So Mace Windu isn't Dead when he gets pushed out of the window...

1. FADE IN:

SPACE

A sea of stars is broken by the vast blue surface of the planet, Utapau. Five small moons slowly drift into view from the far side of the planet...

...2. WASTELAND - FOURTH MOON - UTAPAU

A harsh gale blows across the bleak grey surface of the Fourth Moon... - THE STAR WARS by GEORGE LUCAS, ROUGH DRAFT May 1974

No, I think Sin was just pointing out that Utapau is among a long list of SW concepts whose role has been drastically reworked as the saga progressed...

 

"High born" does not necessarily mean part of the Royal family. On our world there are Dukes, Earls, Barons, Counts, Marquess', Knights, even extremely rich families with no titles are considered "high born". It is not necessarily a requirement to have Royal blood, it depends upon the monarchy. And SW is a fictional world, where our rules do not apply. It is very unlikely that Bail is directly related to Breha.

Anyway, everyone get this Mace thing out of your system, cos this thread ain't transferring over to PT.

 

Key word.
Could.
Your reasons are no doubt sound.
In that they are possible reasons why Mace could have been kept alive.
If the author's had not made it clear that their intention was to concieve, write, prepare, shoot, edit and release a scene where everyone involved is 100% clear of the fact that Mace Windu is dead.
In a hypothetical sci-fi/fantasy movie model such as the one you allude to - then, yes, no body leaves room for the possibility of a comeback in a later chapter.
This is no hypothetical model - there are specific constraints which you seem to be ignoring.
1) There is no narrative reason to bring him back.
2) We already have the three sequels where he might possibly have been brought back - fortunately they were released before the chapter in which Mace dies. And we know Mace is not in them.
3) Everyone who worked on the film says he is dead. They don't wink. They don't give a knowing look. They don't chuckle. They don't say "you'll have to wait and see." They don't say "He's dead... for now." They all say. quite matter-of-factly that he is just dead. Plain and simple. In the last SW movie that will ever be made - Mace Windu dies.
4) Lucas has a new mandate regarding the EU. They cannot resurrect his characters, unless it is within a "what if?" framework. There will be no more blunders like Fett and Palpatine. Lucas has said his piece regarding Fett. He thought Dark Empire was a great graphic novel. But he considers Fett to be dead.

This is not Ming at the end of the 1980 version of Flash Gordon we are discussing "The End...?" - "ooh what a tease!" - it is Mace Windu. You can not remove that from the context that surrounds it, all of which I have listed above.

?

You have keen eyes.
You saw the body of EVERY Jedi who died in the timeframe of ROTS?
I don't believe you.
Your reasoning makes no sense.
Just because characters whose bodies we do not see can and have come back in works of fiction in the past, does not make it a rule of thumb.
It just isn't.
SW has said what it had to say.

Listen to what you are saying!
Characters Lucas writes don't come back as if they have a mind of their own. They do what he writes for them.
He made sure Yaddle didn't come back.
Did he do that by having her getting stabbed in the back while falling out of the top floor of the Jedi Temple onto and exploding bomb, before cutting to a close up of her dismembered head, then a flash forward to her funeral?
No - he just didn't write her into his AOTC script.

If you discount death...

Remind me of the characters who have experienced "a combination thereof"?...

Meaningless?
I've just agreed that that is indeed what it says in the novel.
I was the one who posted that passage from the novel.
The novel is not meaningless - and I never said it was.
Mo

 

GiG
He made sure Yaddle didn't come back.

Damn Yaddle was sexy!

 

Yaddle was big-time...........

 

I believe the New Essential Chronology said so. Along with the Visual Directory. Will be reading "Dark Lord" this weekend, so I'll get back to you there. Essentially, a lot of the OT novelizations don't count anymore. The canon rules say that we must go with the films first. However, as RebelScum pointed out, Bail could've come from a wealthy family which is considered high born and not be royal. Donald Trump's children are high born, even though he is not royality.

Take something into account. General Veers and Derek "Hobbie" Klivian were supposed to have died in TESB. The novelization states this. But in the film, their deaths are never shown. Michael A. Stockpole featured Hobbie in almost all of his X-Wing stories, along with Aaron Alltson. Tom Veitch had Veers alive in "Dark Empire II". Darth Vader has a blue Lightsaber in the ANH and TESB novelizations. This is not true whatsoever.

I'm talking about Utapau being the original name of Tatooine clear up to the fourt draft of ANH. Then it was going to be the name of Naboo in TPM, but was changed again. Finally in ROTS, Lucas included it in his story. But it is no longer a desert planet, a lush green grass land planet or anything else. It's now what we see in ROTS.

