PT Anyone else dislike Palpatine/Sidius' face in ROTS?

If they want to they can. I don't think either one looks "better" than the other. It's dependant on the story situation. In ROTJ they wanted to emphasize his appearance in relation in some ways to Yoda. So he became more old evil wizard. In ROTS he was like Yoda portrayed as strong and powerful. Yoda was not old and wizened so neither was Sidious. He was made a demon to Yoda's angel.

So really in both case whether it's the Emperor compared to Darth Sidious or





In pure technical terms the make-up is far better. 20 years of advancements will do that but it's not like they didn't know exactly what they were doing.



If the 2 make-ups were switched I have little doubt you'd find the one still better than the other because it was first.

Obviously it can depending on the person. Besides that I said "fake" not FAKE. Fakeness is a odd thing. Movies from the past were so "fake" because they were usually studio bound and the exteriors if any would be done on the backlot. Casablanca is very "fake" for it's own day in comparison to Gone With The Wind but does that make it a lesser movie?

 

I have no preference

From what I can see, the skin on the ROTJ makeup looks more "saggy" so to speak, and looking at that same area on the ROTS makeup, you can see that those skin "flaps" are tauter. It reflects even further degeneration by the time of ROTJ, which is why I really wish they could sort of "downgrade" the TESB hologram to more closely resemble that look

EDIT: uh oh QRB, opening the Yoda can of worms! Where can this go?

 

The original Palpatine makeup was made with latex compound, while the newer makeup was made with silicone which has since been utilized quite a bit. There's also another key difference; ROTJ was shot on film and lit to create a certain look. ROTS was shot digitally and used different lighting techniques to pull of his appearance.



There is also this...





Which shows there isn't much difference.

It's not so simple.



On the first film, it was David Miller who created the look. Though it was a bit scary, he doesn't look as good as when Kevin Yagher did it.



By the sixth film, the prosthetic pieces had been used and reused quite a bit. Hence the less than desirable look from John Carl Buechler.



When "Freddy Vs Jason" was done...



New pieces were created by Bill Terezakis and using the more modern techniques like with Palpatine.

 

The concern I have isn't that one looks better than the other, it's that they look so different. It hinders continuity especially in the SE TESB. For the life of me, I can't understand how this gets past so many production people and nobody says "uh, this doesn't look that great". Before I get bashed for stating an opinion as fact, let me say I'm using hyperbole to help some understand my opinion.

 

When you look at the pictures posted by darth-sinister, you can see they aren't very different at all. It's just that his face is never fully revealed in RotJ. It's always shrouded in shadows under the hood, but that behind the scenes pic is very telling.

 

Is it? Being totally honest, it looks very different. But we're also not comparing two behind the scenes photos (one of which is in black and white), were comparing looks from the films, which look considerably different.

 

I don't see how you can honestly say they look "so different." They look slightly different, at most. I mean, come on. We're not talking "Elaine Baker monkey face" difference here.

Darth Vader's look changes in subtle ways throughout the series as well. You could just say, "Well, he obviously changed his armor to look less like a cheap scratched-up plastic costume," but that's not a very believable in-universe explanation. It's meant to be the same armor--but it looks different because they used different techniques to machine it, slightly altered the design, and even lit it differently depending on the movie.

 

It looks different enough. Puffiness, deeper lines, the neck and chin.

Therein lies another problem. Palpatine didn't have to have this face in the PT, but it was yet another fan service by Lucas so we could could see the emperor the way we remember him. Did it progress the story that he was deformed? What purpose did it serve? As evidence that the Jedi attacked him? So many other things were in motion before that.

IMO, it looks bad and it doesn't serve any purpose.

 

well he sure wouldn't go from looking the way he looked in the first half of ROTS to the way he looked in ROTJ in 23 years time naturally. Like i said before, he doesn't look like a normal 80 year old in ROTJ.

 

It would have been deeply unsatisfying if the prequel trilogy ended without Palpatine having transformed into the man we meet in the OT, yes. ROTS is about Palpatine finally revealing his "true face," so to speak. To not have a physical manifestation of that in a visual movie like Star Wars would be a travesty. You're getting too hung up on mechanistic plot justifications when the real reason Lucas had him transform was for symbolic purposes--which, believe it or not, are important.

It's not fanservice. It's storytelling.

 

Just like Chewbacca wasn't fan service? Or Greedo? Or Boba Fett or Jabba?

I believe wholeheartedly with the importance of symbolism in film, but when it contradicts its own source material, the symbolic meanings get lost in the confusion of why things don't match up. Not only was his face not right, neither was his character. The Emperor didn't use light sabers, he considered them like toys. He didn't flip around all over the place at Luke, he kept his methodical calm about him. Sorry, but I can't reconcile the two. I'm glad some can, but I just can't. At least the contradiction has a face.

 

I'm not a fan of either make up, but Among the Clouds has the right idea about the Emperor RoTS, it is his true self coming forth after the mask being torn away by Force Lightning. So in that sense I can accept it.

 

I don't want to talk about Chewbacca or Greedo or Boba Fett or Jabba because those aren't the topic of this thread.

There's nothing confusing about his face. It's the same basic make-up job except with slight aesthetic differences because of the alternative methods used to apply the makeup, not to mention the fact that Ian McDiarmid had aged 22 years and had a slightly different face shape. I don't believe anyone was really that perplexed; all this isn't exactly rocket science.

