Month: November 2012

Welcome back, everyone.  Today we’ll be looking at the comparison of Star Wars episodes VI and III – Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith.

Before we begin I want to show you something really quickly.  It will only take a second.  Really.  A second.  No time at all.  There are four cuts in the following scene that we’re going to look at sequentially in the pleasant spirit of free use. 

Okay, here’s A:

And now B: 

Think of it like a visit to the eye doctor.  Is A better?  Or B?  A?  Or B?

How about C:

And now D:

Is C better?  Or D?  C?  Or D?  C, or D? 

The first time I saw Revenge of the Sith (episode III) in theaters I remember having that weird feeling like I just missed something when I saw this scene.  The best way I think I can get the feeling across is to point to that scene in The Matrix where Neo thinks he sees the same cat walk by twice.  It’s something that you catch out of the corner of your eye, something that makes you wonder if you actually saw something or if your brain is just playing tricks on you.

I think I saw episode III three or four times in theaters (every time a different group of friends or family would suggest it), but I always forgot to pay more attention to this scene.  It would just happen again and it would be over, and I’d be left with the same feeling that I’d missed something.  I remember having the feeling that it had something to do with Obi-Wan’s eyes, but didn’t have the fortune of a rewind button.  I was pretty sure that his eyes changed color during the scene, but it’s so fleeting that I had trouble nailing it down.

Well, (un)fortunately, now I do have a rewind button.  I’ve owned the DVD of episode III for years now, but I think this might have been the first time I’ve watched it.  This scene happened, I skipped back 20 seconds, watched it again, skipped back 20 seconds, watched it again, skipped back 20 seconds, watched it again, then picked my jaw off the ground.  I caught it on the first rewind this time, but went back over and over to confirm what I thought I was seeing.  I was honestly stupefied and embarrassed that this was in the film, let alone the DVD.

Like I said, there are four main cuts there.  Shot A is the first piece, then it cuts to Anakin, then it cuts back to shot B, then cuts back to Anakin, cuts back to C, cuts back to Anakin, and then closes with the quick cut back to D.  The middle shots (B and C) of Obi-Wan in this scene are clearly on a different day (or month!) than the start and close (A and D).

This was clearly just a callback shot when they either had something wrong with this piece or decided to add or change some dialogue or something.  I’d understand if you needed an extra shot of Obi-Wan in a scene where he’s in the background or something, but this is one of the ubiquitous A-B dialogue (we’ll get to it…) scenes that permeates episode III.  All that takes place are Obi-Wan and Anakin standing in front of a green screen delivering lines.  From that standpoint it is not difficult to reshoot the entire scene, or even just Obi-Wan’s half, especially if you already have him in there to reshoot 8 seconds anyway.  It’s not like you’d even need Anakin back on set, all you need is the person that is already there reshooting, and Anakin’s back of the head double.

This whole debacle elapses in less than 30 seconds, and they are the only people there.  Give me Ewan McGregor, a guy that has a back of the head that kind of looks like Hayden Christensen, and a green bedsheet and I can reshoot this in my garage.  

A director who cares at all about continuity would take note of the fact that actors don’t always look the same every day.  If you wanted to splice in a shot (why would you do this?) instead of reshooting Obi-Wan’s whole half of it, you’d take note of how the actor was wearing his costume, his makeup, his facial hair, what his hair looked like, how much gel he put in his hair right before the shot, WHAT COLOR HIS EYES WERE THAT DAY, you know, the little things.

Now, I’ve looked this up on the internet since I figured this out, and some people have tried to just say that the shadows shifted or something and it’s no big deal.  In case the A-B/C-D didn’t work for you above, here’s a side by side of A and B:

And of C and D:

I wish I was kidding.  I wish that I had played around with this in photoshop or something.  Realistically I could probably make the scene look better with an hour or so in photoshop.

Take note of the time difference, if you haven’t already.  The first two cuts are separated by less than 6 seconds, the second two cuts by less than 2 seconds.  What is the mentality that lets that slide?  I’ve never been on a film set (or in an editing room), but I’d imagine that it must be someone’s job to make sure that something you just spliced in matches the things around it.  It must be someone’s job to do what I just did – a few minutes of copy pasting and cropping stuff in MS paint.

Putting together a movie is probably pretty hectic, so I would be willing to cut them some slack on the theatrical release.  Maybe you catch this in the 11th hour and it’s just too late to fix it.  Like I said, this all happens pretty quick, and in theaters I was just left a little confused.  But you should catch it.  Someone should catch it.  By 3am on the morning it was released I could have told you that you should take a look at that scene and figure out it something was wrong.  How many people saw it at midnight?  I’m decent at this – at best – but I’m hardly one in a million (or multi-million, considering the $16 million dollars made on midnight screenings alone; or many-million, considering the $158 million dollars this movie made in the first 4 days). 

If you catch it too late you make a little note, hang it on your mirror or something, and make sure that your world-renowned editing and ‘special edition’ guys spend 20 minutes some morning doing some crazy Lucas magic to this scene.  Or better yet, pay Ewan McGregor some crazy amount of money to regrow the beard and reshoot 30 seconds when he gets some spare time.  Or – if you really want to Lucas out on this thing – save the dialogue but have the shot be of them walking at a distance and just CG both of them in there without needing actors at all.  The bottom line is that while some of these options are less than great there were options on the table before you had to push a DVD out the door.    

So why start with this?  Why lead off with this instead of burying it in the bottom of the post or even a secondary post?

Because that’s the same attitude that produced a movie with such a dramatic failure present in it.

Okay, let’s get back on track.  Eyes forward, class – whatever color they might happen to be.
  
I went into this week with an interesting pair of films before me.  Going into last week I felt it was downright unfair to cast Clones up against Empire, as Empire – even as a standalone movie – is simply a fantastic piece of work.  People seem to agree on that ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/29/star-wars-the-empire-strikes-back-added-to-national-film-registry/ ).

Even the first week I wasn’t expecting The Phantom Menace (often lambasted as the ‘worst’ of the prequels) to hold up to a landmark of film like the original Star Wars.

Return of the Jedi isn’t quite as strong as the others in the set, though.  There’s the Ewoks taking on an entire imperial regiment, there’s all the stuff on Tatooine, etc.  It’s still a good movie, mind you, but going into this week I considered it the weakest of the original trilogy.

Then there’s Revenge of the Sith.  I remember watching this movie and thinking: “well, at least it wasn’t as bad as I and II”.  Even the ever critical character of Mr. Plinkett over on RedLetterMedia (again, NSFW: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-sith/ ) seems to acquiesce on the fact that one of the prequels might not have been altogether awful.  Coming from Plinkett that’s pretty enormous praise.

Given that this was set up to be the best of the prequels vs the worst of the original I thought I might get to see an interesting fight, and maybe even have episode III shine in a few places.

Oh.  Oh, how wrong I was.

Let’s get the things you’re expecting out of the way, shall we?

So far we’ve been using – as our base for graphs – the scale determined by The Phantom Menace.  Each of the movies to this point has mostly fit on that scaling, if perhaps a touch short of ideal (New Hope deaths were a touch off the graph).  Return of the Jedi continues this tradition, and looks pretty similar to the trend we’ve seen in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.    

No surprises there, really.  There’s a decent number of characters, and a long stretch there in the middle where no one dies.  A fair number of the main characters are killed, though.  People aren’t really mentioned or used as back story because things are being wrapped up.

Total deaths clock in at 11, five shy of A New Hope but five greater than The Empire Strikes Back.  This fits, to some degree, especially given the near immortal fortitude of the Ewoks and the difficulty of confirming their fatalities (I’ve always said that I think one Ewok might have been killed – that’s all I counted here).

Let’s take a look at Revenge of the Sith.

Yes, the graph did decide to rescale itself.  It’s because by the time Revenge of the Sith has wrapped up 19 actual named, credited, and important characters have been killed.  That’s almost five pod races.  Here’s the graph on The Phantom Menace Scale:

Revenge of the Sith is a film about killing a bunch of people, so I guess this number (19) shouldn’t be that shocking.  Coming off the nearly pacifistic episode II (4 deaths) and the pod race fatality driven episode I (7 deaths, 4 from pod racing), it just feels like a lot.  When you come out swinging with intent to almost double the deaths of the prior two movies, well, the deaths start to feel pointless and boring.  Beyond that, many of the characters (e.g. the majority of jedi) haven’t been given any character development opportunity whatsoever, so it’s exceptionally difficult to care about them when they die.

In fact, the only Jedi that receive even minimal character development (Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin) end up living.  And DO NOT come back at me with the claim that Mace Windu received minute one of character development.  Kit Fisto ( http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kit_Fisto ) received effectively equivalent character development as Mace Windu.

Tell me what motivates Mace Windu.  Tell me what he does in his spare time.  Tell me where he lives or what planet he’s from.  Tell me who trained him, or who he trained.  Tell me how he came to be on the council.  Tell me how he feels about long walks on the beach.

And don’t you even think about telling me that I need to go to secondary source to find out this stuff.  Star Wars fans should be the first to recognize the hierarchy of canonical sources (crap, I thought I was going to be able to write all these without saying ‘canonical’), and if you can’t make a movie work without giving people a reading list then you need to Peter Jackson that stuff and make it into 5 movies or something. 

Anyway, who dies in episode III?  Well, anyone that has made it to this point but has to have a reason not to be present in episode IV.  All of the people who were shoved into the first few movies for no reason are now killed for no reason.  Nute Gunray is still alive?  Better kill him off.  Finally.

Let’s briefly take a look at how the addition of these two movies fills out the overall graph we’ve been working on.

Pretty interesting – Revenge of the Sith looks more like the original trilogy than either of the other two prequels, at least up until the last 10 or so minutes.  That could just be due to all the people that are killed, though, so let’s just look at the number of characters that have been introduced.

Wow, despite a strong last minute push by Revenge of the Sith, The Phantom Menace still ekes out that win.  Who would have imagined that Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith would end up tying?  Here’s the numeric breakdown:

1st place – The Phantom Menace, 63 characters
2nd place – Attack of the Clones & Revenge of the Sith (tie), 58 characters
4th place – Return of the Jedi, 37 characters
5th place – A New Hope, 28 characters
6th place – The Empire Strikes back, 27 characters

Now that’s a list I’d be happy to be at the bottom of.

I’m not going to dwell on that today, but I think that if I come back to this in a few weeks to put together an overall comparison between trilogies that graph and ranking would be the place that I’d start. 

I think that I learned a fairly large amount from coding the scenes in Clones and Empire, so I decided to give it another go here in Sith and Jedi.  This produced a table of the same sort that I put together last week.  Spend some time with it.  Get to know each other.

Here’s something you might notice.  Revenge of the Sith is 8 minutes longer than Return of the Jedi.  Revenge of the Sith has 86 scenes, while Return of the Jedi has 64.  On average, scenes in Return of the Jedi are just less than 2 minutes each (actually 1.969 minutes).  In Revenge of the Sith?  A bit better than a minute and a half (actually 1.558 minutes).

In the first set of movies, I made the argument that not enough time was available to be allocated to each character.  In Revenge of the Sith the problem seems that not enough time is available to be allocated to each scene.  Things jump around everywhere.  It is a tour de force of hyperactive excess.  It feels like a child rushing to finish something that they should have started weeks earlier.

Let’s look for some bright spots.  There’s certainly a lot less confusion present in episode III than there was in II.  That’s good!  Obi-Wan isn’t just wandering around dumbfounded the entire movie.  That’s progress.  What does he spend his time doing instead?

Well…acting completely out of character.  Oh, so out of character.  So very very out of character.

In episodes I and II Obi-Wan is constantly preaching patience and planning and blah blah blah.  He’s seen twice now what happens when you rush into things alone (Qui-Gon against Darth Maul, Anakin against Dooku).  So what does he do when he’s finally on the bridge with Grevious and able to maybe accomplish something, like maybe negotiations? Smirks and then wrecks up the place. 

So what does he do when he finally tracks down Grevious again?  Watch his movements for a bit?  Come up with a plan?  Surprise him when he’s alone or unsuspecting?  Use his noted tracking skills to find where the other separatists went?  Call in some support to surround him?

No, he just jumps down from the ceiling to taunt and provoke Grievous while he’s surrounded by enemy troops.  Seems reasonable.  Then they get in a car/lizard chase.  Sounds like fun.  What has planning ever done for him, anyway?  Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Oh wait, wrong movie.

Maybe there’s a doppelganger Obi-Wan in this movie, and that’s why sometimes his eyes are one color and sometimes they’re a different color throughout the movie.  [I swear that he looks different in some of the Grievous scenes as well, but I just don’t have the heart to go back and check.]  It was like giving the character a goatee to point out they are from the evil parallel universe.

Do you see what I’m reduced to here in trying to make sense of this movie?

Last week I broke things down in terms of mood to a number of different categories.  Since that was mostly to focus on the element of confusion, I’m not sure what it’s going to tell us this week.  The mood that seems to dominate Revenge of the Sith is action – or rather the lack of mood.

Three scenes in Return of the Jedi seem to be action for action’s sake, and two involve some of the space battle over Endor.  The third is the sail barge battle on Tatooine. I’d give you three and a half if you pushed me a bit on the Ewoks, but to be fair they do try to evoke some emotion, if not a bit less effectively.  In Revenge of the Sith?

 25.  Twenty-five scenes are predominately there for the action.   Here are twenty-five 1’s for scale:

1111111111 1111111111 11111

Here are three:

111

There’s difference in the total number of scenes, so let’s deal with percents, to be totally fair.  That’s 4.69% of Jedi, and 29.07% of Sith.  We are talking just a bit shy of a clean order of magnitude.

Remember, I went into this week feeling like I might finally be able to come up with something good about the prequels.  I really tried hard to find something good about this movie – something that would stand up to Return of the Jedi.

Jedi has some good emotional scenes.  The things that stand out to me are the entire interplay between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor at the end of the movie, the interplay between Luke and Yoda, and the interplay between Han and Leia (and Luke for a bit).  That’s…well, a good chunk of the movie.

I was really hoping to care for characters in Revenge of the Sith.  There are really only two parts that stood out.  The first is after Obi-Wan defeats Anakin (spoiler alert?)  If you can get past Anakin continuing to whine while he tries to climb up the slope, Obi-Wan actually gives a pretty good performance.  He sells you on the fact that doing this really hurt him, and that he’s sad.  You get his despair, and his mourning.  It’s a good performance by Obi-Wan, and it stands as a fitting capstone to this trilogy.   

The only other part that evoked any emotion were the final few scenes where they are making blatant connections to the original trilogy.  Amidala saying “Luke” and “Leia” stirs something up inside you.  The shot of Owen and Beru holding Luke on the farmstead while watching the sunset with Obi-Wan looking on sadly is powerful imagery.