 

Going by your logic, I'd be allowed to say without a challenge that the Emperor didn't die at the end of ROTJ. We don't see his body, so there is room to elaborate a dashing survival story.

However, every human being who has seen this film in the past 20 years "assumes" that he IS in fact dead, because the story points this fact to us very clearly through many means.

By what means? Well, the drama of the story.

The story in ROTS doesn't leave anything ambiguous about any Jedi's death. The drama of Order 66 is supposed to leave an impact on the audience. If, while I was watching the movie for the first time in the theatre, some guy next to me winked and said: "Don't worry. All those Jedi are still alive. There isn't enough concrete hard evidence to say that they are in fact dead." I would have PUNCHED HIM for ruining the moment.

I mean, in the Godfather, we see lots of people being shot up and killed in a dramatic montage. The story leads up to that moment and it is the climax of the film (to me, anyways). We "assume" that they are dead, even though we don't witness their funerals, autopsies etc...

Believe what you want, JarJarPlagueis, I choose to believe otherwise because I believe in the dramatic integrity of the movie and its story.

 

well, to add a new angle/idea to the fold,
Yoda never reacts when Mace is in trouble, nor when he gets sent flying out the window.
And that reaction that he does make seems to be in response to Anakin pledging himself to the Sith.
And so, if Yoda doesn't react to Mace, then......

 

So now no-one is dead unless we get a reaction shot of Yoda?
I hardly think that one would stand up in a court of law.
By that reckoning - only Aayla Secura's death seems to bother Yoda.
What's that - ah right, it's a summary reaction shot to the whole gravity of order 66.
There is no reason to cut away from Palpatine's office to Kashyyyk just to show Yoda, just to confirm that Mace is dead.
1) It is pretty obvious Mace is dead. Showing Yoda react to the other Jedi deaths is not to confirm their deaths, it is to confirm how the killing of the Jedi is having terrible effects on the balance of the Force, and that Yoda is able to pick up on this.
2) It would destroy all drama. We need to stay in that office and see Anakin pledge himself to the Sith and become Darth Vader. Intercutting that moment would be silly. Yoda's reaction shot is a summary response to the events in Palpatine's office in their entirity.

 

Hey any truth to the rumor that Lucas is planning to go back and change some of Sid's lines?


"Every dead Jedi, including your nemesis, Mace Windu are now ALIVE!

I want you to go through the ENTIRE galaxy, kill every Jedi all over again. THIS time leave a BODY, a LUNG or something that proves THEY NO LONGER ARE BREATHING...

Then at last the 3SA shall have peace..."

 

An interesting point, surely he would have felt a great lose to the force with the death of Mace, just like he felt the shift of balance when Ani turned.
Think its a bit unfair to cut down this remark so quickly, GiG.

A good point but I do still believe that Mace is killed in that scene and that is what we are intended to think

 

However in the Clone Wars Cartoon we see Mace doing a lot of super jumping maybe he made like superman.

I personaly think & can accept he's dead way before I think he survived.
but I have been known to make mistake from time to time.

 

Kirk Kanos, your post is a breath of fresh air, amid a sea of pollution.
I thought we should have seen a Yoda reaction scene to Mace's death.

 

Why should Lucas show Yoda reacting to Mace's death? It wouldn't work in the narrative of the scene that it does when he reacts to Anakin's turn and later during Order 66.

 

mace is dead, ..... but i wouldnt mind seeing a one-handed mace to return to the Jedi Temple only to see Lord Vader and his damned five-oh-ones cursing the floor of the sacred temple with their hated feet. There he would meet his doom somehow and by a clonetrooper of the 1138th Battalion of the Grande Armee or by Vader himself ... just imgine a one-handed mace fighting with two sabers, duel-mode

 

Because I would like it to, that's the reason why.
There doesn't need to be any reason. I wanted to see it, and I didn't, but I wanted to.
I'm not concerned with narrative of the scene. This is a movie after all.
It would work for me, and we don't have to agree.

 

I'm not talking about agreeing here. All filmmakers and novelists try to make their stories work with a strong narrative flow. To disrupt the flow is to hurt the film. In this case, going directly from Mace's death into Palpatine finishing Anakin's conversion needs to be continuous. Then breaking up for when Palpatine has knighted Anakin and gone off to fetch his cloak. It'd be like having Han and Leia talking, then getting ready to kiss before breaking away to show Luke running with Yoda on his back, then going back to Threepio interupting them. It'd look awkward.

