PT Obi Wan invisible shield or something else?

In Episode III on Utapai as Obi Wan jumps in on General Grievous and his droid army battalion, why do the droids not instinctively fire on him. They are at war, after all.
Why would Grievious not order all his troops, who vastly outnumber Obi Wan by such a huge margin, and also in light of the fact that Grievious is supposed to be a coward who runs and then hides.

I actually like the film, but you must really close off your brain at some of the plot therein this movie. Why would Obi Wan be so stupid to jump in to that situation anyway?
Maybe Obi Wan used some Jedi trick to stop the droids from firing, but as far as We the audience know, that seems not to be the case, this seems very poor writing?

 

The droids don't open fire because they're not programmed to do shoot at the first sight of the enemy like that. And Grievous has a sense of arrogance as he sees that Obi-wan is alone and believes that he has the advantage. Not to mention that the two of them have unfinished business from past conflicts.

 

Well Obi Wan did say, "hello there." Not even droids are so rude as to try to kill anyone being so polite.

 

Obi-Wan is deliberately confronting Grievous, to distract him and his troops from the imminent Clone attack.

It's the same reason he waits before unleashing the force on Grievous, he'd escape too easily without the chaos of the battle, and Obi-Wan would be at the mercy of the droids.

 

I think it's a reference to the duel between the two generals in The Hidden Fortress. From what I remember it plays out in pretty much the same way where the bad-guy general presumably could order his army to kill the good-guy general, but instead they have an honorable duel while the bad-guy army patiently watches.

 

I always assumed that it was because Grevious didn’t give the order to fire.

 

It's not a plot issue. Obi-Wan jumped because he was confident he could handle it. Which he did.

To complain about the droids not shooting immediately seems like pointless nitpicking for the sake of it. It would be like complaining over why the stormtroopers don't shoot Obi-Wan when he's dueling Vader in the Death Star.

 

Obi-Wan read the situation and determined exactly what would happen: Grievous, knowing that he could fall back on his droids if he lost, would challenge Obi-Wan to a one-on-one duel, distracting Grievous long enough for the clones to make planetfall without his interference.

This is all in keeping with Obi-Wan's character. He's not the absolute best fighter in terms of raw skill, but he fights smart.

 

I suppose it could be nitpicking, but the droids were so literally surrounding Obi Wan, all loaded and ready to shoot, it does take me out of film for a short while, in terms of realism.

Would Obi Wan have been able to defend himself against any attack from the droids?
I assume maybe he can do so, seen as he jumped into that situation?

 

Well, it's fiction, why would you expect 100% realism in that?
Basically every Hollywood action movie has the villains not attack in an efficient manner. In this case it is also a romanticised version of fighting, so that adds to it as well. This obviously doesn't always make the most sense in terms of logic. Look at the escape pot getting away at the start of ANH, or ROTJ and the Empire catching Han, Leia and the rebels at the bunker. You could maybe explain the first attempt of catching them alive, though even that is somewhat fishy if you consider that the Emperor talked about Luke friends dying on Endor and the plan being to wipe out the rebels once and for all, that's not really something you would need prisoners for. Though in theory you could take that as opting to interrogate them first. But this clearly doesn't work when the Ewoks attack and a big fire-fight errupts. Leia gets wounded, and instead of killing her and Han, the stormtroopers come close and ask them to surrender, getting shot by Leia in the process. Obviously they just should have shot the two, because that's what they were trying to do the whole time before that as well, but that wouldn't fit with how the movie was supposed to end

In the position the droids were in, Obi Wan's move would very much surprise them. They have litte reason to shoot, because they have him surrounded, and their general is talking to him. I don't think there were all that many situations in any of the movies where the droids shot first and asked questions later. Usually they tried to make the other side surrender.

Would Obi Wan have been able to defend himself?
Clearly not, that's way too many droids to defend against. But that wasn't the point. He made the move because it would distract the droids, and because he was sure that Grievous wouldn't let such an advantageous situation slip away. He loves to run away, but a much better way to put it is to say that he loves to pick his spots. He fights if he has the odds clearly stacked on his side, so that he can brag about his victory later on. Obi Wan certainly looked cool doing that, and that's kind of what you expect a "super-hero" to do in a movie.

One could also add that with an increasing number of droids around, no one feels responsible to do something. The same thing happens with humans who need help. If one person is around, the person is more likely to help than if multiple people are around. Because in the later case, everyone waits for the other to do something, and if you see four other people not helping, in most cases you subconsciously decide that you shouldn't act either, because you'd be outside the norm if you did. In this particular situation, a droid that would fire could end up getting killed in the process if the shot gets reflected, better to let someone else do it instead of risking your own "life".

