PT Could Revenge of the Sith been 2 movies?

Forgive me if this has been covered a lot. Rewatching the Prequels, it strikes me that Episode 3 is jam packed with soooo much. Could 1 & 2 have merged into a single film? Anyone have ideas/suggestions?

 

Revenge of the Sith could have been two films yes. Maybe that's what makes it so good.

Ultimately less is more. The Clone Wars helped to fill in a lot of gaps. There will probably be future TV shows and movies to fill in even more about that time period. In the long run having the material covered in Revenge of the Sith contained to a single movie was best for Star Wars.

 

Absolutely not. We have too many examples of a story being stretched out and split up in two movies, and it tends not to work. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows doesn't work better as two films (and a lot of the plot points are just lost in the middle).

The PT follows a clear three-act structure that mirrors the OT and presents clear journey of Anakin from heaven to hell. Each film has its place in that journey. Revenge of the Sith, jam packed as it is, tells a single, clear, coherent story that doesn't need to be split up. It even includes some filler (90% of the opening act is not part of the Sith story), so you can't really argue that Lucas wanted more screentime for his story.

 

I Thought the split for Deathly Hollows worked quite well (it's a roadtrip movie and a siege movie) but as for Sith, I've grown to like the pace of the 2nd half of the movie where Anakin's world (and the galaxy) basically collapses around him in real time.

 

The different style of each part makes the split work more or less. However, there are important plot elements that are simply lost because they are never resolved in part 1/never set-up in part 2. And if you read the reviews and rankings of the movies, you'll see that part 1 is often considered boring, dull and uninteresting.
Now try to imagine the first half of Sith as a stand-alone movie. Lots of scenes of Palpatine luring Anakin, lots of scenes of Padme worried about Anakin, random Clone War action sequences here and there.... but when it all starts to come together (the awesome confrontation between Mace, Palpatine and Anakin).... fade to black. Come back next year!

 

I think the time difference between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones is too big. They could make a time skip during a movie, so they could make it a larger story in 3 movies. There are too many unnecessary scenes with Jar Jar, Bounty Hunters and the Droids.

 

I never thought that "Revenge of the Sith" was jammed pack with so much. Frankly, it seemed shorter to me than either "The Phantom Menace", "The Empire Strikes Back" or "Attack of the Clones". Then again, it had a shorter story to tell.

 

There are no time jumps in SW movies. It's just not part of the language.
And it's really difficult to tell ONE story over two different periods of time. You basically need to use TPM as a prologue and then jump to the actual story.

 

Yeah, it's a bit hard to explain why this is so important. For the most part (with a few, brief departures) the Star Wars films are presented as if it's a bunch of documentary footage gathered from over a short, continuous period and later edited together to tell a story. It's a huge part of why the movies feel so grounded, as if they're recordings of real events that seem like they're actually happening as you watch them. Once you start inserting flashbacks and time jumps it introduces artificiality and blatant temporal discontinuity, and it shatters the illusion. There's nothing wrong with those devices per se, but they don't fit the Star Wars style.

As for whether Revenge of the Sith could have been two movies, well, pretty much any movie could be split in two if you really wanted to. Does that mean it would be a good idea? It depends on the structure of the story you're trying to tell. In this case, it wouldn't work, because the prequels were designed from the beginning to be a three-act story: child, teenager, pre-adult. In the third act, Anakin fails his trial of adulthood, and so instead of becoming a man he becomes a machine. (As Lucas has pointed out, the point at which a child is considered to have truly become an adult has shifted in modern developed societies to be somewhere in the early-to-mid-twenties, hence both Luke's and Anakin's trials of adulthood taking place when they're both about 23.)

 

I guess what I am asking is this: Could Episode 1 and 2 been condensed into one film? Could Episode 3 been expanded?

 

yes. I like TPM but it really was just all setup and could have been condensed. Ilike ROTS a lot but they kind of rushed Anakin's fall.

 

I agree with a small change.. I would have liked to have seen Anakin get some of the war hero development that was in TCW.

 

I guess I, and others, have already answered this: nope because the way the PT is structured. It's a three-act tragedy: it starts with a child, with nature, with bright colors, with elegance, with order, with happiness. It continues with a teenager, with more machines than organic creatures, with violent colors, with murky environments, with chaos, with dissonance, with anguish, with inestability. And it ends with a young-adult, with a militarized society, with dark colors (literally in hell), with war, with tragedy, with the end of an era, with sadness. It's a perfect "from heaven to hell" journey in three acts. And that is an essencial part of how the PT is designed and how Lucas concieved it.

This structure, this journey from a "happy kiddie adventure" to a "tragic greek tragedy" is more important than anything else, more important than the actual plot points, more important than the dialogue. It's designed as an emotional experience.

Of course, if you don't accept this, or if you don't care about this, if you think that TPM was "just all setup", you can argue about specific plot elements that could be done differently and argue that the trilogy could've been differently structured. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means that you want something that Lucas just didn't want to do.

 

I like your analysis a lot. Thanks for that.

 

There is now. Solo and Rogue One has their own time skip / flashbacks. And there is also a mini flashback about Luke Skywalker in TLJ.

 

I like ROTS the way George intended it: faster, more intense.