But, it’s not.  Not if you haven’t already watched the original trilogy.  If you’re watching the movies in numerical order for some reason (why would you ever do this?), that’s completely lost on you and you now have a movie completely devoid of emotion except for a speech by Obi-Wan on the slopes of Mount Doom.        
I should come up with some graphs that keep me alerted to how many words I’ve gone since I’ve included a graph.  Okay, I get it.  Here’s a graph of how the moods actually break down when coded to simple categories.

Interestingly, Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith tie in number of positive scenes and ‘other’ scenes.  Remember, though, that Sith has the benefit of 22 extra scenes.  Where do those 22 scenes end up?  Well, we’ve actually already covered that – they go into action.

Oddly, I didn’t realize until making this graph that I didn’t code any suspense in Revenge of the Sith.  My first reaction was ‘that can’t be right’, but after thinking about it for a minute I think it actually is, and it’s actually a pretty big weakness.

In Jedi, events are built up to. There’s dead screen time where you wait for an event to happen.  You are given time to wonder what’s about to happen, and how things are going to turn out, and that’s what suspense is.

In Sith, it seems like Lucas has taken Yoda’s advice a little too literally.  Things either happen or they don’t.  There is no suspense.  Time is not wasted building up to things, everything is clear cut.  With everything that needs to happen there’s simply no time to let things build up.  There was suspense in Attack of the Clones, right?  Hold on a second.

Yeah, I went back to check, and there was at least a little.  I didn’t code it at that point, but it makes me wonder how much suspense there was in Phantom Menace.  There was some, right?

Anyway.

There’s something that I started thinking about that’s a little bit beyond simple action.  It’s the permeation and buildup of scenes that are shot for effects – scenes that are less about characters and more about models and/or computer generated graphics.  The Michael Bay effect, if you will.

It’s easy enough to code scenes that are predominately just shovels for effects.  These are the scenes that are either all effects, or effects to the near exclusion of characters.  Imagine two people fighting with swords which aren’t there, on a narrow platform that isn’t there, over lava that isn’t there, on a planet which isn’t there.  Oh, and the people aren’t there either.  All of it is just a guy at a computer monitor.  We can only hope that the guy at the monitor has a drink in his hand.

The Star Wars movies have always had a strong effects backbone.  A New Hope without the death star run or scrambles with TIE fighters is a weaker picture.  Each of the movies – Return of the Jedi included – should be somewhat guilty of this.  Let’s compare:

Moving on.  

Remember I mentioned the A-B dialogue problem?  Well, even when there are actual characters on screen in Revenge of the Sith, they are often standing, sitting, slowly walking, walking then stopping, stopped then walking, sitting then standing, standing then sitting, or some other bizarre combination of all of the above, in pairs, in front of green screens.  You put a camera over one person’s shoulder pointing at the other actor and the other camera over the second person’s shoulder looking at the first.  [Note: I’m not even treating green screen backgrounds in the above look at CG driven scenes]

You have them talk, fill in a background, and it’s ready to go.  It gets hard if they’re walking too much (probably?), which might explain why they always stop walking at some point.  They might start walking again, but that’s a good tip that the scene (and conversation) is about over.  How does that look?

Looks pretty similar to the CG graph above. 

I wonder what would happen if we looked at both of them together?

Hmmm, there’s probably a lesson there.  Disney, take a look at that graph a few more times.

Hang in there, folks, we’re almost through this.  I can see the end ahead of us.

One of the things that I find myself recognizing in movies these days is the points when I consciously or unconsciously allow for suspension of disbelief.  A movie (or any entertainment) that has fewer points where suspension of disbelief has to occur flows better.  The smaller the suspension that must be made, the better.  

Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith are similar in the sense that both movies are the culmination of plans laid out by the emperor.

In Return of the Jedi the emperor’s plans have been progressing since some point in Empire, when he realizes that Vader’s son lived.  His plans in A New Hope were foiled by the rebels with the destruction of the death star.

In Revenge of the Sith the emperor’s plans have been progressing from the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace.  My initial inclination was that the death of Darth Maul was a wrench in his plans, but it doesn’t seem to have been.  Even that setback seems to have been a part of the plan to draw Anakin to him.  Darth Maul wasn’t his apprentice, he was a pawn.

In Return of the Jedi there are a few places where the emperor’s plan could fall apart.  The plan is pretty tight, though, as the rebels have fallen into a trap that the emperor set.  The rebels could have not fallen into the trap, but it wouldn’t have foiled anything – the emperor would still have the upper hand.  There are really only two places where the emperor’s plan could have failed.

The first is that ‘an entire legion of the empire’s best troops’ could have been bested by a rag tag group of native teddy bears.  The second is that Vader could be turned by Luke against the emperor.  Both are pretty small risks for the emperor – both of those things are pretty rare events.  That’s why they’re powerful when they occur.  The emperor’s plans have also been foiled once in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, so he’s not shown to be all powerful and infallible.  

In Revenge of the Sith, well…I put together a list.

Here’s what it looks like if we graph it, as if we really needed to see it:

In Revenge of the Sith the emperor not only has a ridiculously complex and convoluted plan, but nothing about it ever goes wrong.  If you look at the events of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, every single event is planned by the emperor to produce Vader.  Things happen and Palpatine is always there, smirking and happy with himself.  In the prequel trilogy the emperor is all powerful and infallible.

Even Superman needs kryptonite.  Even Doctor Manhattan needs tachyons.  Whoops, now I want to sit down and reread Watchmen.  The emperor has none of these things.

He is, by all extent, more powerful than Superman or Doctor Manhattan. 

Read that one more time.  Really think about that.

This, to a large degree, is one of the things that accounts for the lack of suspense in Revenge of the Sith (and perhaps the prequels overall).  Call him an antagonist or a protagonist – he’s certainly one or the other.  An infallible being with seemingly limitless power makes for a boring character.  You never expect him to fail because he never does.  If he wants something, it happens.  If he plans something, the plan succeeds.    

Show him being even a little sad that Darth Maul has been killed.  Show him changing his plans on the fly.  Show him once not having that smug sense of satisfaction and the audience might start to imagine for even a moment that his plans might fail, even if they don’t. 

How easy is that?  Pretty easy.

There was one last thing that I wanted to look at during these two movies.  It has to do with music.

The original trilogy plays out like Peter and the Wolf.  Even if you’ve only seen the original trilogy a few times you can probably hum a few bars of a few different pieces of the original Star Wars score.  If you know one piece you almost certainly know Vader’s theme: the Imperial March.  You’d probably also recognize Luke’s theme – it’s a big part of what’s thought of as the main Star Wars theme.

Leia has a theme that’s kind of close to Luke’s, but softer.  The final big one is that of the emperor.  The emperor’s theme is recognizable as the only piece (unless I’m mistaken) in the original trilogy with a chorus – think of the music with deep low chanting.

These themes build and change across the three original films.  The emperor’s theme isn’t even present until Return of the Jedi (because the emperor isn’t really present until Return of the Jedi), though it’s still clearly identifiable due to how unique it is.  It’s also clear due to the fact of how directly tied to the emperor it is.  If the emperor is on screen you’re going to be hearing at least a bit of his theme.

Even with all the other coding I was doing I had a pretty easy time pulling out a bunch of these themes during Return of the Jedi.  If you listen to them closely you can tell what’s going on without even listening to the dialogue.

If you’ve gotten to this point I’m really hoping you’ve seen the movies, so I feel that saying spoiler alert is kind of unnecessary.  But, just once more, here come some pretty major spoilers.  MAJOR SPOILERS.  If you’ve just been reading so far thinking that well maybe you’ll never watch Star Wars just stop now and watch the original trilogy.  Here comes full spoilers of the end of the main plot line.  You have been warned.

The best use of this music that has been building for three films is the last 15 minutes or so with Luke, Vader, and the emperor.  You have a clear picture of each theme at this point, and as things start shifting one way or another each theme stands out over the others.

This culminates as Luke is hiding from Vader in the emperor’s throne room.  There’s bits and pieces of everyone’s themes up to this point, but while Luke is hiding he’s trying to feel for the good in Vader, but Vader is doing most of the talking.  Vader is doing the emperor’s bidding, and you hear a slow build of the emperor’s theme.

Vader is also searching Luke’s feelings, and Luke is trying to hide the fact that Leia is his sister.  He fails, and Vader senses that there is another Skywalker.  Vader becomes overjoyed, and then Luke gives in to everything that the emperor has wanted – he’s filled with anger and hate and directs it all at Vader.  He yells and attacks Vader with all his hate and fury, finally willing to do what he has so far refused – to kill Vader.

What follows is then the strongest and most powerful rendition of the emperors theme in the movie as Luke goes nuts on Vader.  The music comes to a crescendo as Luke knocks down Vader, continues to strike with all his strength, and cuts off his hand – leaving him helpless.  Luke has him defeated at this point, and the regular emperor’s theme returns as the emperor walks down the steps, chuckling.

Luke looks at what he’s done, sees Vader’s mechanical hand not unlike his own, and regains his composure.  The emperor’s theme fades as Luke calms himself and refuses to kill Vader.  Luke’s theme emerges over the emperor’s, as Luke tells the emperor that he has failed, that he will never turn to the dark side.  That he is a Jedi, like his father before him. 

The emperor is now furious, and starts to use force lightning Luke.  Vader pulls himself up and stands next to the emperor as the emperor continues to attack Luke, who cries out for help.  The emperor’s theme again emerges as Luke finds himself defeated.  As this continues, the camera moves to Vader and the emperor’s theme begins to mix with Luke’s theme, revealing Vader’s internal struggle between the two most significant people in his life.

“Now, young Skywalker.  You will die.”

Luke’s theme bursts through as Vader picks up the emperor and throws him over the railing to his death.

All the themes fade as Vader collapses to the ground, exhausted. 

Vader is mortally wounded in the attack, and Luke tries to help him to his shuttle.  The death star is in chaos.  Vader stops Luke along the way and asks Luke to remove his mask, knowing he is about to die.  Luke helps Vader remove his mask and you hear a very light violin rendition of the imperial march as he’s taking it off.  As he speaks his last words the music that plays is a continuation of this on all the lightest instruments that the orchestra could find, including on – what is that, a french horn? – that is otherwise mainly (perhaps exclusively) used for Luke’s theme.

Vader draws his last breath and the well-known main notes of Vader’s theme are played out slowly, one by one, with a harp.  The music that has been used across these films to underscore the main antagonist is now being used to show that there was in fact still good in him.  It’s strikingly beautiful, and transcends dialogue.

It’s also pretty easy to pick up on.  I’ve been watching these films with a pretty critical eye, but was watching Jedi with my wife – she picked up on and pointed out this use of the harp-played Vader’s theme before I was able to say anything about it.  Things in the original trilogy are kept simple to keep them powerful.  Parsimony is the bedfellow of fine focus.  John Williams has received a lot of accolade for his original trilogy scores, and it’s well deserved.  

John Williams also had the (mis)fortune of working on the prequel trilogy.  What was he able to deliver there?

I own copies of all the Star Wars soundtracks, which does mean that yes at one point I went out and even bought copies of the prequel soundtracks (along with also buying DVDs of the prequels at some point).  I always thought that there were two things weird about these soundtracks.  The first was that they were only one CD, while the original trilogy soundtracks were two CDs.  The second was that the songs weren’t even ordered on the CD based on the movie – they were just sort of randomized.

I began to notice one of the potential reasons for this when I was trying to code some of the music in Revenge of the Sith.  It’s actually something I wasn’t expecting, so I didn’t figure out to code it in time, but a lot of scenes just don’t have any score at all.

We can actually figure out some of the discrepancy from looking at the run time of the soundtrack against the run time of the movie:

The astute (or still awake) reader will notice that the score of Return of the Jedi is actually longer than the movie.  This is not due to the fact that the Return of the Jedi soundtrack has extras and alternative versions on it, as I made sure not to include those.  It’s actually because the run time of the movie that I’m using is computed up to but not including the credits – all the calculations I’ve done are based on the length of things without credits, as those are not really a scene.  It’s a minor thing, and if I went back I could fix this graph and make each of the blue bars just a little longer.

It’s rather insignificant to the point of the graph, though.  In Jedi the music follows the story almost exactly.  It’s a big part of the film and helps to support a lot of what is going on.  I could probably pull up a random track and tell you what’s going on in the movie due to how well the music and plot match to each other.

In Revenge of the Sith the music is…well, I don’t even know.  It’s almost an afterthought.  The reason that the CD isn’t in movie order because if it was you might try to do something silly, like sync it up to the movie with the movie muted.  You’d feel kind of silly when your CD ended with an hour remaining in the movie.

There’s also the question of themes.  We’ve discussed how there are clearly identifiable themes in the original trilogy.  In the prequel trilogy the only thing that keeps coming back over and over is ‘Duel of the Fates’ – something that I regarded on first (and repeat) viewing of Phantom Menace as Darth Maul’s theme.  Remember Darth Maul?  He’s still relevant, right?

I tried to listen for unique themes that I could recognize in each of the movies.  We’ll break it down again by scene:

Keep in mind (in many of these graphs, I might add) that Return of the Jedi has 22 fewer scenes, which is why it tends to end earlier on the graph.

So Revenge of the Sith has a little bit of music to set the tone.  Those last three spikes, though, are a scene with the imperial march when Vader and the emperor are overseeing the construction of the death start, and then two scenes with Luke’s theme.

There’s a few other sprinklings of Luke’s theme, a bit of Yoda’s theme, some Duel of the Fates, and even some things that I’m going to call Amidala’s and Anakin’s themes (I think it’s a stretch, though).  It’s just so…half-assed. 

The bottom line is that Revenge of the Sith was so bad that it made John Williams not care.

This brings us to an important question: just how bad is episode III?  Was my initial inclination correct that it’s the strongest of the prequels?

I’m shocked by it, but when I finished watching it I kind of longed to just go back and watch episode I.  That’s right.  The Phantom Menace.  I think The Phantom Menace – with all its many problems – is a better movie than Revenge of the Sith.  I can’t help but shake my head when I try to say that sentence out loud, but I think I have to stick with it.

Even the ridiculous love story of Attack of the Clones seems palatable compared to Revenge of the Sith.  At least it’s a story.

I’m going to have to diverge from common opinion here and say that Revenge of the Sith is the worst of the Star Wars prequels, and by fiat, the worstest Star Wars movie eveeeeeeeer.

It’s partly a problem of doing prequels (so stop doing prequels, everyone!).  You can’t let the characters drive the story because you know they have to get to a certain place.  You can let them drive the story for a while, but then you need to reel them in and have them act completely out of the character that you’ve just built to get them back on track.

By numbering movies before you’ve written all of them you also run the risk of running out of numbers.  Episode III suffers from this as well.  There are things in this movie that should have been cut so that other things could be given enough time to be understandable.  Yoda going to the Wookies has little impact on the story other than to make people say “wow, I know what Wookies are!” and to give Yoda a explanation of not getting wiped out by order 66 or being in the temple when Anakin arrived.  That explanation could have taken a lot less time, or be wrapped up in something else.

