PT Was Grievous a good villain?

His allegiance was pretty obvious...

 

I was referring to his allegiances in the past. Nothing about the character was ever explained. At least with a character like Grand Moff Tarkin we were informed that he was once a governor.

 

I'm not a big Grievous fan.

 

"Nothing" ist wrong. I don't think we've got little information on him in relation to his marginal screen time.

We are told:
- Grievous is a dreaded and fiendish but still coward droid leader. He seeks victims rather than conbatants.
- He's quite angry at the Jedi. He has a histroy of killing Jedi, collecting their lightsabers.
- He was once a human/alien being who has turned into a cyborg and was subsequently trained by Count Dooku.
- He suffers from health problems as a result.
That's quite a bit for a character with about 5 minutes of screen time.
It all leads me to think, although I don't know if this is supported by the EU, that Grievous was injured by a Jedi incident.

So I believe the problems people have with Grievous are more a consequence of his status as a tertiary villain, marginal screen time and the legacy of his "predecessors" than the character itself and what "we know about him". Maul became an iconic personification of evil with more screen time, Dooku was played by a legendary actor and got more screen time. People expected something similar from Grievous and what they got was a tertiary character, soon to be dead. At the beginning, people are still more interesting in Dooku. When Dooku is killed, the film quickly focuses on Coruscant and Anakin. Afterwards, Grievous is confronted by Obi-Wan and soon dead.

 

It felt like they didn't try to make him interesting enough. Maybe it was just because, because he wasn't around that long and he was just this guy with a lot of lightsabers who just wants to kill all the jedi. So, he was just... Meh.

 

GG was badass in the cartoon version of the clone wars but they made him a pussy in the cgi version

 

Agreed, although more like 75% for me

 

The droid general was fantastic. Especially as a sort of perverse parody of Anakin.

 

General Grevious was a great villain in the Cartoon Network Animesque "Clone Wars" series and the Clone Wars Comics. However, in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith he was more tertiary character and lacked the depth of his animated self. It would have been pertinent to include in EPIII that the reason why Grevious is weaker and coughs is because Mace Windu used the Force to crush his chest (heart and lungs). Grevious in SW: The Clone Wars series was still less intimidating and intriguing as a villain.

 

In TCW and CW? Yes. But in ROTS he was underpowered. Plus he had that stupid cough. (Yes I know why he had the cough, but it was still stupid)

 

Totes agree.

I really disliked how Grevious was dumbed down into this cartoonish character for Ep. III. (The live action version of Grevious was more cartoonish than the cartoon version—how ironic is that?)

In fact, one of my biggest gripes with the PT is how stupid having mostly cartoonish villains is. Think about it: all of the serious villains (Vader, the Emperor, Imperial officers, Dooku) work much better than all of the cartoonish ones (Nemoidians, Sebulba, Jabba, Grevious).

Grevious is basically a fusion of a robot and a dinosaur. Robots and dinosaurs are both scary because of their silent, singleminded, clinical approach to killing. Grevious, on the other hand, monologued, spent the whole movie coughing, and awkwardly clanked around. It was the opposite of what his character was in Clone Wars and what it should have been.

Viewers—even kids—don't want to laugh at the bad guy. They want to be afraid of him.

 

I think he ranks near the bottom for SW villains in the main 6. Everytime I see him I think Action figure and his role could have been covered by Jango, but they killed him off. I guess they needed a droid to be the general of the droid army.

 

No, his first debut in the cartoon show hyped him up too much, the movie never delivered, then TCW made him into a joke.

 

I would've liked the character to be fleshed out some more, I wasn't exactly a huge fan of Grievous, but I didn't hate him either. He was OK.

 

You put it most succinctly and accurately Zer0.

 

Grevious is O.K. In the cartoon he's even more O.K. and IIRC he wasn't even a Jedi/Sith, just some Kaleesh cyborg who got blood transfusions from Force Sensitives. He was like a cheap version of Vader, but that's probably because of his cough, (which sounded like a chain smoker suffering) and the fact he was supposed to foreshadow Vader. And unlike Vader, he died pretty pathetically. He has some cool fight scenes though.

 

I thought the idea behind Grievous was good and (as previously mentioned on here) I saw him as a test for the technolgy that helped Vader live.

I knew nothing of Grievous til I saw ROTS and I think he came across as just another villain thrown in, like Maul and Dooku were. These characters appear and you wonder why they weren't mentioned in previous films if they are so important to the separitist movement. This is something I mentioned yesterday on the Maul thread, but I think the idea of having one villain per film (Maul, Dooku, Grievous) doesn't give them the chance to bed the characters down like they did with Vader in the OT for instance.