 

Yeah, a lot of filmmakers lean on flashbacks to make their stories make sense. That's fine, but Lucas didn't do that, not once in six movies. That's because he wanted the movies to feel like they were a series of real events playing out uninterrupted in front of a documentary camera. He wanted there to be a sense of immediacy to the proceedings. We were just a fly on the wall, watching things happen. We weren't teleporting backwards or forwards in time to witness events that took place out of chronological sequence with the main narrative. All the required backstory was cleverly provided through either dialogue or some form of implication. The hand of the storyteller was almost undetectable past the opening crawl.

I never really got what this "war hero development" was supposed to be, exactly. I love TCW, but I don't see Anakin as getting all that much development in the show. It's a show about him going on a series of adventures during a war. That's not development, that's just a lot of things happening to him. And that's fine, because TCW is supposed to be even more of a straight adventure serial than the films, but Anakin is actually fairly static character in that show apart from his changing relationship with Ahsoka. TCW is intentionally designed to function on its own apart from the films. Nothing happens in TCW that is required for an understanding of the story of the films.

The films tell us all we need to know. When ROTS opens, we immediately see that Anakin has matured since AOTC and become an experienced war hero. We don't need to see it happen any more than we needed to see all of Luke's war experiences in the interim between ANH and TESB, or his personal growth in between TESB and ROTJ. Luke acts differently in all these movies, the clear implication that he's grown more mature through his experiences, but we don't actually see most of these experiences. We only see the highlights, the single most transformative moments. It's really no different than how Anakin's development is presented in the prequels, so I don't understand why the prequels get such disproportionate flak in this regard.

And to tie it in to my other point, for both Luke and Anakin, Lucas could have chosen to include a montage depicting their experiences in the years between each movie. But he didn't, because that's not how his Star Wars movies work. Everything in Star Wars is immediate. It's happening right now. If you want to know what happened beforehand, you have to pay attention to the characters' references to things like the time they fell into that nest of gundarks, or that business on Cato Neimodia that doesn't, doesn't count, or that time they ran into a bounty hunter on Ord Mantell. There are no flashbacks.

 

I should've said it this way:
"There are no time jumps in Lucas' SW movies".

And for me, Star Wars begins and ends with the six films Lucas made (partly because this very same reason: because the new movies use a different language). But that's another discussion.

 

Given that both TPM and AOTC came first, I'd say better not to. Besides, I think a Star Wars trilogy works best if consecutive films take place farther apart than the events of ROTS, even if there is a cliffhanger.

The only plus I see to this is that it could have given room for a different ending for Padme (my one major gripe about ROTS).

 

To answer the OP,
Given that TPM and AotC as they are, no, splitting RotS into two films would likely not have been ideal.

I do think that RotS is a bit rushed, that a lot has to happen in that film and to me, it feels at times like a checklist.
And I think part of that is due to TPM not being able to do/start a few important things due to Anakin being so young.

What Lucas could have done is to have TPM as ep 0 and call it simply "Prologue."
That was a very early idea back in the late 70's.
That ep 1 would be a prologue, ep 2-4 would be the PT, then an in-between film as ep 5 and then ANH as ep 6 and the OT 6-8, then another in-between as ep 9 and then finally the ST as ep 10-12.

Consider, the three OT films take place over 3-4 years.
The PT has one film, TPM, that is set ten years before the next one. So we have one very long passage of time and the rest are fairly short.
So if the first film was a prologue and then the three PT films were set closer together.

Lucas is free to do as he wishes but I doubt the fanbase would have been unhappy if Lucas had said in 1997 that he was doing four SW films instead of three.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

I don't think that TPM works like a prologue at all: time jump or not, it does exactly what ANH does in the OT: it sets up the characters and story elements for the rest of the trilogy.

But let's say TPM is a prologue and that there would be three more films. AOTC is the first of the trilogy. And then what? How do you split Revenge? Or would ROTS be the second movie and then have a third movie featuring a badass Vader killing every surviving member of the Jedi Order or the Republic? Because I'm afraid that's what a lot of people who say that TPM and AOTC should be combined want. And that, in my honest opinion, is a terrible idea.

 

No, I have little interest in a whole film with nothing but suited Vader.

You could have more of the clone wars instead of just start and end. Show more about the growing support in the senate for what would eventually become the rebellion.
So the war starts in ep I, ep II shows how it is going and ep III shows the end and also goes more into what is happening in the senate.
Develop the seps a bit more, if you really want to have "There are heroes on both sides" then show that, don't just say it.
You would have more time to show Anakin and Obi-Wan being friends and not like they can barely stand each other.
You could have more time for the romance.

TPM is a fair bit like a prologue in my eyes, the character with the most development and screen-time, Qui-Gon, dies and does not feature very much later.
Anakin is recast and is twice as old and is very different as a character.
Padme's position is different.
The friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan is not established or developed.
The seps threat was not established in TPM and comes out of nowhere in AotC.
Same with Dooku.
And in RotS, Griev also comes out of nowhere.

Lucas knew he had three films but to me, he didn't take full advantage of that.
You have disposable villains that come out of nowhere and gets tossed aside quickly.
Plot threads are established and then not resolved.
Character development occur off-screen.

ANH establishes the characters, starts to develop relationships and also sets up the overall conflict in the galaxy, Empire vs rebels.
Seps vs republic shows up in AotC, not TPM.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

^ I do like the "villain of the week" idea, especially since when you combine the Maul, Dooku and Grievous into one, you get Vader.

Also, we actually got a 2 hr. Clone Wars movie with Genndy Tartakovsky' 2003-05 series, that I really love.