I’m just going to toss my first thought out here – maybe Obi-Wan could have acted with patience when he found Grievous, and called in and waited for reinforcements.  The council, recognizing Grievous as an important threat, could have sent Yoda (and maybe another throwaway Jedi or two for Grievous to kill) to help Obi-Wan deal with that threat adequately.  It’s super important that this goes well – remember that the council was more than willing to recall Obi-Wan and Anakin halfway across the galaxy for the opening scene.

Maybe without the Wookie scenes there would be time to show some more of the hints of friendship between Obi-Wan and Commander Cody (the only named clone trooper), and then show Cody’s struggle with executing order 66 or staying true to his friend.  That struggle of Cody’s could be used as the element that allows Obi-Wan and Yoda to escape.  You’d also have an opportunity to feel for one of the clone troopers, as well as learning more about Obi-Wan.  Wow, there’s some character development you get out of it, too.

Special bonus?  Two (or three, or four!) on one light saber battle.  Something for the kids, you know?  A fight with a four-armed guy makes a lot more sense when you have two or three guys working on it, anyway.

Honestly, that didn’t take much thought.  I didn’t pause while writing this to come up with that, nor had I thought about it before.  It literally took almost no time at all.  Like I said earlier, I’m nothing special – get together a bunch of smart people in a room, give them the freedom to express their opinions and be critical, give them some time to brainstorm on this stuff, and you’ll get plenty of ideas that are drastically better than this one in no time at all.

Episode I and II had flaws.  Those flaws were well known before episode III was produced.  Given those flaws, episode III should have received even minimal critical review at the script stage.  It doesn’t feel like it did in the slightest.  What could I say that I haven’t already? 

If you go to the zoo and watch the monkeys long enough, you’ll witness monkeys eating their own feces.  It happens.  Simple biology would point to the fact that this fecal matter will pass through that monkey again, becoming what could be perhaps construed as some sort of concentrated double feces.  That is the best that I can do to describe Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

So, there you go.

You’ve earned some bonus questions by this point, and soon you’ll have them.  First I wanted to just say thanks for reading.  If I had any idea how long this would have become as I was sitting down to write that first post I probably wouldn’t have done it.  It’s been a lot of fun, and I think it’s changed the way I look at these movies.  I hope it’s done the same for you.

Anyway, questions!

– How long has Palpatine been sitting up in this ship captured? I always thought his capture had happened just before the movie starts, and Dooku was in the act of fleeing with his prize (instead of just hanging out in orbit). Later Anakin says that he and Obi-Wan were specifically called back from the outer rim to rescue Palpatine, which means that at least some time has passed. Are they the only Jedi that know how to fly a ship, by the way? Why were they so important to be recalled from their other duties?

– Why doesn’t the trade federation invest in a ton of those tiny droids that latch on and completely destroy your ship? Those would easily take down star destroyers – they might have been able to take down the death star. It’s not designed to deal with single-pilot fighters, how in the world would it ever cope with basketball sized droids?

– How is it that R2 is almost as dexterous as a Jedi in Return of the Sith, but in the original trilogy he can’t do much of anything? Did he take a penalty to DEX for acting out of alignment or something?

– Are the Jedi specifically supposed to be captured? Because there are several places where droids have the drop on them and could easily kill them if they simply shot their blasters.

– Obi-Wan makes exceptionally short work of two of those walking droids that in the prior movie seemed exceptionally difficult for Jedi to deal with, even in one-on-one situations. Has he been training specifically against them? Also, why did they replace the droid destroyers? They can’t be cheaper to make (as fully humanoid robots would be), and they’re barely better than the regular droids.

– Why does Obi-Wan not lose his legs when they’re crushed by a metal platform against a metal floor? I remember wondering this in theaters, and maybe it’s just a bad angle or bad CG.

– If all it took to free Palpatine was to wave a hand anywhere remotely near the locks why didn’t they do that when they first entered the room? Sure, Palpatine isn’t a Jedi, but he would at least not be a (literal) sitting duck if Dooku actually wanted him dead. I mean, just show Anakin fiddling with something on the side of the chair for 2 seconds.

– Seriously, where did the clones get those ships? Why is this never addressed? Why are the clones important at all, compared to these ships?

– When the ship starts to plummet toward the planet gravity goes all screwy. This is a ship that spends most of its time in space, right? So, I guess the artificial gravity was knocked out, sure. This ship starts in medium to high orbit around Coruscant. Coruscant is not shown to have any reasonably different gravity than Earth. The International Space Station operates in low-Earth orbit. Pull up a video of the space station crew floating around in what is effectively zero g. Gravity is an inverse square laaaaaaaaaw.

– For that matter, why would a ship that high in orbit immediately plummet toward the ground with the same force as if it had been a stone pushed off the edge of a table?

– Is Grevious in on the conspiracy too? Why not just let all three of them die trapped in the ray shield? Also, add ray shield to the list of super overpowered devices that could single-handely win the war if used wisely instead of just once. Let’s check in on that list: droid destroyers, Gungan energy balls, flying droid basketballs, ray shields, patience.

– In another situation where the Jedi seem to be full instigators of this war, Grevious brings Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Palpatine to the bridge for ‘negotiations’. If he wanted them dead, he could have easily killed them in the ray shield. Obi-Wan responds to Grevious acting fairly peacefully by breaking out of his bonds and attempting to kill everyone in the room. Then, once people (sorry, droids) are simply running away he and Anakin wrap things up by brutally killing them as they flee.

– Why is it that every other droid stops working when you decapitate it, but Grevious’ guards don’t need their head at all to function? Why even put a head on them? Is it just like a place where you can store stuff? Like your keys?

– What does Grevious do to the ship to make it start crashing? It seems perfectly stable before he jumps out the window, then after he does that there are just random explosions and the ship starts to break in half. I guess that was a load-bearing window?

– When did Obi-Wan get a sense of humor? In the last movie he was super job-focused and stern and in this movie he’s constantly cracking jokes.

– Why would Corusant have any land dedicated to what is effectively an airport? Since there are no ships in this universe that rely on air moving over wings to produce lift, there are no ships that require more than their footprint to take off or land. There is not a single ship present in any movie that needs any significant ground to take off. Now, Coruscant would likely have plenty of spaceports – oh, wait, we’ve already seen a bunch in prior movies. They’re just places you park your ship next to, or fields where you land it gently in an area exactly its size. Star destroyers land at the end of Attack of the Clones, and they just go gently up and down – no runway needed. Runways are for craft that either need a distance to get up to speed to generate lift, or for those that have no means of landing other than…well, controlled freefall. There would be no reason for a runway to exist on Coruscant, and on a planet that is utilizing 100% of space (the whole planet is one big city!) there’d be no reason to keep any around even if they were a throwback to a forgotten age. Let’s consider – Anakin doesn’t seem to have very much control of the ship at all. At best he might be able to make exceptionally minor pitch yaw and roll changes, but certainly none to speed, as the ship is basically in semi-controlled freefall. That means there are either a lot of runways (for no reason), or he just happened to be aimed at the one remaining one that’s on the Coruscant Registrar of Historic Places or something. Whoops, sorry about destroying that historic air control tower.

– The ship is plummeting toward the ground at or near terminal velocity. Other ships come along side and start shooting something at the fires to put them out. The streams of liquid don’t seem at all impacted by the fact that well…wind. I’ve heard people come up with the notion that this is super special heavy firefighting liquid that would like fall faster or be resistant to air pressure or something, because this is a situation that happens all the time, right? I guess that would explain why Coruscant had so many runways. If you were spraying this stuff not in full freefall you’d need that much extra pressure to ever send it any distance, which would simply be ineffectual. That said, even if this was molten lead it is still subject to some pretty simple physical forces that are simply not on display.

– Anakin says they (him and Amidala) don’t need Obi-Wan’s help, and implies that they can handle things on their own. So, then next thing he does is go to Yoda. Why? He’s shown to be much closer to Obi-Wan.

– Amidala suggests that Anakin talks to Palpatine to try to get him to go back to negotiations to try to bring a peaceful end to the war. Anakin gets super angry and tells her that ‘she sounds like a separatist’ and that she should ‘bring that up in the senate where it belongs’. Why are the Jedi so intent on waging a full out war with no end when in the prior movies they are set up as ‘guardians of the peace’ and say that they ‘cannot fight a war for you’? Guess what, Jedi? You’re not only fighting a war, you’re leading a war.  Also, why does Amidala continue to take all this abuse?  Did she develop all these self-esteem issues while she was child ruler of an entire planet?

– In episode II they go all out to catch Dooku because they say that if they can catch him they will instantly win the war. At the start of episode III they kill Dooku, but fail to catch Grevious. Shortly thereafter, they say ‘if we catch Grevious it will end this war’. How many times will it take them to catch on that there might be a second in command?

– Obi-Wan’s eye color and hair. OBI-WAN’S EYE COLOR AND HAIR.

– Grevious has a reach that exceeds the length of a lightsaber, and he has with him four lightsabers. All he has to do is sweep two lightsabers each in different, paired directions, at a distance apart just longer than a normal lightsaber. Unblockable. Or swing two in that fashion and stab with the third. Or just clap two of them together from opposite sides at the same time. Or, you know, just let Obi-Wan win. Grevious has to be in on this plan, too, right?

– Since when do blasters set things on fire? Like, upon hitting something errupt into flame? Is Grevious made of combustible material?

– Why does Anakin change his mind so incredibly fast after Mace is killed? He’s immediately regretful that he helped Palpatine, and originally came there to arrest him. The only thing that Palpatine is holding over him is the power to save people from dying in childbirth, and then Palpatine is like “oh yeah, I totally don’t know to do that, but I’ll definitely look into it”. Why doesn’t Anakin go get some other Jedi or just try to kill Palpatine right there? If the idea is that he’s giving in to his anger he should be pretty angry at Palpatine at this point.

– To go back to my questions about episode II, Obi-Wan in episode III says that the Chancellor will not be able to control the thousands of planets in the republic, while Dooku claimed that at least 10 thousand would defect from the republic to the separatists’ cause. Order of magnitude discrepancies here.

– Before Nute Gunray is killed he says that ‘the war is over’ and that ‘Darth Sideous promised us peace’. This further gives evidence that if the Jedi had tried to negotiate at any point they might have found themselves in an interesting discussion.

– Who is the video editor in the Jedi archive? Or is Obi-Wan just really really good at search queries? The notion of “let’s look at the security footage” leads to pulling up the 5 seconds of important footage from two different time points and areas – why would the emperor even have come to the Jedi temple anyway?

– Anakin says that the Jedi turned against him? Which ones? Mace? By that point he had apologized to Obi-Wan for his earlier actions, and was in the process of redeeming himself in Mace’s eyes. He had no reason to believe that any Jedi had turned against him at that point, unless you count fighting back turning against him when he came to kill them.

– Why is governor Tarkin on the bridge with the Emperor and Vader? 20 years pass before he is relevant. As a governor he can’t be that important, other than what he will eventually become.

And a few questions about Return of the Jedi:

– The opening crawl says that the new death star is even more powerful? How?

– When Luke comes to Jabba he walks in – peacefully – and simply turns away the guards with the Jedi mind trick.  In the prequels those guards would have been cut to CGI pieces. Why would Luke not just slaughter them?  They don’t have names and they’re not people, so it’s totally okay to just kill them, right?  I’m so confused after watching the prequels.  So confused.

– When the sail barge is hit is lists to the side, but why would it stay up at all?

– Why would they bring the droids to Endor at all?  Is hilly forest one of R2’s favored terrains? 

– Can anyone just jam anyone’s comlinks on speeder bikes? Why would it be the center switch? Wouldn’t that be something important?

– Why have we as a culture allowed Lucas to go in and make horrible changes to these movies?

If you came here today looking for the last of the Star Wars posts, my apologies.  As I suspected – and mentioned last week – I simply haven’t had time to put together the Revenge of the Sith/Return of the Jedi post given the holiday week.

This week’s post is going to be a bit shorter – at least compared to the last few – and I figured that I would focus on two of things that are likely to come up in a lot of conversations this week.  Those two things are Twinkies and turkey.

If you haven’t heard that Twinkies might be going away you might want to stop reading for a moment to spend some time on Google to catch up.  It got me to thinking about how many Twinkies might be eaten in an average year.  Given the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, that then got me thinking about how much turkey Americans eat on Thanksgiving.

This post, then, makes for a bit of trivia to talk about around the table while waiting for all that turkey.  That bit of trivia will come as the answer to the question:

Are there more calories in the world’s annual consumption of Twinkies, or in Americans’ single-day Thanksgiving consumption of turkey?

To answer this question it requires pulling some data down from the internet, some data that has the potential to be fairly unreliable.  To that end I have tried to verify numbers that I’ve found with as many sources as possible, or come to a reasonable number that seems to be the average of those that I’ve found.

The first bit of information that we need is the number of Twinkies consumed each year.  It seems that the internet is in fairly good agreement that the number of Twinkies sold each year is somewhere 500 million.  This doesn’t mean that 500 million Twinkies are consumed – just sold – but this is a good number to start with.

Twinkies are also pretty easy to pin down calorically – there are 150 in each individual Twinkie.

That means that the calories consumed via Twinkies over the course of a year comes to right around 75 billion calories.

75,000,000,000 calories.

Now that you know that, feel free to speculate on the over/under for turkey.

Like I said, there’s a little less consensus on the exact amount of turkey eaten on a given Thanksgiving, but it looks like there’s some agreement that the number of pounds eaten last year was somewhere around 650 million.

Calories are trickier, as different parts of a turkey are drastically different in terms of fat content and thus caloric density.  The most calorically dense part of turkey would be dark meat, skin on, which clocks in at right around 1,000 calories per pound.  If everyone was eating only dark meat skin on turkey, this would be be an even 650 billion calories.

650,000,000,000 calories is almost an order of magnitude higher than that calories in Twinkies, but it’s also the case that this is the absolute worst case scenario.  There’s also a lot of meat on a turkey that’s a lot less calorically dense.

The meat with the least calories is skinless white meat, which is only around 600 calories a pound.  If everyone was eating skinless white meat on Thanksgiving, that would be 390 billion calories.

350,000,000,000 calories is quite a bit less than the 650 billion from all dark meat, but still five times as many calories as a year’s worth of Twinkies.

If we assume that a bird is an even mix of meat that averages somewhere around 800 calories we’d come up with 520,000,000,000 calories, probably the safest estimate we can make without digging quite a bit deeper for better numbers.

There’s also the fair point that I’m having trouble distinguishing whether or not the numbers I’m finding are taking into account the meat that is eaten or the weight of the bird.  If things were a little closer I’d worry about this, but even if we say that half of every bird is bone and other inedible bits we’re still well above the annual number for Twinkies.  

So, Americans on Thanksgiving will consume more calories in turkey alone than the entire world will consume in Twinkies over the course of a year.  Keep in mind that this is only turkey – when’s the last time you had a Thanksgiving dinner that had nothing aside from turkey?  I’m betting the calories from everything else on the plate at least double this amount, if not more.

