PT Thoughts/General Discussion: Attack of the Clones

Dude, I hate to burst your bubble, but GL ripped that chase off from Fifth Element that had just came out in 1997.

 

Except that chase in the Fifth Element was at sunset/afternoon, while AOTC was at night. The chase in the Fifth was Bruce and Milia fleeing police, while AOTC is Zam fleeing Jedi; the roles reversed, the police are the bad guys in Fifth, the Jedi the good guys; the woman is good in Fifth while Zam was on the bad side. The Coruscant Chase has moments that are similar, but that is like comparing all fighter plane movies to Top Gun and saying, “it copied Top Gun!”

 

@Kato Sai It's a yellow hovercar flying through a massive, supertall city, engaged in a chase. That is a very specific type of chase sequence. But you do you.

 

So because the vehicle is the same color and its big city is a direct copy? Everything else is opposite. The police are bad, the Jedi who are a type of police are good, the girls in these two films are opposite, one is hope and the other a bounty hunter, the focus of each chase is vastly different.

 

You
Do
You

 

So rather than address the differences, you say this? Sigh. This is how SW Fandom dies, with thunderous applause.

 

Don't worry dude, you didn't affect anything.

 

Ripped off? Uh GL took ideas from Seven Samurai and all other sources. The chase isn’t the same because the plot of the Fifth Element and AOTC isn’t the same, nor are the characters the same, and even the time of day is different.

 

The AOTC chase is far more anime feeling to me than anything else, that's a huge reason it stands out to me as a top sequence in Star Wars. There's some similarity in the traffic patterns, but the whole vibe of those two sequences is miles apart.

 

If I'm wrong then I guess you have no real reason to get all worked up about it then.

 

Totally agree. Well said.

 

Has he said that he did that? Are a couple things being similar, or maybe even inspired by the Fifth Element, if so, ripping off?

 

Before there were Dark Troopers in Mando, there was.. Super Battle Droids!

 

AOTC is my favorite at capturing the war aspect of Star Wars. Everything from the design of the military hardware to the dramatic and visual impact of the big battle scenes on Geonosis is spot-on.

Also the ending montage is Star Wars perfection.

 

I think Anakin looks good with a green saber:

 

Agreed.
I had a pet theory that the green saber in AOTC was somewhat symbolic.

With his blue saber Anakin committed the Tusken massacre. So it was kind of tainted. Then his saber is destroyed in the droid factory and Anakin surrenders. When he borrows the green saber in the arena it is like a fresh start. He commits no dark actions while using it. Then in the Geonosian hangar Dooku destroys the green saber and Anakin is then dismembered wielding the same blue saber Kenobi just lost to Dooku with.
It’s like the destroyed green saber represents Anakin’s lost potential to become a true Jedi, it is partially stunted by his encounter with Dooku.

This culminates in ROTS when Anakin kills Dooku for revenge, fittingly using a blue and red to symbolically replace Dooku.

 

I like all that symbolism! The Green Saber has always had a purity to it, the blue feels more like its for war and policing.

 

That's pretty much how Legends had it - while it was never a strict rule, in general the green sabers tended to be used more by diplomats, healers, etc, and the blue sabers more by guardians. "Jedi Consular" vs "Jedi Guardian" in this case.

 

So true. Jedi Consular was my preferred caste. They master the ways of the Force. Under them is also the Jedi Seers who discovered The Prophecy of the Chosen One.

 

I watched this movie the other day with the audio commentary on, and two things Lucas mentioned surprised me.

The first is that he really equated the Republic’s clone troopers with the Empire’s stormtroopers. Hearing him talk about the movie back in 2002, he’s giving us the origins of the Empire’s army, with the implication being that the Empire continued to use clones even after the Clone Wars. At the time the EU had its own interpretation, with recruits eventually replacing the clones. This was adopted by Disney canon too, and in a few later comments it seems like Lucas also adopted this view or went back to it if he had it before. But from the AOTC commentary, it sounds like he considered OT stormtroopers to be clones, at least for some time.

The second thing is that Lucas said the Geonosians not only designed the Death Star, they also built and operated it. Some of this made its way into the EU and Disney’s canon, though the Geonosians were eliminated after being used as slaves in these stories. But Lucas mentions, perhaps jokingly, that having the Geonosians actually continue to live and operate the Death Star “fixes” the moral issue of having Luke blow up tens of thousands of human beings. Again, I’m not sure how serious the comment was, but technically it does fit the story and the overall moral scheme of the kinds of deaths shown onscreen.

So I’m not saying both these comments are necessarily 100% “accurate,” but they create the picture of an Empire populated by clone stormtroopers and Death Stars manned by Geonosians. There’s something appealing about that to me, mainly because of how it fuses the OT with the PT, but also because it gives more solid standing to what’s introduced in AOTC.

 

So Bugs invented the most menacing planet killer.. makes me wonder if they were GL version of Rakata.

 

And both were effectively ineffective.

 

Couldn’t resist.

 

I’d say the Super Battle Droids actually did a pretty good job of taking out a good number of Jedi. That said, I think battle droids in general aren’t meant to fight Jedi. En masse or particularly deadly variations of them can be effective, but generally they’re foot soldiers aimed at other foot soldiers.

 

That’s very astute. Battle Droids are canon fodder like the Grunts in Halo. While it is Droidekas and Super Battle Droids who are meant for more advanced enemies.