ST Less is More

That's the weirdest and saddest comment I have read all day.

 

I've been trying to find time to respond to this post, but there's so much information in it I just can't keep up right now. (This is a joke, but also illustrative of my point about certain scenes in the PT).

StoneRiver: Not knowing what's going on might create tension if we were more emotionally and perceptually connected to the characters. Good horror films or thrillers do this: we can't see what's lurking in the dark, so we don't know what's out there, but we do feel tense because we at least know something is probably about to get the person we care about.

Someone said that the characters tell us what's going on at times. One of the basic rules of storytelling is show don't tell. Or, in film where telling happens more often than in literature, at least join the images to the telling in a way that adds up to something. In the clone and droid battles, A and B don't usually add up to C, but something more like D, Y, Z. Clones shoot; Jedi deflect lasers; the Geonosians say they're losing. It doesn't really add up in a way that I can get emotionally involved with; at least not very much.

In comparison, at the end of ANH, things follow in such a way that an emotional power is built up, and I understand what's going on while feeling something about the characters. We know what the goal is to win: blow up the Death Star. We know Luke is about to be blown up by Vader. Suddenly Han shows up and saves the day, which leads to Luke having a chance to achieve the goal. Then we watch him achieve the goal. It's all a nice tight line in terms of plot, action, and character.

What was the goal of the AOTC battle? How would we know when someone won unless someone told us? Why were the clones winning and the droids losing? Why would capturing Dooku stop the droids from attacking? How did the Jedi know where Dooku was or was heading? They seem to all know Dooku is heading to a hangar so he can escape: how do they know that?

Darth Chiznuk: Anakin sees a bunch of droids and knows that's where Grievous, Dooku, and Palpatine are? That's an odd way of knowing something for a Jedi. Maybe the droids were there to throw the Jedi off. Why would Grievous give so obvious a clue about his location? It doesn't make any sense, unless you just believe that Grievous is stupid. And if so, then we have no tension in the battle or real fear about what's going on.

Here's something that would have made more sense to me: Anakin's a Jedi, right? Maybe we get a scene that mirrors ESB where Palpatine or Dooku have a telepathic moment with Anakin, and that's how Anakin can sense where they are in all that chaos? That would have brought some emotion into it for me. But instead, we are given this absurd explanation that in the middle of all his chaos, Anakin sees a bunch of small droids, and for some reason this means goal and not trap or wild goose chase.

[Now after my own huge wall of text [Bang!], we can see how my message (or messages) [Boomboom!] might begin to become confused [Zap!] slightly if people only [We win!] have a short time to read it all.]

 

I have diffculty believing anyone has trouble in following what's going on in the battle of Geonosis. As far as the battle above Coruscant... Have you ever seen the flagship of the Royal Navy? It's pretty easy to spot in a fleet (partly because it's surrounded by other ships) and I don't think I'd need telepathic powers to identify it if i were in an aircraft. This smacks of Nitpicking 101.

Although saying that... I would have liked it if at some point in the PT there would have been a ANH "use the force Luke" moment. I think the DS trench run in ANH is the most succesfull moment of peril in the entire series... largely because it's done as a literal countdown (helped by Williams brilliant score). TESB and ROTJ are more similar to the PT in terms of amounts of palpable tension/peril. I think there's more sense of drama (not peril/tension) in the battle of Hoth... but again, I think that's played as a different aesthetic and is intentional on Lucas' part.

 

It seems enough clear that Anakin had simply seen Grievous's ship before and recognized it on sight, as Hellhammer suggests. It is established in RotS, and shown in The Clone Wars television show, that Anakin and Obi-Wan have faced Grievous many times before. It should not surprise us Anakin had seen the Invisible Hand before and knew it to be Grievous's ship.

 

Yeah, to be fair, I always figured the "the one crawling with Vulture Droids" line wasn't so much an identifier as a "this isn't going to be easy" "typical of our luck" kind of line.

 

TBH, I love the end battle in ANH the most of all 6 movies, because it is so personal. You feel for every Rebel blown up (mostly because each of them has some dialogue) , you can follow the action closely, because you have a limited amount of ships (in contrast to the PT battles or ROTJ). While the battle over Coruscant looks amazing, the stakes IMO are to low, you see a few clones blown up, but you know Anakin and Obi will make it. It would have been cool to have a few more Jedi in the battle and to have some of them die (maybe killed by Grieveous in his starfighter, who is then chased into the hangar. A big problem of the PT is that you have mostly faceless armies facing each other (droids vs clones or gungans). While in the OT you also have faceless stormtroopers, you also have the commanders and you get the feeling that the troopers are normal humans as well (chattering ST at the tractor beam control for example). I hope that the ST will shy away from faceless armies and give us relateable heroes and villains.

 

They know where Dooku is heading because, well, they see him and they follow him. Capturing Dooku would not stop the droids from attacking then and there at Geonosis, but since Dooku is the leader of the Separatists, his death or capture has a good chance of stopping the war from spreading to the rest of the galaxy.

I still don't see what's the problem with recognizing Grievous' flagship on sight. They have sensors and technology that allows them to distinguish one ship from another quite easily. Anakin and Obi-Wan have past experience with Grievous, so even without sensors, radar, coordinates or whatever they have quite a good chance of regonizing the ship on sight. It's just like recognizing someone's car. There are thousands of that exact same model on the street, but you're familiar with this cause it's your friend's (enemy's? ) car and you've seen it a million times and you can distinguish it from any same model that, to an uninformed observer, would look exactly the same.