Anyway, feel free to use this knowledge to create some conversation at the dinner table, or have people take sides on it, issue some bets, take a house rake, and earn yourself some easy money.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Welcome back to the second part of the second part of the Star Wars comparisons.  Wednesday I talked about quite a few things that differ between The Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones, but really only touched the tip of the iceberg.  Because of that, I wanted to put together a special extra post to cover one more thing that I wanted to talk about after watching both movies.

That one thing is love, and how love is displayed in each of the movies.  Awwwww.

To the nature of the subject it’s inherently harder to quantify, though I will stick to my guns on the claim that if you can’t measure it, you don’t understand it.   

The comparison of the love stories between Empire and Clones is actually pretty interesting due to the fact that in the big picture they’re somewhat similar.  Two characters who start off as friends are placed in danger, grow together over their experiences in the movie, and fall in love.  Sounds simple enough, right?

The love story in Clones is between Anakin and Amidala, and in Empire it’s between Han and Leia.  George Lucas probably watched Empire a few times, right?  I bet that he can come up with something that works – even if not quite as effectively – in the same way as in Empire, right?  Let’s take a look. 

In Empire, only 6 minutes into the action, Han tells the general that he needs to leave to pay off Jabba the Hutt.  The general says he’s a good pilot and it’s a shame to see him leave, but he understands.  He says goodbye to Leia, who responds somewhat unemotionally.  Han becomes frustrated, and storms off.

Leia pursues him into the hallway and tries to convince him to stay.  She says that ‘we need you’, and Han comes back with ‘we need you?  well what about you?’  Han has already expressed that he’s interested in Leia (back in A New Hope when he asks Luke if he thinks a guy like him could work with a girl like her), and you’re clearly seeing his frustration that he thinks Leia is holding something back.

He says things like ‘afraid I was going to leave without a goodbye kiss?’  Her response is ‘I’d just as soon kiss a Wookie!’, to which he exclaims ‘I can arrange that!  He could use a good kiss’, and stomps off.

He’s going to leave – he goes back to the hanger to take off, and turns off his communicator.  C3P0 has to come and deliver a message by hand that Leia is trying to contact him (about Luke being missing).  Han continues to visibly express frustration with the situation (such as responding to the claim that his tauntaun will freeze with the line “then I’ll see you in hell!), and when he’s forced to stay (by Luke’s disappearance, Chewie working on the ship, and the imperial attack) you start to cheer for the romance because even Han had basically given up on it.

Leia is fighting for him to stay, and at that point either doesn’t feel anything more for him or simply won’t reveal it.  She has a good excuse to want him to stay as a good pilot, so she doesn’t actually have to reveal anything more than that.

Later in the film, after Leia has started to see a different side of Han, they are captured and Han is set to be frozen in carbonite.  It’s at that point that she is brought to the same hallway discussion – Han is being removed from her and this time she realizes that it’s not just the pilot she was trying to keep, it was Han.  She tells Han that she loves him right before she is about to lose him and he replies with the downright phenomenal line “I know.”

The line isn’t good because it’s cold or emotionless – I’d argue it actually carries more emotion than most lines in any of the prequels – it’s good because Han is having the same conversation with her that he had in the hallway earlier in the film.  At that point on Hoth Han was trying to get Leia to admit she had feelings for him, something that he already suspected.  In this sense, he did already know that she loved him.  He simply had to wait the rest of the movie for her to understand it the same way he had.

Han could have just as well said something like “it’s about time” – the fact is that he’s already displayed in his actions throughout the rest of the movie that he loves her too.  He doesn’t need to express that to her in words, because by her admission he now sees that she is on the same page that he was on back on Hoth.  Making it as simple as words cheapens it, and moreover it underestimates the audience’s capability to draw those connections themselves.

Now, let’s consider the ‘very similar’ situation in Attack of the Clones.

Anakin shows up on scene with Amidala and she is pleased to see him.  He makes a number of awkward and creepy comments, and she laughs them off.  It’s his free pass – he’s an awkward kid having an awkward moment and stumbling over his words when nervous.

He tells the audience (via a conversation with Jar Jar) not that he loves Amidala, but that he is obsessed with her in an unhealthy way.  He thinks about her every day since they were separated back when he was nine, etc.  Jar Jar (!) and Obi-Wan act as voices of reason and say that he shouldn’t worry, that Amidala was happy to see him and basically imply that they’re still friends.

Anakin responds to this advice by continuing to be creepy and obsessive, to the point that Amidala comes out several times with stern statements like “stop looking at me like that…It makes me feel uncomfortable”.  Amidala expresses no feelings for Anakin, nor does she have any reason to even keep him around.  Unlike Leia, who needs Han for his piloting skills (and his ship), Anakin is a completely interchangeable piece in this puzzle.

Even if it is the case that a Jedi is needed for protection Amidala could easily go to the council and request someone different, or even ask for Obi-Wan to work alone this one time.  They are not stuck in space, they are in the capital city of the capital planet.  They are literally a short trip away from the densest population of Jedi in the universe.

Let me walk that one by you again.

Anakin could be made to be special or useful for being a Jedi if they happened to be somewhere that Jedi were in short supply – say, Naboo or Tatooine.  The point at which Anakin has already totally creeped out Amidala several times over (not to mention angered and disobeyed Obi-Wan) is when they are still on Coruscant.  Being a Jedi on Coruscant is like being an ‘actor’ or ‘writer’ in Hollywood.  You’re not that unique – have too many problems and even the vague threat of replacement should come up.  Especially if you’re someone who was only admitted to the order with strong hesitance for fear of the problems you might cause.

By all rights Amidala should request a different Jedi, as she has to continue to have “no means no” discussions with Anakin over and over.  She should absolutely protest the idea of being shipped off to a planet alone with him given all the conversations they’ve already had and the concern she has over and over expressed.  Can I go back and use a stronger word than absolutely there?  Can I put it in double italics?  If a Jedi knight is necessary for the trip (why is that again?) let us not forget that Anakin is still in training, let alone showing huge problems with self-control.    

In Empire, Leia begins to see a different side of Han.  In Clones, nothing changes.  Amidala gives the same “no means no” speech over and over with growing looks of concern.  You don’t start to feel for Anakin, you start to feel for her.  The only thing that actually changes is that the voices of reason (Obi-Wan and – I cannot believe I’m typing this, Jar Jar Binks) are removed from the picture and Anakin is free to be as creepy and obsessive as possible.  Anakin and Amidala eventually kiss, and she immediately pushes away and says “no means no” again, expressing great regret that it had happened.  What does Anakin do?  He now begins to obsess over the kiss itself, saying things like:

“From the moment I met you, all those years ago, a day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t thought of you. And now that I’m with you again, I’m in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you makes my stomach turn over – my mouth goes dry. I feel dizzy. I can’t breathe. I’m haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything you ask… ”  

This is supposed to be romantic, kids.  This is how you treat a lady.

Is there any surprise that the generation that this was aimed at grew up to embrace the Twilight books?

To be fair, there’s some points in Empire where Han has lines that – delivered incorrectly – might be construed to be as creepy as some of Anakin’s.  When in the asteroid field the ship shakes and Han catches Leia.  Once it stops moving Leia peacefully says “let go of me.”  Han, in frustration, says “don’t get exited” to which Leia responds “captain, being held by you isn’t quite enough to get me excited.”  Leia is (successfully) expressing her frustration with the situation of being pursued by the Empire and directing it at Han.  Han, also frustrated, throws back the line “sorry sweetheart, we don’t have time for anything else”, while leaving.

On paper, it’s kind of a creepy line, but in delivery it comes off not as a threat, but as something said to intentionally anger Leia.  Han is trolling, basically. He also uses the same coping mechanism he used earlier – leaving.  Anakin’s delivery, on the other hand, always ends with him giving a creepy stalker smirk or smile as Amidala leaves.  I swear, just toss it on, mute it, and watch Anakin.  He’s not trying to anger Amidala, he’s trying to lure her into his windowless van.   

In Empire, Han and Leia kiss (fairly consensually!) at the end of a somewhat tense discussion, but are interrupted by C3P0.  Leia makes a quick exit and Han yells at him, but otherwise doesn’t dwell on it.  He doesn’t go back to his bunk and cry while writing in his diary, he moves on and realizes that if Leia had wanted to kiss him it will happen again.  She does.

There’s a good contrast between the capture of Han and Leia and Leia’s admission of love to the capture of Amidala and Anakin and Amidala’s admission of love.  Leia’s makes sense, and it’s been building all movie.  She’s not about to die, she’s about to lose (for the second or third time in the movie) someone she has come to realize she cares about.  Amidala’s doesn’t make sense given her actions the rest of the movie, and you get the feeling that it’s kind of situational (she is about to die).  She’s reached the bottom and just wants to go out with a bang.  It’s like kissing the passenger next to you on a plane plummeting toward the ground.  A spur of the moment kiss in the face of death does not a love story make.

Surprise!  They live, and what next?  Well, immediate secret marriage, of course.  Twilight novels, eat your heart out.  

So how to measure it?  By this point I’m sure you’re itching for some graphs.

This train of thought got me thinking about two things.  The first is the situations into which the characters are placed.  Anakin and Amidala spend a good chunk of the middle of Attack of the Clones alone together.  It’s as if Lucas realized that all it takes for two people to fall in love is a little bit of alone time on a pretty planet.  Did Han and Leia need alone time to get to know each other?  Let’s see.

This graph shows the distribution of scenes in which the focus of the scene is devoted to the two characters on screen alone.  This allows for scenes like the one where C3P0 stumbles in, as the main focus of the scene is the part where Han and Leia are alone, not where C3P0 enters.  This also means that I don’t have to go back and code down to the second the time that these characters are alone – by that we’ll have to consider the above a reasonable approximation.

I feel like the subtleties of this graph should be explained in detail to every teenage boy.  Your failures in love might not be attributable to the idea that you simply can’t find a way to create alone time, it might actually be that you’re trying so hard to create a one on one situation that you’re failing to capitalize on time where you’re not alone.

Do keep in mind, the blank spots on this graph are not just the places where these characters are on screen and not alone, but also the time devoted to all the other characters in the movie.

If you’ve ever thought that calculus isn’t applicable in real life, we can take some integrals of the above graph by movie to figure out how much time in each movie is devoted to scenes in which these characters are alone.  In Empire, it’s a clean 15 minutes, or right there at an even 1/8th of the running time of the movie.

In Attack of the Clones it’s a touch longer – 32 minutes is devoted to Anakin and Amidala sitting in fields looking at waterfalls, etc.  For a full half hour you are sitting and watching Anakin and Amidala roll around in fields, or gaze out over lakes, or have formal dinner dates.  Clones is a longer movie, but not that much longer.  These scenes account for 24% – just shy of 1/4 of the run time of the movie.

So how is this extra time spent?  Well, I’ve talked about Anakin’s creepy stares and windowless van, so let’s take a look at that.

I’ve attempted to come up with some level of how creepy some of the dialogue between these two characters in the movie is, on a three point scale.  A rating of 1 is something that might sound worse than it is out of context, or has a reasonable explanation.  A rating of 2 is something that’s a bit worse, or something that has a less tangible situational explanation.  A rating of 3 are the things that should start to frighten the other person.      

There has to be something that Empire is going to have more bars of, right?  How about this?

Clones and Empire are both movies about persistence and pursuit.  In Empire, the crew of the Millenium Falcon persistently try to escape the pursuit of the empire.  In Clones, Anakin persistently pursues Amidala.

One of these movies has a character who admits to and continues to act on obsessive tendencies.  One of these movies has high levels of creepy dialogue, and a couple that is forced to spend creepy alone time together for little reason.  One of these movies has a character that over and over rebukes completely unwarranted sexual advances.  One of these movies ends with a secret marriage.

Oh, wait, all of those things happen in Clones.  In Empire, the characters try to distance themselves from each other, act in ways human adults often do, and spend very little time completely alone together.  Leia doesn’t fully rebuke Han’s actions, but rather starts to allow them to happen.  Empire does not end with a marriage, it ends with one of the characters (basically) being killed – see my last post for a better justification of saying Han is functionally dead.

Take a look at the first graph again – the last time Anakin and Amidala spend completely alone (the droids are at the wedding) is the scene in which Amidala admits her feelings and they kiss right before the arena.  After that they never have any other conversations about each other or spend any time alone (until super secret marriage).  It’s like the whole plot was a build up to that kiss, and then once it’s happened the next logical step is marriage.  They don’t need to talk about it – it is that universally understood to be the outcome.

If the Empire plot is building to the kiss and admission of love right before Han is frozen, well – spoiler alert – the next thing that happens is that Han is frozen.  Looks like Darth Vader and Boba Fett ruined the next logical step of secret marriage.  Darn.  That has to be a bummer.  So that’s why everyone is sad.

I think I’ve made my point on this one?  Hopefully.

If you’re still reading, though, thanks and congrats!  I mentioned that I wrote down questions I had while watching episode II, and if you’ve made it through all this love story stuff you’re now only lines away from reaping your reward.  Continue, and read what I think can be best described as they were by a friend commenting on the last post:  “accurate and depressing”

By the way, I cannot believe that I had this many questions about episode II.  Keep in mind, I was just watching the movie normally and coding for other things – I was not watching with an intent to find these questions – they just jump out at you.  This is the leftovers (the B side, if you will), not the focus.

– In episode I, while Amidala and Palpatine are in the senate, Palpatine points out the then Vice Chancellor as the embodiment of the main problem with the senate. He implies that the Chancellor is easily bribed and influenced by this guy, and really just kind of lays into him as a bad person. So, in the opening scenes of episode II, why is this guy still seemingly serving under Palpatine? I could see if it was a Sith ploy, but wouldn’t Amidala say something? She’s in the room.  Does she not remember?  Later, in the most contrived and manipulative tone ever, he’s the one that says ‘This is a crisis – the senate must vote the chancellor emergency powers’. This is the line that guilts Jar Jar into putting forward that motion.

– Why doesn’t Jango Fett just kill Amidala himself? I could understand if he didn’t want to be connected to it, for instance if he was going to have an alibi of being somewhere else when it happened. Nope, he’s on Coruscant, in full armor, watching it all happen. If he really wanted Amidala dead why not just crash the place with his jetpack after both Jedi leave chasing the diversion?  He’s supposed to be a pretty top notch bounty hunter, right? They’d get back, Amidala would be dead, and they’d be kind of out of luck.  You know, unless he dropped a really unique poison dart that could be traced to the last place he was.

– This is covered a lot over in the RedLetterMedia reviews, but there’s such a lost opportunity for character development when Obi-Wan jumps out the window after the droid. He has just finished thoroughly feeding it to Anakin about how they’re not supposed to be launching an investigation and how Anakin should be more patient and stop rushing into things, and that Anakin is basically a short-sighted loose cannon. If Anakin jumped out the window it would be completely consistent with his character, and also consistent with Obi-Wan’s to go follow him. It would help develop both characters, instead of stunting both of them.  Obi-Wan doing it is like the good cop shooting a guy in the face while the bad cop is out getting him ice cream. Honestly, the character painted to that point of Anakin doesn’t even seem like one that would chase after Obi-Wan, but rather one that would stay with and protect Amidala (perhaps rightly so). This may seem small, but I think this is one of the largest lost opportunities of any of the movies.

