Saga Suspension of disbelief

1. The vote was a sound one because let's face it, Valorum was a big wuss. Padme trusted Palpatine because he was more experienced at this sort of thing. How was she to know she was being used.

2. And risk getting cut in two?

3. Maul was surprised by what Obi-wan was doing. He couldn't figure it out.

4. She was calm because she understood why Anakin did what he did and she couldn't entirely blame him.

5. The Clone Army was authorized by Palpatine for use and they didn't have much choice.

6. You can see the balcony didn't crush him. A lot of the weight was on the underside of the balcony when it landed. That's why Anakin doesn't use the Force to lift it off him.

7. Lucas said that no one was on par with Sidious except Anakin, Yoda and Mace. Save for Mace, this dates back to 1981.

8. Why would she be shocked? She didn't see what he did to Dooku and she was lied to about the Jedi Temple assault.

9. Obi-wan only lied once and that was about the Lightsaber. The rest of what he said was the truth. He just let Luke infer that Vader and Anakin were two separate people.

10. The Ewoks didn't do it all by themselves. Chewie in an AT-ST, Han's cunning and Palpatine's arrogance brought down the Empire.

 

For me, suspension of disbelief is only lost when small things are pulled apart and analyzed, different from how quick they appeared in the movie. Of course, as a Star Wars fan, we pretty much all have done this; it's just natural for something as interesting as Star Wars.

For example; Agen Kolar and Saesee Tiin are indeed piss-poor swordsman, but the scene moves so fast in the movie, I never stopped to notice that; my focus was always one the main point of action; Sidious and Mace. Luke blindly swinging his saber wouldn't be effective against Darth Vader's sophisticated style, but by then, I'm immersed in the film, and I can clearly see the point of it is that Luke's using his anger to overcome his foe.

It reminds me of when Rick Baker was asked about a background character in the Cantina. He said something to the effect of "if you noticed him, then we didn't do our job."

 

Really? I don't get this. What are all those weird, interesting-looking creatures doing there if we're not supposed to notice and wonder about them?

 

I think he means that any noticing on our part should be subconscious. They should add to the background atmosphere, but not divert our attention from the protagonists.

Of course, we've seen the cantina so many times that we've gotten into the habit of looking into the background and studying all the little details that we missed the first hundred times we saw them.

 

^Exactly; don't take that quote too literally. Some alien with a mustache in the background was not intended to distract the viewer from Luke and Ben finding a pilot. The aliens were excellent scenery to the cantina, nothing deeper than that (though over time, they DID get their stories).

 

And apparently Obi-Wan since he was on par with Anakin. Anyways, not being on par doesn't mean totally inept. It is one thing to kill them quickly, it is another for them to not even put up a fight.



On the Death Star, if you get enough concentrated energy you can blow up anything, even a blackhole. Although you might run into trouble finding enough energy in the whole universe to blow up a blackhole.

 

How did the AT-AT's land on Hoth?

 

In transports - outside the energy shield which does not cover the whole planet, but only the base.

 

Again, it's comparable to Superman fighting the JLA and only the Flash is fast enough to keep up with him. That's why the duel starts with Palpatine moving so quickly that Agen and Eeth were cut down without much effort. The only reason Obi-wan survived against Anakin was due to the latter being overtly emotional that he was fighting sloppy and then made a huge mistake, because of his arrogance. Had Anakin fought like Palpatine fought, Obi-wan would be dead.

 

Eh, I disagree.


Anyways, the only real problem is the battle droids. Their interaction with other droids and living beings just wasn't believable for military droids. Super battle droids were good, but the regular ones weren't good.

 

I laugh when I see that SBD come up and roughly push/slam some battle droid aside in the Execution Arena.

 

"Roger roger." Ugh and retch. Hated them with the burning passion of ten thousand suns. The only place they serve any worthwhile purpose is in TCW. I find them marginally amusing as cartoon comic relief characters. Who engineers their equipment so that it falls apart when it's powered down? Utterly stupid!

 

If "Roger roger" was the worst of it, it would be bearable, but compared to some of the things they do it isn't all that bad. By ROTS though they weren't bad. Their quirkiness was toned down, and was more of a background humor than main event.

 

That doesn't really bother me. Star Wars technology seems able to produce huge amounts of energy on command, whether it's a lightsaber, a faster-than-light drive that fits inside an X-wing, or the various shield generators we see. The Death Star seems wasteful -- surely you could destroy all life on the surface using 1% of that energy -- but if you put enough energy in there, sure, the planet will blow up.