 

No, it's differing opinions. I don't like the way it looks and you don't have a problem with it. We've both states our cases and now we're done.

 

What's this "Yoda can of worms"? I'm too curious and you have piqued my interest.

 

The puppet Yoda vs. CGI Yoda debate. I don't understand why it's such a huge argument, but the facts are as they are

 

The ROTS "Emperor" makeup isn't my favourite, but I can live with it. I'm far more interested in the performance Ian McDiarmid gives -- particularly, as has been mentioned, the moment he portentously puts on the hood.

I will say that, having the Emperor as something of a fat fool, might make him appear a bit oafish, but it works in at least two eerie visual contexts:

i) In the Senate scene, with his frothy delivery, and his dramatic arm-raising, he is reminiscent of Boss Nass, leader of the subterranean, dark-side-eyed, long-nailed Gungans. (Think of the "peace globe" moment at the end of TPM).

ii) Padme is pregnant in ROTS, and Anakin's obsession with saving her could be read, on one level, as a fear of the physical, psychological, sexual, and domestic changes that a pregnancy and motherhood bring. Right after declaring her "beautiful", he has his first nightmare about her presumed demise. The Emperor is like a hideous parody -- a hyperbolic projection made flesh -- of Anakin's sublimated fears: the strangled feminine (from Anakin's strangulated POV).

Further linkage on that second level can be seen with the line "I will do whatever you ask", as uttered when Anakin sinks to his knees and "pledges" himself to Palpatine. It is an echo of the end of his dramatic fireside confession to Padme in AOTC, where he says, "I will do anything that you ask." If you pay attention to the way Anakin says the line in ROTS, you'll notice there is a marked pause between the word "you", and the final word, "ask". It is like Anakin catches a glimpse of what is happening in that moment.

I hope no-one construes that as any kind of attack on pregnant women. What I mean to indicate is that Anakin himself objectifies Padme (he associated her with an angel the second he laid eyes on her in TPM; and tells her she hasn't changed a bit and is "exactly" the way he remembers her in his dreams in AOTC). An objectification that some part of him knows can't hold up forever. And I think the idea of fatherhood frightens Anakin; shakes him to the core. But he is unable, or perhaps simply unwilling, to ever admit it. He never faces his fears. Lessons in his story for us all.

 

I don't mind the ROTS make-up.

It's looks like a fresh wound, still swollen and full of adrenalin. The ROTJ one looks like an old scar, a rotten piece of dark side drug abuse. Makes sense, imo.

What's more troublesome is the the fact that they didn't adjust the make-up for the one TESB SE scene. Certainly not more inconsistent than the monkey face, though.

 

There was no deformity. See any actual scarring? How to account for the symmetry? Is Palpatine in the least bit rattled by his "experience?"

As others have noted, Sidious's visage is clearly his true form. As in all other contexts, he used the assassination attempt to his advantage, garnering sympathy from both Anakin and the Senate. It worked.

What's more interesting is that this begs the question as to how old Palpatine actually is. He bears a striking resemblance to the 900-year Yoda, which suggests that he may in fact harbor the fabled Plagueis's secret to immortality (or at least, protracted age).

I love when Lucas trusts the audience to read between the (pixel) lines.

 

Lucas did intend Tarkin and Chewbacca as cameos, but with regards to Palpatine's visage, he was always going to go that direction. As noted, it was supposed to be a slow change. But Lucas felt that it was more pertinent to have it be done at once.

"George once said a really useful thing when I began playing Palpatine (in The Phantom Menace), and I don't know if he remembers this. He said, 'In a sense, your eyes are contact lenses.' In other words, the Palpatine character was the most artificial - it was as if they grafted his face and put in (his) eyes. Because the real Palpatine is the one who bursts forth at a calculated moment in Episode III just after persuading Anakin to kill Mace Windu. That is when the true person comes out, letting the evil fully manifest itself. The Emperor that you see in the last film looks like he does because he's very old and very evil- it is what he always looked like. He just had this carapace of looking like a fairly ordinary guy, a politician that smiled a bit, and so on. I don't think George had made up his mind when we started shooting whether to continually show Lord Sidious as he really is after his initial transformation or if Sidious would go back and forth with his appearance...the nice guy that you saw was revealed later in the monstrous mask as the self, the Sith self." Later he says that, "in Episode 3, it's more like Hyde in the guise of Jekyll".

--Ian McDiarmid, Star Wars Insider #82.

"Palp's crinklebutt look is the true face of Sidious, but he needs a bit of lightning for it to come out of him."

--Rick McCallum: Hyperspace chat.

As to the new footage for TESB, Lucas wasn't going to spend money making separate pieces and just used what was made. Ian filmed the new footage after wrapping the last scenes for ROTS with both Palpatine and Vader.

 

They shouldn't look same, a lot of time passes between ep 3 and 6

 

True - but only a few months pass between TESB and ROTJ. Still, trying to recreate the old look might have been a little tricky - and since it's a hologram, it doesn't have to match perfectly.

 

Or it really doesn't matter if it doesn't look 100%, but close enough to get the job done.

 

indeed, at least theres more continuity with the hologram

 

Indeed. It looks so close it's not even worth fussing about. It's like asking why Han Solo looks like he's aged three years despite having been frozen in suspended animation--and that for less than one year.