– So, Jango says ‘his client’ is getting impatient. That means that someone hired Jango, who hired the shape-shifter, who used a droid. Seems like a good assassination attempt would involve a lot fewer middlemen. Outsource much?  I can’t wait for the special edition where the droid hires another droid to do the job.

– It seems like there are so many better ways for a shapeshifter to kill someone. So many that I’m not going to list them. How much is that ineffective droid worth, though? And doesn’t it have a communicator? The shape-shifter is willing to shoot it out of the sky (instead of shooting Obi-Wan, who was actually a larger target), so it can’t be worth much. When things go south why not just send it higher and higher into the atmosphere? Or, say, the opposite direction?

– Anakin stops following the shapeshifter at one point to take ‘a shortcut’. A shortcut to where? If he knew where he was going in the first place, why even have a chase? How unique is the ship that the shapeshifter is flying? If he was just picking out a ship from the crowd that was fairly common it would be like jumping off a highway bridge to try to land on a that ‘unique’ white Toyota Corolla. Oops, sorry sir, wrong white Toyota Corolla.

– In the club scene, Obi-Wan uses the force to stop a death stick dealer from selling his wares. It’s not even implied that death sticks are illegal – maybe they’re like devil sticks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_sticks) , which also have an unfortunately evil sounding name. Obi-Wan actually ‘sends him home to rethink his life’. That seems pretty over the top and heavy handed from a Jedi. Is their job to impose social norms and serve as a morality patrol?  Do they do this all the time?  Is that one of the risks of living on Coruscant?  Imagine if there were Jedi just wandering around the world stopping you from doing things they didn’t like.  Sounds like fun.

– The shapeshifter seemed to be planning to kill Obi-Wan with a blaster. Why, then, would she be trying to get in arms’ reach of him?  And why not kill him with a blaster earlier, when she shot down the droid?  It was actually easier than just shooting down the droid.

– In episode I, Obi-Wan and Captain Panaka seem to be the most level headed and practical characters, and also the best tacticians. Despite this, they are both left on the ship while the weakest parts of the crew head into dangerous situations. When Anakin and Amidala are leaving for Naboo, Obi-Wan and Captain Typho (at that point the two most security-minded and capable characters) look on and exchange worries while they let the two weakest characters again leave on their own.  Both express concern of what might happen to them.  Maybe, you know, tell someone who cares?

– The Jedi librarian says “if an item does not appear in our database, it does not exist”. Does that mean that the archive is no longer updated when they find or discover something new? Or do the librarians just not have object permanence?

– When Obi-Wan is looking for Camino he says “gravity is pulling all the stars in the area to this spot”. How big is the Camino system’s star? Even if we’re just talking about other stars orbiting the system that seems like it would be pretty massive (otherwise they’d be orbiting in a much different fashion).

– The younglings don’t have a new idea. Obi-Wan had said pretty much the same thing to the librarian, that maybe the archive was incomplete. If Obi-Wan believed the librarian he should have just yelled the same thing back at the kid: “if an item doe not appear in our database, it does not exist!”

– Amidala was an elected queen? Also the youngest? What credentials did she have to serve as queen? Is Naboo a matriarchy?  Do they ever have kings?  Are they required to wear all that makeup as part of the job?

– Anakin really just likes picking fights with everyone. Not a question, just true.

– Right before Anakin and Amidala kiss, Amidala gives Anakin a look that reads as ‘look, how many times do I have to tell you that no means no?’ She has said it several times already, and after he starts to kiss her, she pushes away and says ‘no’ again. Is this what Lucas thinks courtin’ should look like?

– Later, in what I dub the ‘fireside chat’, Anakin basically begs Amidala to be with him. She again rebukes his advances and tries to send him away. I’d say you have to dig to find some of this, but it’s worse than Twilight. Anakin is coming off as a super creepy, desperate stalker.  Why has she put up with this the entire movie?

– If Anakin and Amidala are trying to be covert about their whereabouts, why do they hire a fancy looking droid rickshaw to take them through the streets of a major city? Wouldn’t that raise some suspicion? They couldn’t have walked? They left Coruscant traveling as commoners, so that they wouldn’t be tracked as easily.  Also, the droid pulling the rickshaw is one of the droids that was earlier shown on the tvs in the bar as part of the droid football league (yeah, you remember that now, right?). Is ‘rickshaw attendant’ the career path after you get too old to play robot football?  Or did the rickshaw droids just decide that they would be great at football in their spare time?

– Jango drops charges from his ship that visually explode, then moments later make an explosion noise. Is the idea supposed to be that you’re experiencing the sound/light speed differential, like seeing lightning before you hear thunder? In space? You know, where there’s no medium for the transmission of sound?

– First off, Jango needs a better targeting system. But, in true ‘now that the shields are back up no one shoots at us ever again’ fashion, Jango stops using his lasers the second that they are shown to be effective. Seriously. He makes several direct hits to Obi-Wan’s hull and droid, showing that any shields he has are down, and that the targeting is zeroed in. (Later, on the planet, the damage is revealed to be devastating – the hull is melted down to ship substructure – droid is totally fine though). Jango is firing upwards of a dozen shots a second, and just four shots did some pretty big damage. What to do in a situation like that? Stop firing lasers, of course – they don’t seem to be working – and prep missiles while also backing off a bit so you can’t see what’s going on. Duh. Basic space battle stuff, guys.

– The scene transition between Anakin looking for clues to find the Tusken Raiders and Obi-Wan spying on the separatists is something that has confused me every time I’ve seen this movie. You go from Anakin searching for something in a rocky desert environment to a scene where it pans down to a character (who looks like Anakin from the distance) sneaking around a rocky desert environment not unlike Tatooine. It flows in my mind that this should still be Anakin. Things zoom in and it’s Obi-Wan, and I always feel a pretty jarring disconnect even though I know it’s coming.

– Dooku says he’s confident that 10,000 more systems will rally to the cause with the support of his little gang. Sure, the universe is pretty big, but it seems like a pretty easy trip from Coruscant (the core of the Republic) to a place like Tatooine, which is summed up best in Luke’s words from A New Hope: “If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” It’s also the case that Dooku is talking about Republic planets defecting to the separatists, which means that there are at least 10,000 planets in the Republic. Are there 10,000 senators? In all six movies we only come across a dozen or so planets – so all the important stuff happens on something on the order of less than 0.1% of planets?  In A New Hope Tarkin says that the Emperor has dissolved the senate, and local governors will now be tasked with keeping order. How large would their jurisdiction have to be? A little hyperbole is fine, but someone really needs to be running conclusions on these numbers that they just pull out of nowhere.  If you just start saying “we just need to say a big number here, how about 20 billion?” you just quickly become Dragonball Z.

– Nute Gunray is having a conversation with Dooku in the hallway when Obi-Wan is spying on them. He asks first ‘is the queen dead yet?’ and then says ‘I’m not signing any treaty until her head is on my desk!’. Less than a minute later they’re in the conference room and Dooku casually mentions that the Trade Federation has pledged their full support. Nute Gunray and the Nemodian Pope both nod in agreement.  What changed?  Why didn’t we get to say it?

– Obi-Wan, with an exceptionally small amount of effort, is able to use a tracking signal to pinpoint that Anakin is not on Naboo, but on Tatooine. Seems like if you were going on a super secret mission you’d turn that off. Also, they left Coruscant on a passenger freighter, and only picked up a random ship on Naboo – presumably just a random ship, and certainly not one that belonged to Anakin. Soooooo, what is Obi-Wan tracking exactly? Anakin himself?  Something in his bags?

– What is Dooku trying to accomplish when talking to Obi-Wan? If he is on the side of the Sith, he’s just revealed their entire hand. But…he’s not, because he’s working with the same guy he reveals. Is he actually trying to destroy the Sith? To me, this is the most confusing scene in any Star Wars movie. I watch it over and over and I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to be taking away from it.

– Jango kills a Jedi that is attacking Dooku. An unnamed, uncredited, non-speaking, CGI Jedi. Doesn’t count.  With all the Jedi they had named and given roles to so far how hard would it have been to have just let one of those die?  Why create a completely new character that we’ve never seen before and have no connection to?

– So, protocol droids and battle droids have completely interchangeable parts?  Good to know.  Seems like Chewie should have had a much easier time putting C3P0 back together in Empire – all his parts are just plug and play.

– I get that the Caminoians are great cloners, and built the clone army.  I am fully willing to take that suspension of disbelief.  I’m on board.  But…who built the ships? The firepower they are able to deliver is devastating to the Trade Federation – if the Caminoians built those ships they should be better known for engineering than for cloning.  Why do they assume that Obi-Wan is there to see the clones?  He should be there to see the ships.  Why do they even need the clones, actually?  They could have bombarded that planet from space, or wait – wait – they could have simply set up a blockade.  Maybe Amidala’s ship got lucky in Phantom Menace, but I doubt that Dooku’s tiny little solar sail would be able to run a blockade of star destroyers.  I guess you wouldn’t want to do the same thing twice, though.

– Was Dooku actually trying to kill Yoda, or just screwing around? He knocks over the pipes or whatever, toward Anakin and Obi-Wan, which causes Yoda to exert all his energy into catching it. Dooku simply runs to his ship and leaves. Seems like all he’d have to do would be turn around, kill Yoda, then let the pipes fall on Anakin and Obi-Wan. Then he doesn’t even have to run to his ship, he’d have all the time in the world. Realistically, he could let Amidala show up, and just kill her too. Separatists win!  Jedi devastated!  Yay!

– Mace, Yoda, and Obi-Wan discuss whether or not Dooku was telling the truth and a Sith is in control of the senate. Seems like all you’d have to do is start at the top (Palpatine) and start asking people to come in for a random blood test. Say there’s a virus going around or something. Do a midicholorian count and boom, there’s your Sith.

– Looking back, there’s more deaths, but I don’t know if there’s any blood. Anakin slaughters tons of Geonosions, but they just kind of fall apart like play doh. When he gets his hand cut off there’s just a smoldering stump. Obi-Wan gets cut up, but gashes just appear. The queen’s handmaiden dies, in an explosion. Shmi has cuts on her face, but just kind of dies of exhaustion. Tusken Raiders just kind of fall apart like there’s nothing in their suits.  In Empire there’s not really blood either, to be fair, but somehow it just feels different.

– Dooku is also able to make it from Geonosis to Coruscant on a solar sail, but Obi-Wan is out of transmitter range from Geonosis to Coruscant (the first time this has ever been brought up as a problem).  How far out is Geonosis, then?  It seems like it would be out on the outer rim if the separatists wanted to stay hidden, so how long of a trip does Dooku actually take?  Ships in the star wars universe that are the size of Dooku’s ship do not tend to have hyperdrive.  It’s why Obi-Wan and Han are confused to find tie fighters out in the middle of nowhere in A New Hope.  Hyperdrives take up entire rooms (as is shown in the Naboo ship in Phantom Menace).  If it was possible to get from Geonosis to Coruscant at sublight speeds, and Naboo is closer to Coruscant than Geonosis, then why didn’t Qui-Gon just take them back to Coruscant at sublight speeds in Phantom Menace?  They might not have had rations, but with 20,000 credits it seems like they could have picked some of those up on the way (easier than replacing the hyperdrive).  Tell me where Dooku’s rations are on his tiny ship, by the way.  Even if we just give in and say that Dooku’s ship had hyperdrive, then why would be need the solar sail?  Why would he not be jumping to hyperdrive the second he was out of atmosphere?  He already has no-solar sail, sublight thrusters to get off the planet, so the solar sail is either for travel between systems (in which case a hyperdrive would be redundant) or is for sublight short distances (in which case the thrusters are redundant.  Seems like someone just read about solar sails and said “woooooooooow, we should have one of those in our movie!”

One other thing came to me about episode I while I was watching all the magic use of communicators in episode II:

Readers, today I envy you.  Today you get to sit back and read about Attack of the Clones (episode II) without actually having to watch Attack of the Clones.  By the way, feel free to toss on Empire (episode V) while you read.  I’d highly recommend it.

If you haven’t picked up on it, this week I worked on the next two films in each of the Star Wars trilogies.  For the original trilogy that means The Empire Strikes Back, and for the prequel trilogy that means Attack of the Clones.

I’m not going to go into as much detail on the opening for this part, as if you want some of the setup and explanation you can start at the first part of this series, here: ( http://theskepticalstatistician.blogspot.com/2012/11/quantifying-star-wars-part-one-episodes.html )

The idea of last week was that lack of character depth could be partly attributed to the breadth of characters introduced.  A sacrifice of quality for quantity, so to speak.  By coding the times in the movies that characters were mentioned, introduced, and killed, it gave a different sort of picture by which to compare the movies.

Spoiler alert: Episode I has a lot of characters, and almost none of them die.  Episode IV has quite a smaller cast, and lots of those characters are eventually killed.  So how do things look if we apply the same sort of coding to episodes II & V?

Well, here’s Empire:

And here’s Clones:

I kept both of these on the same scale that I used for The Phantom Menace to keep things easily comparable across all the movies.  I’m not sure yet if the last two movies will fit, but it’s at least a good sign that both of these movies fit on it. 

The first thing I notice is that fewer characters die in Empire – at least in comparison to the first movie in its trilogy, A New Hope.  In A New Hope characters were killed all over the place – in Empire the number of characters killed is 7.  This is the same number that were killed in The Phantom Menace, but still almost twice as many as are killed in Attack of the Clones.

To be completely fair, two of the ‘deaths’ in Empire are worth discussion.  I am including in them both C3P0 and Han Solo.  Let me explain.  Suffice it to say there will be spoilers (but almost no blood).

Han Solo is tricky, as his freezing in carbonite marks the end of his input into the rest of the film.  He is now simply a stationary prop, not a character.  While the comment is made that he is in perfect hibernation, he is from a character standpoint – all intents and purposes – dead.  This is something that could be debated (and I’d love to hear debate on it), but I’m basing things partly on the fact that from a screenwriting/directing/acting standpoint Harrison Ford has no more work to do.

If I think to other movies for similar situations I’m drawn back to Lord of the Rings, and the character of Gandalf.  If you’re familiar with LOTR this one probably starts to make sense to you, and if you’re not I’m actually not going to spoil this one.  Okay, just a little – Gandalf also gets frozen in carbonite.    

The other character is C3P0, and there’s an interesting contrast to his mortality across these two movies.  In Empire – shortly after arrival in Cloud City – C3P0 wanders off from the group and stumbles into a room of stormtroopers (though it’s only revealed that there are stormtroopers later).  He tries to back out but is shot by a blaster – his parts scattered across the hallway.  He is decapitated by this blast and he appears to lose power, functionally dead.  His broken parts are about to be fed into a furnace when Chewie stumbles upon him.  Chewie doesn’t just turn him back on, he puts his parts in a box.  He starts working on fixing him, but it’s a long process, and likely only possible at all due to Chewie’s mechanical prowess.  C3P0 is barely back together at the end of the film, after intensive work from both Chewie and R2D2.