 

It can be done, it's the job of the filmmaker to make it work. Most filmmakers, when presented with the often monumental task of taking an idea on paper and making it work on the screen, they often pull their hair, thinking, How in the heck are we going to get this done?
So to say that it wouldn't work isn't a very positive outlook. The truth is, it could work.
Making movies takes vision, the belief that it can work, and it could be worked in and work well. There are many ways of achieving successful direction/cinematography in a movie, and the only limit is the imagination/vision.
This is about agreeing, because if you don't think it can work, that's fine.
To say so definitively that such a scene wouldn't work tells me that you perhaps don't care for such a scene, so in the way, we are disagreeing.
I personally don't see it ruining the narrative at all. I see it working. That is where we disagree. And that's fine, I'm all for people viewing things differently. And this is how I see it, and there's no right or wrong in this.
Again, this is my opinion, I wanted to see such a reaction by Yoda, but didn't.

 

Any director can make it work. But they also have friends and editors to help them out. Roger Burton did the dialogue scenes and he kept it in line. Lucas had an idea that we only see Yoda react here and then again here.

 

It's just too bad that GL's yes-men didn't tell him to leave that awful BALCONY pickup scene out of ROTS. And to think, they actually wrote that up later, thinking it had to go in. Geez. Would have spared us the sight of Portman's gaunt face.
I watch it now, and still don't know hwy it seemed so necessary to Lucas.
And they cut short numerous scenes (or rushed them) when they needed more room to breathe.
Some scenes feel clunky, especially in the first half.

 

Mace is dead, whats the big deal? Why the Ph.d type of debates? He ain't coimg back and he better not, or I'm out of star wars. He dies period, no what iffs, no fanboy bring backs. It's over. Gees

 

One thing I will say is that Mace Windu is the only character besides Darth Maul to be shown in the movies plus all the other media for what they are.

 

Just cause someone says leave it out or change it, doesn't mean that he'll listen to them. Speilberg told Lucas to change Anakin's turn and he did. But when he and the others told him to change the Battle of Naboo, he did and then he undid it. The balcony scene was his way of making it clear that Anakin and Padme are very much in love, which then plays into the story later on. That Anakin is so in love with Padme that he will do whatever it takes to keep her. And Padme points out jokingly that love has blinded Anakin, but then it blinds her too. Lucas felt that it was important to convey this and so the balcony scene exists.

 

Change the battle of Naboo? Back in TPM? how did they tell him to change it?
I figured GL thought it necessary, but the scene's absurd. I already knew that Padme and Anakin are SUPPOSED To love each other (GL's been telegraphing that and telling us that since the beginning, it serves the story line, but we're never SHOWN that they love each other). They might as well be phoning in their performances, they don't have any chemistry.
But the best scene that told me they love each other was when Anakin returns from crash landing the Invisible Hand, and he and Padme hug, and Anakin says it's the happiest moment in his life. I thought that was the most persuasive scene between the two.

That balcony told me nothing except that GL can't write love dialogue. It was, by far, the hokiest love dialogue in any Star Wars movie, and that's saying a lot. I even prefer that whole "aggressive negotiations" bit during the arena battle in AOTC. That told me more about their relationship than anything.

And I skip it every time I watch the movie, and I don't feel a single thing is missing. The scene could have been cut, could have been cut in half, and the movie would be the same.

Really, what did it tell us that we didn't know? We already know he's thinking and acting blindly. We already know he cares for Padme and is worried about her. And if that's the point that GL was trying to make, that Anakin is blinded by love, he sure didn't persuade me of that. Again, simply having someone SAY something doesn't make it so. Imagine if Mace delivered his angry lines with a big, bright smile on his face. He's smiling and laughing and joking, and says, I'm angry. Sometimes GL falls into "no duh" dialogue.

I will say, that balcony scene could have been much better, and Padme's face should have been kept out of the bright light. Ugh.

 

Lucas cut the battle one way. His friends told him that it would work better a different way. He edited it that way and the score was mixed. Then at the 11th hour, Lucas recut the battle once again. This is why the music seems disjointed. Speilberg, Howard, Coppla and others were involved in his test screening to friends. His own friends. The supposed "Yes men" told him honestly what to do. He did it and then changed his mind.

Lucas wanted to make us see that Anakin's only doing all of this, because his concept of love is totally off. People thought he turned out of revenge for someone or something. It's not. It's simply that he's greedy and his possessive love for his wife drives him to being evil. He wanted to make sure that it was evident.

Besides, people in love will often say or do things that are "hokey".