they're not operated via control signal like the regular grunts are.

 

In earlier drafts, it was also made explicit that the TF powered the droids with two separate generators/transmitters.

 

Well the whole idea of a "generator" for battle droids is kind of nuts. Just an excuse to have a Deus ex Machina resolution. Why wouldn't the droids simply be independently powered? Like all other droids we've seen in the Saga? The TF could still have some kind of remote fail-safe off switch, but powering them via a separate source that can be targeted & interrupted is wacko. Any battle they go into it would be "forget the droids, let's just throw everything we can at the control ship".

 

I figure, in large part, it's because the TF fears a droid rebellion, and in a more general sense, likes having its finger on as many buttons as possible. This is actually shown quite subtly in the Galactic Senate scene.

It's interesting, in fact, that Anakin talks of being blown up, on Tatooine, should he, as a slave, attempt to escape. Yet he's the one who allows the droids to escape their martial servitude by blowing up the reactor of the Droid Control Ship above Naboo: the freeing "feminine" sphere to Tatooine's arid "masculine".


And yeah, it's a bit "nuts", but you could read it as a rhyme, of sorts, with ROTJ, which features a megalithic Death Star being protected by a thin shield generated by a comparatively tiny, well, radar dish on some "sanctuary moon" populated by primitives. No-one learns anything in Star Wars.

 

That's a cool metaphor with Anakin being the one to "free" the droids.

I also have always noticed that while there is a lot of similarity between the TPM and ROTJ battles, there is a lot backwards about the two, possibly alluding to balance going out and then returning.

Anakin's "macro" struggle - effecting the whole battle (from within the TF ship) / vs Anakin's "micro" struggle (within the DSII) - returning to the light to save his son.

Knocking out space device to help on land / knocking out land device to help in space. Both involving alliance with primitives.

There's more but I can't recall right now...

 

You know no matter how many times I have seen TPM I can't off-hand remember the exact sequence of events.

Is the Vice-Roy captured after or before Anakin's errant blasts cause the destruction of the droid control ship?

I know that Obi-Wan's comeback on Maul happens afterwards so Anakin in sense shows how he can shift balance by his actions.

Padme's moment comes first I think but the fighting still goes on afterwards until Anakin takes a hand. Then the droid army is defeated and Obi-Wan makes his comeback.

What we don't see is what goes on with Padme and Gunray. We can presume that he would give up pretty soon but there still are droids all around and she is still trapped in a bad situation so the outcome is not certain but Anakin puts into play events that doe end it.