I tried to think about things as if I had never seen Empire before.  When C3P0 was shot I moved him into the ‘killed’ column.  When he was reactivated by Chewie I moved him out of the ‘killed’ and back into the ‘appeared’ – it’s why you’ll see a ‘takeback’ of sorts in the ‘killed’ curve for Empire.

In Attack of the Clones, C3P0 is also violently decapitated.  Did I have to move him to the ‘killed’ column?  Nope.  He never stops talking.  He’s a little disoriented, but it doesn’t seem to affect him in the slightest.  His body continues walking around, ala Frankenstein.  Shortly after decapitation his head is welded onto a battle droid, and a battle droid head is welded onto his body.  Both continue to express slight disorientation, but also continue to function.  In fact, both continue to act like battle droids, raising some questions about where commands originate in Star Warsian droids.

A blaster shot again violently decapitates the battle droid head off of C3P0’s body, and C3P0’s head is violently pulled off by R2D2, dragged across the ground, and then hastily reapplied.  C3P0 never seems overly concerned (at least by C3P0 standards), but more than that he never comes even remotely close to a state that could be considered ‘killed’, and so no change had to be made to his state on the charts.

Now, it makes sense that there are less deaths in Empire than in A New Hope.  In A New Hope a ton of the deaths happen when Red and Gold Squadrons are assaulting the death star.  They are a dozen or so people assaulting a small moon, and the overwhelming odds pay off in almost complete extermination.

The entire story of Empire is about running away.  The rebels aren’t trying to stop the imperial fleet on Hoth, they’re trying to buy time for a hasty evacuation.  Luke removes himself from both the rebels and the empire and retreats to Dagobah , where there is no signs of war whatsoever.  The Millenium Falcon and its passengers spend the entire remainder of the movie trying to evade and escape imperial pursuit.  The death count is low because they are not fighting, they’re fleeing.  Beyond that, they’re fleeing in a ship that has a history of evasion.

[update – I originally mistakenly cited ‘Dantooine’ instead of ‘Dagobah’, which was caught by a few readers.  Just wanted to point it out as a good situation where a few extra sets of eyes caught something that I would have kept erring on over and over – this is why it pays to pay people to proofread something, regardless of how many times you might have proofed it yourself, Lucas]

Aside from Han and C3P0, which were described above, the only other deaths were a couple members of Rogue Squadron while fighting the Battle of Hoth and a couple members of the imperial fleet that Darth Vader chokes and kills unceremoniously.

Attack of the Clones is about the start of a full-fledged galactic war.  Unlike A New Hope where a small force is looking to exploit a strategic vulnerability, Attack of the Clones involves full scale, army-to-army, open conflict.  We’d expect this situation to prove a bit more fatal…right?

Deaths of actual characters in Attack of the Clones come roughly every 40 minutes or so.  The opening scene involves the death (by explosion) of one of Amidala’s decoys, which seems like it might be setting a pace a little more grim than that of The Phantom Menace.  The next character to die is generic shape-shifting bounty hunter (by poison dart).  An accident-free hour almost elapses before Shim Skywalker is introduced, and almost immediately dies of…exhaustion?  Starvation?  Relief?  Prior wounds?  Boredom?

Slow up to that point, but then a war starts.  A star war.  

Yousa thinking yousa people gonna die?  Well, maybe Jar Jar.  But not if they have names.  Just Jango Fett.

It’s okay that he’s decapitated because he’s wearing a suit and helmet, and it’s functionally almost no different than C3P0’s decapitation.  There’s no blood, no guts, just a lifeless suit and helmet.  It might as well have been some Fullmetal Alchemist action going on there.  At least the suit of armor in Fullmetal Alchemist has some blood in it.  When Jango is killed it doesn’t feel like Jango the guy has been killed.  It feels like Jango the suit of armor has been killed.  It feels like he’s been removed from the suit, and the suit is all that remains.  Do you know what else that removes?  Emotion.      

Anyway, the entirety of Attack of the Clones is as dangerous as…you guessed it – ONE POD RACE.

I want to make one more point on character deaths for a moment.  I’m not going to dwell on it, because you can go back to the last post for more on it, but I want to point out another death that is set up similar to that of Biggs in A New Hope.

At the start of the battle of Hoth, Dak is introduced as Luke’s gunner.  It’s quick, and his main line is “right now I feel like I could take on the whole empire myself!”  In that simple line you get the picture of his character and start to root for him to actually take them on.  Minutes later, Luke fails to pull Dak’s unconscious body out of his speeder after being shot down, and Dak is crushed under the foot of an imperial walker and unceremoniously killed.  It adds to the despair of the audience because moments earlier you were rooting for this kid to take on the empire and he has now (literally) been crushed under them.  You now feel like maybe you can’t take on the empire, and retreat is a reasonable option.  You’re in there with them, and feeling the same emotions and motivations.  These moods and emotions are something we’ll cover in a bit. 

Anyway, deaths aside, we can also just look at how many living characters there are in each of the movies up to this point:

I’m actually surprised how similar the trajectory is between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.  I think the biggest difference is that in Attack of the Clones the audience is introduced to a room of a dozen or so characters almost immediately, which accounts for that early spike.  It raises a good point, as a lot of (but not all) of those characters are characters that have been introduced in Phantom Menace.  What would these lines look like if characters were removed that had already been introduced in the prior movie?
Feel free to speculate on it, but it’s something we’re not quite ready for.  I do plan to look at that after we have all the movies taken care of, though.  

A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are also somewhat similar – I think the biggest difference in those is that the main battles (Hoth & Yavin 4) take place at drastically different points.  These battles are where a lot of characters are introduced all at once.  The Battle of Hoth is basically still in the opening of Empire while the death star run is the close of A New Hope.  It’s a different type of pacing that gives the movies distinct feels.

A New Hope is all about the buildup to the death star run, while Empire is all about the aftermath of Hoth.  It makes A New Hope more about triumph, while Empire is more about futility.  All of the training and running in Empire simply postpones the inevitable.  At the end of A New Hope Luke and Han save the day against all odds.  You cheer with them.  At the end of Empire the odds catch up to them – Luke is no match whatsoever for Vader, and Han is frozen and hauled away by a bounty hunter.  You mourn for them. 

It got me to thinking about how the moods of the films differ between Attack of the Clones and Empire.  It also just got me to thinking about scenes in general.  Before watching either movie again my initial remembrance of Clones was that of a movie that jumped back and forth between Obi-Wan scenes and Amidala/Anakin scenes for most of the movie.  I remember that on first viewing, years ago, I kept finding myself incredibly bored by all the Ami/Ani scenes, and just constantly asking myself ‘I wonder what Obi-Wan is doing?’  

I’m getting ahead of myself.  The important thing here are the scenes of the two different movies.  I decided that this was something else I could code for these two episodes to try to get a little deeper into things.  To start I had to define how I was going to code a scene.

Now, I realize I could just go to the DVD menu and pull up chapters or something, but I don’t think that would be very rigorous.  Instead, I decided that I would define scenes as segments of the movie where action with a set of characters occurred basically uninterrupted and the mood was fairly uniform.

This produced a pretty decent amount of data.  I took note of a lot of stuff, much of which I’m going to hold off on for a second post sometime later this week.  For now we can talk about a few things that I tried to do.
First off, this allowed me to look at the number of scenes in each movie.  Empire had 56 scenes, and Clones had 61, but Clones is also around 15 minutes longer of a movie.  Most scenes in either movie are three minutes or less, so this extra 15 minutes more than allows for those five extra scenes.

One thing I did seem to notice is the fact that scenes in Empire have much softer beginnings and ends, and are really only separated by other scenes.  The action doesn’t really stop, and it gives the feeling that a lot of things are happening at the same time.  In Attack of the Clones the scenes are a lot more self-contained.  The characters involved need to do something, or want to answer a question, or want to get somewhere.  They do it, and the scene is over.

Obi-Wan and Anakin need to meet Amidala.  Obi-Wan and Anakin need to catch the shape-shifter.  Obi-Wan needs to figure out where the dart came from.  Amidala needs to pack.  Anakin and Amidala need to leave the planet.  Obi-Wan needs to find a planet.  Obi-Wan needs to get to that planet.

I could keep going.  I’d rather not.

There’s very few big-picture goals going on in Attack of the Clones.  What little actual big picture goals exist, they’re never really fleshed out.  I guess Obi-Wan is trying to find the killer (despite saying that’s not his job in the opening scene), then later trying to find Jango?  Amidala is trying to pass legislation?

Actually, I just read up on it, and I guess she’s opposed to the legislation.  I remember the opening crawl said she needed to vote on something, but didn’t say vote for which side.  I guess I got that wrong.  Whoops.  Oddly, that doesn’t really change my interpretation of the movie in the slightest.  I guess that’s how important that legislation turned out to be – it might as well have been a minor tax increase or something.

After she voted I guess she was trying to…stay safe until the next vote?  Or did she not vote yet?

Anakin’s goals are easy – he is trying to lure Amidala into his windowless van.  More on that later in the week.

Let me know if you think I’m missing some big picture goals here, but this is what I’m getting at – goals are hard to come by, so we’re stuck with these really small goals, like needing to pack a bag.

In Empire the big picture goals are simple and blatant.  Luke is trying to become a Jedi.  Han and Leia are trying to escape the pursuit of the imperial fleet.  Vader is trying to catch Luke.  All the smaller goals come directly from these larger goals.

Luke is trying to get to Dagobah to become a Jedi.  Luke is trying to find Yoda to become a Jedi.  Luke is trying to master the force to become a Jedi.  Luke is trying to lift the ship out of the water to become a Jedi.  Luke is fighting Vader because he thinks if he wins he’ll show everyone he’s a Jedi.

Han and Leia go into the asteroid field to escape the fleet.  Han and Leia try to fix the ship to escape the fleet.  Han and Leia go to Cloud City to try to get parts to fix the ship to escape the fleet.

Vader sends the probe droid to Hoth to find Luke.  Vader brings the fleet to Hoth to find Luke.  Vader comes to the surface to find Luke.  Vader sends star destroyers into the asteroid field to find Luke.  Vader kills his own officers because he’s angry because he’s not finding Luke.  Vader sets a trap in Cloud City to find Luke.

Is this sinking in?

This sort of aim or aimlessness manifests itself in the mood of scenes in each movie.  In Empire, the story of Luke and Vader is that of frustration and anger.  Luke is frustrated that he can’t become a Jedi faster and gets angry, eventually directing this anger at Vader.  Vader is frustrated that he can’t find Luke, and directs his anger at his own officers.  The story of Han and Leia is one of escape and despair.  The empire is constantly on their heels, they have very few small victories, and a lot more setbacks.

In Attack of the Clones, the Obi-Wan story comes off as a murder mystery.  He’s constantly looking for something, but it’s completely unclear to the audience (and him) what it is.  He’s in libraries and diners and sneaking around places.  Unlike Vader and Luke or Han/Leia and the imperial fleet, Obi-Wan has no true antagonist.  There’s nothing and no one for him to play off of or share motivation with.

Amidala and Anakin are similarly lacking any antagonist, unless you count themselves as each other’s.  Tell me, why are Amidala and Anakin having a picnic in front of waterfalls?  Why are they having a fancy dinner?  Why are they riding native animals?  Why are they getting married?

Seriously, I get the heavy-handed overtones telling me that it’s supposed to be a love story, but there is simply no love on display at any part of this movie.  Love was never the dominant mood of any singular scene.  Anakin and Amidala are not doing these things because they are in love, they are doing these things so that they will eventually have a reason (if you think they eventually do) to say that they’re in love.  There is a much longer discussion to be had here about the contrasting love stories of Empire and Clones, but I think I am going to push it off until later in the week as it’s exceptionally harder to quantify, and I want to talk about actual things that were coded in this post.

Speaking of, the coding of scenes is what got me to thinking about the things in the last few paragraphs.  Before sitting down to either movie I decided to simply code each scene with one word (sometimes two) that reflected the overarching mood of the scene.  I had very few preconceptions of how this would work out, and it’s only by doing it that I think I realized some of the main themes that were present in each movie.

Beyond that, I had to come up with ways to identify each scene, and I was looking for ways to keep myself entertained.  To that end I also tried to come up with good names for each scene.  I had more fun with this than I should have.  Disney, please feel free to use these names for any upcoming DVD releases.

I can’t quite measure this in any easy way, but the more the scene delivered a sense of meaning the more I should be able to encapsulate that meaning in a title that speaks to all of you, right?

That’s a long setup for a long table, so here it is:

        
So, spend some time with that, see with what you come up with.  I really tried to come up with valid and simple adjectives for each scene (the simpler the adjective the better), but there were some places where things just took a little more.

For example, there are a lot of scenes in Empire that are dominated by despair.  I used the adjective despair for a number of scenes, but then came up to two that were dominated by despair to such a high level that I had to append them with ‘absolute’.  The first of these two scenes are when Han goes out (to his presumed death) to hunt for Luke (who is presumed already dead) in the snowstorm, and the rebels have to close the main doors behind him.  If you’ve seen Empire you can probably hear in your head the broken howl that Chewie lets out as the doors slam shut and Leia looks away in…well, absolute despair.  It is devastating.

The second ‘absolute despair’ scene is that in which Han is frozen.  I doubt that I really need go into that one.

There’s actually also an interesting difference in mood in the imperial fleet between A New Hope and Empire.  In A New Hope, Darth Vader is not in command of the death star, or the fleet, or of much of anything.  He’s clearly lower in the chain of command than Grand Moff Tarkin, and it’s unclear if he’s higher or lower than some of the officers who mock him, his ‘ancient religion’, and his failure to find the rebels or the plans.  He starts to choke one of those officers in A New Hope, and Tarkin yells at him like a child that he’s just caught misbehaving.

In Empire, all those people who might have been at or near Vader’s level have been killed on the death star.  Darth Vader is now in charge of the imperial fleet.  The mood of imperial scenes is drastically different – Vader knows he is in power, and everyone else knows it, too.  When his officers do things he doesn’t like, he kills them in front of the crew and promotes someone else.  When one of his officers comes to him to personally apologize and accept responsibility for losing the Millennium Falcon he kills him, says “apology accepted”, and calls on someone else to continue the search.

Moods like this are easy to come by in Empire.  Things are pretty clear cut, and you get to see what is motivating each character and even each larger group.   

What was really a surprise to me when I started to get into Attack of the Clones was how many scenes in it are dominated by confusion.  It’s not to say that I was confused by these scenes (I often was), but rather that confusion was the dominant emotion expressed by characters in the scene.  There are many scenes with Obi-Wan and others standing around being confused, saying things like ‘but why would X do Y?’ or ‘but isn’t X a Z?’ or ‘did you know that X did Y?’  I think that long ago I always wondered what Obi-Wan was doing during Ami/Ani scenes simply because I always wondered what Obi-Wan was doing.