Again, the battle itself is not the main focus and not something that we should get emotionally involved in. The battle in AOTC and ROTS serves as a backdrop for the characters' main mission - facing Dooku in AOTC and rescuing Palpatine in ROTS. No one expects you to break down in tears when a few clones die. The fact that someone explicitly states that their forces are winning / retreating doesn't bother me in the slightest, since it perfectly fits into the context of the situation. Why were the clones winning? You can have dozens of reasons for that. They are outright superior, they have the element of surprise, they catch the Seps off guard, they come in guns blazing, etc.

Sorry, Dra--- , I mostly really enjoy your posts, but I don't see where you're heading with this, it kinda sounds like too much nitpicking to me

 

I think visually, the ROTS battles are a little too dense, but I didn't have any problem following what I was supposed to. Was I as I engaged as I could have been? Not really, but it wasn't due to lack of clarity it was down to lack of characters I really loved and really key stakes. Part of that boiled down to faceless (CG) clones & fighting hordes of (CG) robots. The way every frame was packed left me with the age-old watching a video-game problem at times.

 

That's it exactly. The emotion/peril in the battles of the PT is defused because the drama is in the much subtler stuff e.g. Palpatine manipulating events in order to ensnare Anakin etc. The consequence is of course that the space battles, as you say, are merely a "backdrop". So it would be true to say that there's less at stake in the space/ground battles of the PT, but I think that would be to miss the point of the bigger battle... which is the one for Anakin's soul.

 

So, we're on space battles now. Okay.
Due to nature of the PT, in those movies they were not life or death situations and we knew that all the main characters had to survive. Anakin's involvements in the battles above Naboo and Coruscant were more or less pure fun, Obi-Wan's space escapades is Ep 2 and 3 were for fun and mission purposes.
Space battles in the OT were made with it's time's best resources. ANH's space fight is all right, lack of technology was compensated by suspense of that pointless trench run, asteroid chase and Falcon's fight with the stardestroyers was fun, probably unrealistic, and ROTJ's fight was great, but also too far fetched (come on, fighters to destroy a stardestroyer? Or SSD?). They put too much focus on uncharismatic characters (Luke in ANH and Lando in ROTJ) so the effect materialized only when Han came to rescue.
The recipe for the sequels? I'd say, the prequels. The main characters in space battles that serve merely as a background to their missions.

 

I don't think the issue is size in as much as it is quantity. I'm fine with an army of Jedi with light sabers. The trouble is that we saw too much of it in the prequels. It has a place in Star Wars but at least develop a crescendo that builds up to the "epic" battle finale. It sounds boring, but I don't see the harm in starting off the spectacle small and working up to something much grander. The Classic Trilogy is a testament to this while the Prequels showed that while bigger sometimes being better, it was seldom appreciated once it developed a verse-chorus-verse style repetition in all three films. So, rather than less is more, moderation is the key.

 

It really isn't fair to compare the ANH battle to the Clone Wars battles in AOTC and ROTS because you aren't meant to be engaged in those battles in the same way as the ANH battle. Luke's objective in ANH is to destroy the Death Star, so we become emotionally invested in that objective and therefore the battle itself, whereas in those other battles the heroes always have different objectives to which the actual battle is little more than a backdrop or an obstacle. So it makes sense that there would be a feeling of confusion and emotional disconnect when the objective is to navigate through that confusion rather than having a goal relating to the battle itself. Personally I would welcome a return to more focused, objective-oriented battles in the ST, and I would have liked more of that sort of thing in the PT, but I'm ok with the way they played out in those movies because it made sense for the story Lucas was telling to not focus on the battles themselves too much. Besides, that's just another reason TCW compliments the movies... because it allows for that ground to be covered as well.

 

I get what the point of those battles were, thanks, I was saying that I wasn't as invested in the characters as I should have been, that's all.

 

Yeah, to this day I still don't understand the strategy of the Trench Run, but damn I love it. The stakes, the editing, the tension, the score, the general crapness of most of the Rebel Pilots... Superb.

 

The battle of Yavin/trench run is the only real space battle in the entire saga where there's an actual objective and where the stakes are high... which makes for an intense 15/20 minutes. It's yet to be beaten (IMHO), with the battle of Geonosis the closest thing in the entire series to resemble an actual 'war'.

 

I like the trench run because it's so straightforward with a clear objective.

 

There's a lot of cool stuff in Geonosis (I'd say the only battle I don't like at all is the Gungan battle in TPM). Love the gunships.

 

At least they tried with the strategy. The computer seems to take a couple minutes to get a lock, so flying down the trench was all about being in a position for the targeting computer to aquire the lock.

What they never explain is why Luke, Biggs and Wedge don't swoop in behind Vader so Red Leader so he has a clean shot.

 

I think ultimately why the Gungan battle lacks dramatic tension is because of the Jar Jar antics. I know that is a tired argument but up until that point I had no issue with Binks. It's a small complaint but to me up to that point it works (force field shield deflecting tank rounds ect). It's a big set piece that I think is kind of ruined by the Three Stooges aspect with Jar Jar.

 

I remember raising that very issue in the "plot holes in the OT" thread:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/plot-holes-in-the-ct.50010529/page-9

usual answer was "It would have tipped the Empire off as to the vulnerability, and they would have scrambled all fighters".

 

I liked the concepts they had if Naboo soldiers fighting alongside the Gungans. While it might have been a compositing nightmare it might have helped to at least have something real in the scene.

 

There'd be so much spaceship traffic in the middle of the air though. Explosions left and right. Michael Bay would've taken a cold shower after viewing that scene.

 

Odd--to me, the Hoth ground battle is the one that makes least sense.

 

Why's that?