 

People always say this, but the intention was never to create another Vader for the prequels. We didn't need some sort of iconic villain to fixate on for three movies. We already had Anakin and Palpatine. The tertiary villains like Maul, Dooku, and Grievous are just there to represent a greater threat.

 

I agree, from a certain point of view, I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the screen time of those villains in the PT means they don't have the chance to develop as characters for me and I feel they should of been seen or mentioned across more than one movie (like Dooku was). Obviously Palpatine is the main puppet master behind it all, but hes a shadowy figure in the first 2 on the periphery in terms of the action and as a villain I think he doesn't come in to his own until ROTS, (where throughout that film I think McDiarmid is menacing). Anakin as villain doesn't come in to play til the second half of ROTS.

It came across to me in the case of Maul and Grievous (and probably Jango too), is that they were marketing tools for each movie and selling points for the kids as opposed to being villains that are established in the whole story that you can root against like we did with Vader.

It just one of those niggly little things I look back on as a missed opportunity with the PT.

 

Obviously they were used as marketing tools, but I'm skeptical that that was why they were created. Star Wars has always been all about introducing new, visually interesting characters in each movie. It makes the films very successful when it comes to merchandising, but I think that's just a happy accident Lucas saw no reason not to capitalize on. He says he doesn't think about the merchandising angle specifically when he's writing the movies, and I for one believe him.

 

But to me, this approach is selling yourself and your movie short. What is wrong with having a good and well developed villain?
Anakin isn't a villain until very late in the PT, Sidious is behind the scenes, also until late in the PT.
So I think there is more than enough room for a visible and better developed villain over the three PT films.
Having disposable and unintersting villains is far less good than well developed and more fleshed out antagonists.

Also, Griev wasn't shown as much of a threat as he ran away a lot. Maul had no character and had not done a whole lot before his big end fight. So his threat wasn't all that big either.
Compared with Vader just from ANH, Maul and Griev are less developed, less threatening and less interesting as characters.
In short, they are less good as villains.

Bye for now.
The Guarding Dark

 

Very good villain. Great design, and I appreciated how his somewhat goofy, cowardly nature served as a counterpoint to the heaviness of the rest of the film. And the extended showdown with Obi-Wan is classic for me, feeling equal parts Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

 

It's not selling anyone or anything short. That's just not how the movies were set up. It's of course your prerogative to dislike it, but there was a reason for them being that way, and it was a perfectly valid and respectable one.

Not every villain has to be a larger-than-life, all-consuming menace to be defeated at all costs. The main villain is Sidious, and yes, he is in the shadows for most of the trilogy, because that's the kind of villain he is. The secondary villains are pawns of a greater evil, and as such that's how they are portrayed; that's the kind of villain they are. As we've all heard many times, the Star Wars films are based on old 1930's serial matinees. In those, not every mustache-twirling villain tying a damsel to the train tracks had an elaborate, pathos-fueled backstory and multi-faceted characterization. They were an obstacle for the hero to overcome in exciting ways, and nothing more. And there was nothing wrong with that.

And while they may not be as well-developed as some others, I do think antagonists like Maul, Dooku, Jango Fett, and Grievous are good villains. They're visually arresting, they exude a sense of menace, and they have interesting--though briefly developed--personalities (even Maul!).

 

I think it is selling it short when you end up not having much of a vested interest in the characters and villains that are being portrayed as the protagonists of the story. Yes they look great, and they are good villains that could of been better. When they were used as big marketing tools for the films then you think they are more important to the story than they actually turned out to be. There seems to be no disputing that was the makers intention from the beginning, but I don't think it worked 100%. The addition of Dooku worked very well for ROTS though, his death was a real point of reference for where Anakin was then in his state of mind.

 

But I don't understand why this is a problem for the prequels but not for the originals. No one complains about Grand Moff Tarkin, or Boba Fett, or Admiral Piett.

And no, this isn't a non-sequitur, or an attempt to deflect the conversation, or OT-bashing, as people tend to complain around here. It's relevant because these are characters that virtually no one ever raises these concerns about, yet they're functionally very similar to the villains in the prequels. And there's nothing wrong with these villains from the OT; they serve their limited purposes well, just as the PT villains do. People seem to understand why the villains in the OT are the way they are, but for some reason it's a different story for the PT, even though the explanations are exactly the same.