There are also many scenes where there is no mood, simply action.  The scene where Obi-Wan fights Jango on Camino is a perfect example of this.  The scene starts with Obi-Wan running out a door and bringing up his lightsaber.  Jango starts shooting at him.  I remember thinking – the first time I saw this in theaters – that this scene was a bit jarring.

There’s no setup, there’s no context.  A few lines of dialog at the start would have made all the difference.  It has the feel that Obi-Wan didn’t come there to talk to Jango and then had the realization that he was the bounty hunter in the jetpack suit (which is what it should have had).  It has the feel that Obi-Wan just came there to fight, maybe having already pieced all that together.  He’s never shown piecing it together, or walking down the hallway, or doing anything that would set this up, so you just get the action for action’s sake.

It’s a small thing, yes, but it’s one of many small things.  I will keep coming back to this, but it’s something so small that it could have been easily corrected, which is in some ways worse than something large that couldn’t be.

Anyway, this table of moods has a lot of information, but it’s a little tricky to get a picture of all of it.  To try to simplify things a bit I decided to code these moods into a number of larger categories across the two movies.  That produces this chart:

Now that’s a little clearer.  By the way, I recognize that Attack of the Clones has a few more scenes total, but we’ve already discussed that this is simply due to the fact that it’s a slightly longer movie.  The difference is also fairly minimal, and wouldn’t change anything in the above chart.

You can see that the predominant mood of Empire is negative – despair, worry, fear, anger, etc.  The predominant mood of Clones is also negative, but it wins by only a hair above the second place finisher: confusion.  A tight third is scenes which have no mood other than pure action.  Oddly – as negative as a movie as Empire is – it still has more positive scenes than Attack of the Clones.

This is a good time to point out that Empire had no scenes which were simply coded as action.  There is plenty of action in Empire, but there’s always other mood and emotion present.  When Rogue Squadron is fighting the Battle of Hoth there is quantifiable mood to those scenes because the characters are invested in it.  Think of the example of Luke and Dak above.

When the thousands of identical soldiers – all in full gear to obscure their humanity – fight the giant army of robots, well, there’s really not any emotional connection to anyone involved.  It’s just action for the sake of action.  The Battle of Hoth is not action for the sake of action, it’s action to develop the characters and set the whole movie in motion.  The Battle of Geonosis is action for the sake of adding five minutes to the movie where they didn’t have to pay actors, and to set a different series of profitable cartoons (The Clone Wars) in motion.  

There were some scenes in Clones that had action in them but also had a distinct mood, but those were by far the minority.  Obi-Wan was occasionally in action and able to look confused at the same time, as was Yoda occasionally in action but able to look worried and disapproving.

Speaking of Yoda.  In Empire he says – in response to Luke looking for a great warrior – “Great warrior, hmmm?  Wars not make one great.”  In Clones, Yoda seems to be in full command of the force that attacks Geonosis.  Jedi are billed as having “kept the peace for generations”, which might indicate that the first thing that he might try to do would be to negotiate with Dooku, maybe for a peaceful resolution.  Every major player in this scenario is present, so if he could sit down at a table with them he could potentially work out the surrender of the separatists.  He has the upper hand with a brand new Army of the Republic – something that the separatists don’t know about and might completely change their mind about entering into peaceful negotiations.

Instead, he comes in with blasters on full, initiating the start of the war.  You might say that the attempted execution of Ani/Ami and Obi-Wan started the war, but to be completely fair they were all spies who were caught, well, spying.  You could say that the Jedi’s attempt to rescue Ani/Ami and Obi-Wan was the start of the war, but it was another unwarranted attack on a group that had yet to do anything but execute some spies.

In fact, once Dooku had the upper hand he called for a cease-fire.  He gave Obi-Wan and the captured Jedi a full chance to surrender, promising that their lives would be spared.  You might say he was lying, but he has no reason to.  If he was planning on killing them after they surrendered he could much more easily kill them without surrender.  He might lose a few battle droids, but it would be a miniscule cost next to wiping out the majority of the Jedi.  If he was looking to use them for bargaining (which Obi-Wan accuses him of), why didn’t he try to bargain with two Jedi and a prominent senator? 

So, the Sith are acting reasonable and trying to end the conflict with a peaceful resolution, and the Jedi come in and attack in full without any attempt at negotiations or offer of surrender.  Trade Federation ships are trying to retreat, and Yoda instructs the clone troopers to concentrate all fire on the closest ship in order to destroy it and all those on board.  What?

I guess if it’s just robots (is it?) you don’t really have to listen to the hundreds or thousands of voices crying out all at once before being silenced.  

I get it now, when they talk about the Jedi being peacekeepers they actually mean capital P ‘Peacekeepers’, like in Farscape.  You know, a militaristic organization that keeps the peace by attacking and destroying anyone that disagrees with them.  Can’t believe I didn’t think of that one sooner.

I think I can simplify things just a little bit more, and that’s by really trying to collapse scenes down to positive moods (happiness, triumph, hope, etc.), negative moods (despair, anger, tension, etc), or neutral moods (action, confusion).  That allows us to look at the ups and downs (quite literally) of each of the movies.

Here’s what Empire looks like:

And here’s Clones:

Here they are on the same graph (though it’s a bit more cluttered):

I think that should be quite clear by now that there’s a fundamental difference in the way that moods are used across the two different movies.  Empire is a sea of bad news punctuated by a series of small victories, while Clones is a rapidly shifting movie trying to find itself.

I have a bit more that I’ve coded that I think I’m going to turn into a bonus post later in the week, along with questions similar to those I included at the end of the first post.  This will hopefully satiate all of you for an extra week, as with the lead-up to Thanksgiving I’m not sure I’m going to get to the third installment until after the holiday.

Before we go (you can feel free to leave now if you were only here for the pretty pictures), I want to touch on two more scenes to make one more point about confusion and dialog.  It is partly in the hopes that someone will finally be able to explain away what I believe to be the singularly most confusing scene in Attack of the Clones. 

The first scene in question is nothing more than a conversation between Obi-Wan and Count Dooku.  It immediately follows Obi-Wan’s capture by the separatists, and Obi-Wan is being held in a stasis field.  This has the added benefit similar to having a conversation over the phone, as Obi-Wan is incapable of doing anything more than talking.

The scene unfolds as such (borrowed from www.moivequotedb.com with great thanks), with my comments in italics and brackets:

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Traitor! [true]
Count Dooku: Oh no, my friend. This is a mistake, a terrible mistake. They have gone too far, this is madness! [said incredibly quickly, seeming entirely facetious]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: I thought you were the leader here, Dooku. [Obi-Wan’s constant air of confusion]
Count Dooku: This had nothing to do with me; I assure you. [could be true or lie] I will petition immediately to have you set free. [could be true or lie]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Well, I hope it doesn’t take too long. I have work to do. [true]
Count Dooku: May I ask why a Jedi Knight is all the way out here on Geonosis? [honest question]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: I’m tracking a bounty hunter named Jango Fett. [true] Do you know him?
Count Dooku: There are no bounty hunters here that I’m aware of. [lie] The Geonosians don’t trust them.
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Well, who can blame them? But he is here, I assure you. [true]
Count Dooku: It’s a great pity our paths have never crossed before, Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon always spoke very highly of you. I wish he were still alive. I could use his help right now. [seems true, no reason to be a lie]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Qui-Gon Jinn would never join you. [could be true or lie]
Count Dooku: Don’t be so sure, my young Jedi. You forget that he was once my apprentice, just as you were once his. [true]  He knew all about the corruptions of the Senate, but he would never have gone along with it if he had known the truth as I have.  [true]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: The truth?
Count Dooku: The truth. What if I told you that the Republic is now under the control of a Dark Lord of the Sith? [totally true]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: No, that’s not possible! [lie] The Jedi would be aware it!  [lie]
Count Dooku: The Dark Side of the Force has clouded their vision, my friend. [true] Hundreds of senators are now under the influence of a Sith Lord called Darth Sidious. [true]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: I don’t believe you. [true]
Count Dooku: The Viceroy of the Trade Federation was once in league with this Darth Sidious, but he was betrayed ten years ago by the Dark Lord. [true] He came to me for help; he told me everything. [true] You must join me, Obi-Wan, and together we will destroy the Sith! [seems legit]
Obi-Wan Kenobi: I will never join you, Dooku. [true]
Count Dooku: It may be difficult to secure your release. [true]

The first time I saw this I remember scratching my head and wondering that had just happened.  I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in that things might become clearer later in the movie, but it only ever gets more confusing. 

From Dooku’s first line I’m thrown off-guard.  The delivery comes off so quickly it seems like Dooku is making a show of being facetious.  It’s like he needs to get some procedural stuff out of the way, and just wants to get it over with quickly.  So he’s either lying, or the directing in the scene was abysmal.

Dooku next starts moving through a series of possible lies.  He infers he’s not in charge, which would allow for the fact that he doesn’t know that Jango is there.  It seems like he is in charge, though, which would mean that he would almost certainly know that Jango was there.  This seems to back up the point that he’s lying to Obi-Wan.

Then the mood changes, unexpectedly, and he’s going all nostalgic about how he trained Qui-Gon and how much he misses him.  This, immediately, seems heartfelt – a rarity in Attack of the Clones.

Then things go totally off rails and Dooku starts revealing huge truths to Obi-Wan, like that Palpatine is Darth Sidious, the sith lord behind everything that’s been going on so far.  Obi-Wan scoffs at this, and Dooku gives detailed information on how he came to know this and how credible the information is.  Obi-Wan – who has been on an investigation the entire movie to this point and is one of the rare voices of reason – seems completely uninterested in this information, or for that matter on every following up on it later.

Dooku makes an impassioned plea to Obi-Wan for him to join him, and destroy the sith.  There’s no reason for Dooku to be lying here.  He’s making a reasonable case that if Obi-Wan helped him they could both rally the Jedi to overthrow Darth Sideous.  It’s a win-win situation.

Dooku is revealed to have been a Jedi, and nothing is shown that would suggest any motivation for him to have turned to the dark side.  He’s not fearful, he’s not angry, and he doesn’t hate anyone.  He’s calm, and well-reasoned.  Moreover, there’s no talk of any fear, or anger, or hate in his past.  A throwaway line at some other point in the movie – maybe from Yoda or Mace – would be as simple as ‘Dooku succumbed to fear and anger after X event, and his desire for power led him down a path to the dark side’

Instead, you’re left wondering if Dooku might actually be against Darth Sideous, if he was willing to reveal so much of the core of the entire plan.  Without any explanation or change in motivation, Dooku is later revealed to be Darth Tyrannus, Darth Sideous’ sith apprentice.  His actions are completely incongruent.

A line or two would be all you’d need to establish back story, and another line or two would be all that’s needed to explain his true loyalty.  That’s all you need, and now there’s a little more understanding of what might motivate Dooku.

I mentioned it earlier, but it’s these small things that keep cropping up in Clones.  There is one more, and it’s quick.

It’s the opening scene.  Amidala’s decoy has just been killed.  Her response, right before dying?  “I’m so sorry…I’ve failed you, senator.”

Why would Amidala’s decoy say that she was sorry that she failed her? From where I’m sitting it looks like she did exactly what she was supposed to do – distract people from killing the actual Amidala. She did her job to the fullest extent, and if she was the kind of person who signed up for that job she should die proud instead of regretful.

Her last words shouldn’t be ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I’ve failed you’, but something that actually shows her dedication, like “my life…for the queen!”

If a member of the secret service takes a bullet protecting the president they’re not going to turn around and with their dying breath say “I’m sorry I didn’t stop that bullet harder, sir.  I’ve failed you.” or “I feel like my dive could have used a little more work.  I’ve failed you and I’m sorry.”

The goal of the queen’s decoy is to shield the queen from all the people trying to kill her. Did the decoys not get that from the job description? What was the discussion like before they left for Coruscant? “Hey handmaiden, do you know what would be fun today? Why don’t you ride in the nice big ship, and I’ll fly the fighter – I always get to ride in the big ship, today you’ve earned it. It’s my present to you for your years of undying service. Feel free to put on any clothes you find – really dress up and feel like a queen.”

The problem is again that this is such a glaring error, and the fix is so simple.  You could honestly just dub this over in post and correct what stands out as a major point of disconnect.

I keep asking myself, Attack of the Clones could not possibly be worse than The Phantom Menace, right?  No matter how I come at it, I think I have to admit that The Phantom Menace is in fact a better movie (deep breath, deep breath).

Episode I is plagued by some big problems, and there are really no good fixes.  Episode II did not learn the lesson that having two or three people read the script with a critical eye would fix a lot of things.  The errors are more egregious because they’re so easily fixed by a little bit of script work.  It’s death by a thousand cuts vs a sledgehammer to the face.

It’s not that this sort of dialog that would fix things is completely foreign to Attack of the Clones, either.  The astute reader may have noticed that the scene ‘Arrival on Naboo’ is coded as ‘retcon’.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it stands for ‘Retroactive Continuity’ – the act of going in and altering prior facts or worldview to be consistent with new facts or worldview.  You see, the only point of this scene – the absolute only reason it is in the movie – is so that Anakin and Amidala can have a quick chat and explain why she’s not Queen anymore.  Spoiler alert, turns out that on Naboo the royals are elected, and Amidala was elected at the age of 13 or 14. 

A whole scene is devoted to fixing that mess.  One line of changed dialog makes the opening scene make sense.  A few lines of dialog could explain Obi-Wan’s motivation for fighting Jango on Camino.  A line or two of dialog could give Dooku the needed back story.  A line or two from Yoda could turn a preemptive strike into a plea for peace.  A few more lines from Dooku could explain his conflicting motivations.  A line or two from Jango could return his humanity, and any emotional lines at all from the clone troopers could give them theirs (oh, I forgot, they were bred not to have emotion).  

The Phantom Menace felt like the script only made it to the very early stages of peer review, and those that looked at it were blinded by their love of the other Star Wars movies.  In Attack of the Clones it feels like they simply said forget it, and used the first draft.

In contrast, The Empire Strikes Back feels so incredibly tight.  There are no wasted lines, and everything seems to have a focus and a purpose.  Characters have clear motivations and speak and act accordingly.  Their slightest moves and expressions seem carefully planned to pack as much emotion into every scene, while Clones seems to try to pack as much action and CGI into every scene.  

It’s almost unfair to put Attack of the Clones up against a film like The Empire Strikes Back, but there it is.

Anyway, be sure to check back later in the week for the less statistical follow-up that I find myself unable to avoid.  

And if you’ve made it through all of this, thanks again!  These are getting…a little long.

Well readers, today you’re in for a special treat.  Welcome to part one of a special three-part series about Star Wars.  