The thing that does really bother me, I think, is the hilariously low number of clones. A mere 1.2 million clones to begin fighting a war on a galactic scale makes my suspension of disbelief flicker off there for a moment. And the idea from the Clone Wars series that 5 million more is an unthinkable count that will will bankrupt the Republic? Yeah, fans and EU sources can twist and turn in an attempt to fix it after the fact, but why they couldn't just have multiplied all those numbers by 10 or 20 to at least make them sound better to non-astronomers, I have no idea.

 

The Soviet Union had millions of troops in Eastern Europe in WWII. So 1.2 million clones for the whole galaxy? No way.

 

In my headcanon, the war wasn't intended to be fought on every single planet in the whole galaxy; just a few select strategic points were chosen, like the WW2 Pacific island hopping campaign. So I can accept that only 1.2 million clones would be seen as enough to tip the scales. But as the war dragged on, no doubt those numbers were recognized as inadequate, and more fodder had to be found to throw into the breach.

 

1.2 million Clonetroopers, 9,000 Jedi Knights, thousands of non clone officers and all local resistance cells were used to fight the war. It was doable.

 

Yup. The Essential Guide To Warfare says 3 million clones were ready fairly early in the war - and that this number grew rapidly.

The 1.2 million would have been in the first few months of the war.

 

How exactly was the death star built? In space and all, wouldn't the materials float away? Please explain.

 

They have artificial gravity - they could have used that to hold the parts together while they were being connected.

 

Even we can build things in space. The ISS was put together in orbit. The main body has its own maneuvering jets -- essentially, it is itself a spaceship. Medium-size pieces were put in place by robotic arms. Small pieces are carried out by spacewalkers and installed with hand tools.

Presumably, as @Iron_lord said, in Star Wars, you build the artificial gravity generator first. And you bring a lot of astro droids.

 

I just ignore hard numbers

 

It's essentially the same thing done in "Star Trek" with Federation starships being built either in orbit of Earth, or within a certain number of miles.

 

^^^^^^

 

Indeed. The significance given to the quantity of a few million clone troopers makes little sense, which is why I've always considered the "units" referred to in AOTC to be actual divisions of the clone army, each comprising a few million or billion clones.

So people are rationalising this as meaning that the Clone Wars are just a small series of skirmishes? That's demonstrably untrue. The Clone Wars are a conflict between two rich, powerful, expansive superpowers which have become highly militarised by the time of ROTS. One of these superpowers, the one which uses the clone army, totally rejects the legitimacy of the secessionist other and attempts to totally reconquer it, with the latter comprising multiple thousand star systems. The Republic is brought to its knees ("crumbling under attacks" from the Separatists) to the point of becoming an oppressive autocracy. It's without question the biggest, most destructive war in the timeframe of the films. It's the crucible in which the Galactic Empire is formed for a reason. TCW and ROTS portray multiple large scale battles, each with mass casualties on the Republic side.

TCW shows clones crewing all of the ships of the Republic Navy, with entire crews of several thousand clones perishing with the destruction of every Venator-class star destroyer, something which happens very regularly. TCW also shows clones manning civilian prisons on Coruscant and patrolling the ecumenopolis' many labyrinthine streets. Clones are more than just combat troops in TCW; they are medical personnel, support personnel, training sergeants and technical specialists.

There are other inferred drains on the manpower of the Republic Grand Army. Occupying reconquered former CIS worlds would require large clone occupation forces. Size matters, as the U.S. found out to its cost in Iraq. For a single planet of 8 billion people, the Republic would need an occupation force of much more than a few million troopers. In an ROTS deleted scene, it's revealed that Palpatine has begun appointing governors to every star system of the Republic, not just the reconquered CIS ones. The novel is more explicit that these governors come with their own clone army divisions, but the film does not go into that level of detail.

Even after the deaths of Dooku and Grievous, and even up to the point when Vader orders the deactivation of all CIS droid forces, the Republic/Imperial military is shown to be fighting a hard slog against the CIS. In spite of all this, they seem to have enough clones to spare for law enforcement duties. Keep in mind the vast sizes of both the Republic and the CIS, the two of them comprising many tens of thousands of separate star systems, each with at least one inhabited planet and probably many systems with planets (eg. Coruscant) that make Earth look like a sparsely populated rock.

I might go as far as saying that small clone numbers go against the spirit of the films. Trivial details like numbers must serve the story, not the other way around, and I cannot see how the story presented in AOTC, ROTS and TCW can conceivably allow these small numbers.

Fortunately, there's enough ambiguity about the term "unit" used in AOTC to allow for a more reasonable number (eg. to the order of 10^15) of clone troopers. That's how I keep my suspension of disbelief active.