 

Maybe the droids were concerned about a friendly fire incident, like you can't fire on an enemy when your battle buddy is behind them.

Or maybe droid protocol is to "arrest" an enemy individual when surrounded like that. I'm sure Obi-Wan knew how the droids would react before jumping in there, since he's been intimately destroying heaps of them for 3 years.

 

Battle droids seem to be programmed to take prisoners. They don't shoot on sight.

 

A Jedi is capable of taking on a hundred droids at once. Not a thousand.

 

Obi-Wan jumping down to face Greivous man to man I agree was just part of the kind of intended nobility of the era. That and he knew the Clone Army would arrive shortly for the droids. Obi-Wan even observes himself this civility being stripped away when he has to gruesomely kill Greivous with a blaster, signifying the civil times are coming to an end.

Greivous not letting the droids kill him; Greivous was overconfident, and wanted to make an example of Obi-Wan perhaps.

 

Well, there is this line from TCW Season 1 Episode 1, Ambush:

King Katuunko: You were right, Dooku. One Jedi is not worth 100 battle droids. More like, 1,000. I'm sorry, but I will be joining the Republic.

Now, of course Katuunko is referring to Yoda's guerrilla tactics and not a direct 1 vs.1000 battle, but it's still one of the few straight concepts of how strong a Jedi is compared to a battle droid.

 

Was a Lucas moment.

 

Which makes total sense actually. If I had battle droids at my disposal, I wouldn't trust mindless droids to decide who to kill - they could fire on my mom, my dog or my prized hostage after all. I don't think they get to make that call.

And Obi-Wan did what he had to do. Just jump into the fray and try to either fight or think his way out of it, but either way, he was at very least buying time and energy away from Grievious.

 

"Well, if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"

 

I think that battle droids were deliberately dumbed down as a safety issue. We can see the logic and flexible programing inherent to R2 , BB 8 and even C3PO so there is no reason that battle droids could not be given the same abilities.
However -
To give a very large number of killing machines the ability to think creatively could very well become as dangerous to the Separatists as they were to the Republic. In the Clone Wars we saw a number of battle droids complaining about tasks they had to preform and even being a bit defeatist when confronted by the Jedi. At the same time they could be a bit arrogant when they thought they had the upper hand. But they were never able to make the leap to outright defiance or self preservation. at the expense of their masters.
To me it seems as if Battle Droids not only had simplistic programming but simplistic brains as well to prevent any possibility of true creativity or thoughts that might lead to them turning on the Separatists.
So when Obi wan jumped in very unexpectedly their simple programming and brains could not deal with this new situation. I do suspect that if Obi Wan had ignited his lightsaber and attacked the droids core programming would have kicked in and they would have fired on him. Also, as the primary goal was to protected the Sep leaders the droids may have calculated that to engage in a firefight with an opponent who can deflect fire back at both them and the persons under their protection would not be a good tactical move. Therefore they maintained a perimeter as bodyguards as opposed to initiating an offensive stance.

 

Has anyone seen those season 7 animatics of clone wars? In the "Bad Batch" arc, there's a hilarious scene where Mace Windu drops down into a hangar full of battle droids, with only Obi Wan at his side. All the droids face him, and:

The droids hesitate for a moment before one points and yells "BBLLAAASSST HIMM!"

 

I also loved the movie. But yes, the droids rightly pointed every blaster onto that one target. If not for Grievous' apparent irritation with this Jedi Master and wanting to teach him a lesson personally, he could have (as a HISHE video suggested) said, "All troops. Focus your fire...on the Jedi." And game over for wise Kenobi. I mean he would have been obliterated and blasted into oblivion. It was a supremely risky move by Kenobi. Completely surrounded by battle droids, who are clearly shown in AOTC to be a threat when surrounding and outnumbering Jedi.

In an alternative universe, Grievous investigates how the now dead Kenobi tracked them here. Surviving and assuming certain events went the same, Grievous is now a threat to Palpatine as he begins to suspect that Darth Sidious isn't all he seems. And the Droid Army and Separatist are not so easily stood down because Sidious loses his control over them. Even if it meant running away whilst Vader wipes out the Separatist Council, it is likely that Grievous could well become a thorn in the Emperor's side. Of course, it is possible the Jedi would also not have moved to remove the Chancellor, given Grievous isn't captured or killed yet. But yes, Obi Wan doing that, whilst initially funny, I thought he could easily have been blasted away there.