Okay, half of you may have just stopped reading (in which case come back in a few weeks), but the other half of you are likely pretty excited.  I’ll take that tradeoff on this one.  Given the recent news that Disney has bought Lucas Film (and basically all the other things that have ‘Lucas’ or ‘Skywalker’ in the name), I couldn’t help but put together a post about the Star Wars franchise to try to give Disney a little heads up about what not to screw up in a new trilogy.  Please Disney, pay attention here.

If you’ve ever talked to anyone that’s kind of in to Star Wars you might have picked up on the notion that the newer prequel trilogy (episodes I-III) is viewed as a much weaker series of movies than the original trilogy (episodes IV-VI).  It is certainly reflected partially in the company that I keep, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a person that considered the prequel trilogy better than – or even equal to – the original trilogy.

So what’s so bad about it?  Well, there’s a lot of people out there that have done a decent amount of work highlighting some really solid things that are bad in the prequels (might I suggest that you start here [NSFW]: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/ ).  There are a lot of great points out there (like the lack of a protagonist), but there’s not much – if anything – that you can point to as quantitative and measurable.

If you can’t measure it, you don’t understand it.

With that in mind I started to think of some of the ways that I could measure things about the Star Wars Movies.  One of the things that came to mind was how needlessly complex the prequels were made, and how little time was devoted to character development.  The lack of character development is something that a lot of critics touch on (there’s a good example of it in the series of videos linked above), especially compared to the original trilogy where characters become a lot more developed.

What’s the difference then?  After thinking about it a bit, I realized that the problem was likely one of breadth over depth – that the prequels contain more characters than the original trilogy.  This would be something that also then plays into the increasing complexity and lack of development for any given character.  So, I decided to try to quantify this by figuring out some numbers relating to characters in each trilogy.

When I started working on things I realized that this was something I couldn’t do in just one week, partly due to the fact that I would need to watch and code each movie in turn.  I therefore decided that splitting it into three parts made a lot more sense.  Today will be the first installment of each trilogy (episodes IV & I), next week will be the second (episodes V & II), and two weeks from now will be the close of each trilogy (episodes VI & III).

Now, there’s an easy comparison to be made if you simply look at the number of credited characters in each movie.  The Phantom Menace (Episode I) has a lot more credited characters than A New Hope (Episode IV).  Part of this is likely because George Lucas wrote more parts for friends and family (e.g. Amanda Lucas as ‘Diva Funquita’).  For fairness, I’m not going to count characters of this caliber.  On the other side of the coin there are also characters that are present but not credited, like Jabba the Hutt in Phantom Menace.  Since he was CGI there was no need to credit an actor, though his character was still mentioned and presented as at least semi-important.

My base, then, is going to be the list of credited characters.  I will exclude some characters in Phantom Menace that are clearly unimportant to the story (which should only make the effect I’m looking for smaller), but will also include those uncredited characters that do seem important.  I will do the same for A New Hope, though there’s less work to be done.

There’s something to be said about how many characters there are in the movie, but that’s not the entire story.  There’s also something to be said about how characters are introduced, and how many loose ends are left running around.  What do I mean by that?

Well, when you meet a new character in a movie they either just show up, or someone talked about them beforehand.  Having characters talked about but not present works to either fill out other characters’ backstories or motivation (e.g. talking about the emperor in A New Hope), or works to create a background for that character when the eventually appear (e.g. Yoda in The Phantom Menace).

Characters also either stay in the main focus, wander off, or are killed.  Killing off characters reduces the number of characters that you have to worry about (e.g. most of Red Squadron in A New Hope), and allows you to focus more on the remaining characters.

With that in mind I sat down and watched The Phantom Menace and A New Hope (theatrical editions of each), coding them both.  Read that again, by the way – I watched The Phantom Menace for you guys, and I watched it hard.

What did I code?  Well, I took note of the minute into the film that every character of note was either first mentioned, first presented, or first killed.  Usually they were only killed once, but that’s neither here nor there.

There were some tricky points, like how to treat storm troopers, or battle droids, or things of that nature.  Basically, I only counted these characters if they were unique from the generic group (e.g. TK-421 in A New Hope), as this seemed to balance out fairly well in both movies.  I wasn’t going to count every Gungan or battle droid the same as I wasn’t going to count every generic rebel or storm trooper. 

That data can be graphed by time to give us a picture of how characters are introduced (and removed) in each of the movies.  Let’s start with A New Hope:

For the most part, characters are introduced fairly slowly, and somewhat steadily.  There are two main peaks where characters are introduced somewhat in bulk.  The first is around 15 minutes, and it’s where we meet a number of characters, including Luke.  The other larger peak is around 100 minutes, and it’s the start of the death star run where we meet the pilots of red and gold squadrons.

There’s a decent number of characters who exist only in reference, at least for a while.  Downturns in the overall character number (blue line) mean that characters are being killed.  Downturns in the ‘mentioned’ (orange line) mean that a character that has been mentioned has now shown up.  An example of this takes place at that same spike around 100 minutes.  It’s the first appearance of Biggs, who Luke mentioned nearly an hour and a half earlier (and who is killed only minutes later).  It makes Biggs’ death more impactful – you know him the whole movie as one of Luke’s close friends only to finally meet him and shortly thereafter watch him killed. 

Overall, things seem fairly balanced in A New Hope.  There’s a reasonable number of off-screen characters used for reference, backstory, and foreshadowing, and plenty of people are killed (as would be expected given the situation). 

Let’s move on, then, to the Phantom Menace:

Well, there you go.  Before you say anything, yes these graphs are on different scales.  The reason is that The Phantom Menace wouldn’t fit on the same scale we just used for A New Hope.  Here’s what A New Hope looks like if we put it on the same scale as The Phantom Menace, for fair comparison.

The picture is pretty clear, there are more characters.  It’s also the case that even with all these characters, very few are spoken of off-screen (some of the rare exceptions are characters like Yoda and Chancellor Valorum).  No characters of note make it to the end of the movie having been mentioned but not revealed.

There’s an interesting additional point here – for clarification I watched the theatrical cut of A New Hope, not the special edition.  What does the special edition add?  This kind of over-presentation of everything that seems to be plaguing the prequels – a good example being the character of Jabba the Hutt moving from the ‘talked about as back story and development’ to ‘a guy who shows up and you can look at’.   
 
I also have to say, the world of The Phantom Menace must be a whole lot safer than that of A New Hope, because very few important (or even just named) individuals are killed.  In A New Hope there are fewer characters alive at the end of the movie than characters killed.  In Phantom Menace?

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT – In The Phantom Menace Qui-Gon and Darth Maul both die, as well as one fighter pilot from Naboo (a much lower fatality rate than red or gold squadrons in A New Hope which faced almost TPK).  Four named but uncredited CGI/puppet pod race competitors are also killed, making a podrace event more deadly than a three-man Jedi-Sith lightsaber duel and an assault on a heavily shielded command cruiser, combined.  Two pod races (if they were similar to the one in The Phantom Menace) would be nearly as deadly as assaulting the death star with a small rebel force.  Three would be more deadly.   Read that again, please.  Let it sink in.  Let it really sink in.

A quick aside – which do you think was longer, the pod race in The Phantom Menace, or the death star run in A New Hope?  I swear that I’ve always thought that the pod race was like a half hour long.  I would have easily put money on it being over 20 minutes.  It is only 10 minutes and 31 seconds.  The death star run?  11:56.  

Back to characters killed.  Sure, battle droids ‘die’ in The Phantom Menace, but I’m not counting generic deaths.  I’m not counting all the stormtroopers and rebels that die in A New Hope, because it would skew the numbers pretty hard (let alone if I were to include the deaths following the first demonstration of the death star on Alderaan, or the stormtrooper deaths following the destruction of the death star).  More people die on the death star than Gungans and battle droids ‘die’ fighting anyway.  

The deaths that are seen in the A New Hope graph are people like Biggs, Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, and Grand Moff Tarkin.  I already talked about the power of Biggs’ death – you see Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s charred skeletons.  Even Grand Moff Tarkin’s death makes a strong point – he believes the death star, and himself by proxy, to be so invincible that he scoffs at the thought of any possible threat or his own demise.  It makes the hope for the rebels seem that much more minimal, and makes it that much more powerful when they eventually do beat the odds.  

To be totally fair I’m not even including in those killed the characters like General Taggi or General Motti (both credited characters with reasonable speaking roles), as I can’t verify that they were on the death star when it was destroyed.  It’s possible they were simply there for a conference or something.  Stopping in for lunch, you know?  Trade a few jabs with Vader and head home somewhere. 

Noteworthy are the spikes in the number of characters in The Phantom Menace.  That huge jump right before the hour and a half mark is when the Jedi arrive back on Coruscant (the stable area right before that is the end of the podrace and trip to Coruscant).  The third act is hardly the time to be increasing the character count by 30-40%.  More than that, almost none of these characters had been mentioned earlier in the movie (again, the exceptions are Yoda and Chancellor Valorum).

It’s hard to really tell the difference having these on separate graphs, so let’s take a look at how things play out just looking at the difference in characters overall.

Again, no surprises.  There are simply more characters, this just looks at the data in a way to make a good comparison.  This is the number of live characters at any given point, though, so what happens when we look at killed characters?

So there’s a part right around the hour mark where Phantom Menace almost has the same number of killed characters, but not quite.  When you look at it this way you can really see how deadly the death star run is, and – in comparison – how non-lethal the end of Phantom Menace is.  You thought storm troopers were inaccurate with blasters – it’s like the Trade Federation was using foam bats or something.

I’m not even being as mean as I could be – this graph could be normed to number of characters in the movie.

The fact that one movie is winning on live characters and one is winning on dead characters makes me wonder what would happen if we just talked about characters that have been introduced into the story.  Well, that’s this graph:

 
Is this point becoming clear enough that it can be explained to someone at Disney yet?  Hold on, I’ve got one more way to look at this.

My original thought was that The Phantom Menace is sacrificing character depth for character breadth, while A New Hope is not.  This should be manifest in how much time in focus is available for each character – that is, an average character’s share of the running time for any given minute.  The more characters are fighting for the same screen time the less you can give to any particular character.  So, here’s a graph of the minute by minute share of screen time that each average character would get in a fair split:

Basically, every minute is split among all the current characters, and this is the average share that each would then receive (in a fair split).  This also takes into account that when a character is killed, they no longer need screen time.  [Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope is the one instance that might not hold up perfect here, but I would argue that after his death he is no longer taking up screen time for his own character development, but present only to help develop Luke.]

If a movie only had one character this graph would be a straight line neither upward nor downward, as each new minute is a minute devoted only to that character.  When new characters are introduced the line heads down, as each character is receiving a reduced share of screen time.

While A New Hope spends time developing the characters they have (with that main dip again being the death star run), The Phantom Menace is constantly devoting time not to developing old characters, but simply introducing new ones.  As the minutes tick on each character has to fight for a diminishing share of screen time.  If you look at things split between minutes up to that point, things look like this:

I’m starting to feel like I’ve been beating a dead horse for a while now, so I think that’s going to be the last graph for today.  All said and done I think it was the first two that really packed the real punch.  There is a little left to wrap up, though.

Characters weren’t the only thing I looked at, mind you.  I also tried to code groups or races of people (like rebels, jedi knights, the galactic senate), and it was working for a while.  The hardest part of A New Hope by far was the cantina scene, where there’s about a half dozen races introduced all at once.  That wasn’t too bad, as it’s easily the densest part of A New Hope.  I tried to do the same for The Phantom Menace, and Tatooine was like a mock United Nations.  Every other character is a completely unique race.  I thought that was bad, and then the gang arrived on Coruscant.  Game over, man.   

Anyway, a simple lack of characters does not a good movie make – you can still make a pretty bad movie with a pretty small cast.  I won’t list examples because you can probably come up with dozens on your own.  The point here is that it’s a lot harder to make a good movie if you have too many characters.  When I think of movies that are well executed with large casts of characters the first two things that come to mind are Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series.

There’s a reason that the LOTR movies are so long and that the Harry Potter series is 8 movies, and it’s because of the number of characters at play and the time spent developing those characters.  The extended editions of LOTR are over 12 hours long, for three movies.  That’s only a little more than an hour less than all six Star Wars movies. 

The LOTR extended editions are actually a great comparison to close this out.  Peter Jackson’s extended editions use that extra time to better flesh out the characters already in play, to great effect.  Think of the time spent developing even the (relatively) minor characters of Merry and Pippin.  George Lucas’ extended editions (the special editions) use that extra time to introduce things like dewback lizards and random CGI elements like cars, buildings, and crowds.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out next week in the next two parts of the series, especially considering the fact that I get to watch Empire.  I have a few ideas for other things I can look for in those two movies, but if you have suggestions feel free to let me know – I probably won’t sit down to code things until the weekend.

If you’re still reading, though, you deserve a treat – this one got long.  For you, then, I have a special bonus for this week’s post.

After only a short bit of The Phantom Menace I couldn’t help but start writing down questions I had as they came up.  Some of them were things I’d noticed before, or seen online before, but some are things I’ve never noticed until I was really watching the movie with an intent to code it.  Without further ado, then, here are some unanswered questions I have regarding The Phantom Menace, in full fan-boy fury:

Deep breath, push nerd glasses up nose.  Here we go.

– What is the “Congress of the Republic” (look it up, it’s in there) from the opening crawl?  The Galactic Senate?  Is there another body of the Congress that hears other matters?  Is there a House that also has members and might have been able to listen to the matters at hand?  Did a typo like this that happens in the first minute of the movie really slip by?  Is that how few people read this script?  Did Lucas forget the crawl and write it day of?

– Why does the Trade Federation stop firing on the ship after the shields are fixed?  Why don’t they send even a single fighter in pursuit?  It’s not like they have to scramble the pilots, their ships have no pilots.  They’re just ships.

– If the Queen’s ship doesn’t have enough power to go to hyperdrive, how is it that the Trade Federation had no means to track or follow it?  How close is Tatooine?  Do they have a cloak?

– Why doesn’t Qui-Gon try out a larger dealer after Watoo says he’s the only one who has the part?  Qui-Gon noted that Watoo was one of the smaller dealers, and from the looks of the city in the distance as they approach we are talking about a major starport.

– Why doesn’t Qui-Gon go to a bank, or a currency exchange?  Take a hit on the exchange rate, sure, but SOMEONE must care about republic credits.  He’s also not opposed to casual theft and con acts, so why not just go steal some money?

– Why does Watto say he’s lost everything?  He has lost one part for a ship, which sounded expensive but couldn’t have been the main bulk of his stock, especially given how rare of a part it was (since no one else carried it).  He lost Anakin, and Qui-Gon kept the pod racer (which was never Watto’s anyway).  Qui-Gon made a secondary bet about Anakin, but let the original premise of splitting the winnings at 50-50.  That means that Watto took in half the winner’s purse of a podracing event, but lost one ship part and one slave.  The purse would have to be at least reasonable in a race with something close to a 50% fatality rate.

– Watto is willing to take a bet of the pod racer vs one of the slaves (Anakin or Shmi).  He says that no ship is worth two slaves, but is willing to take the bet for one on a roll, meaning that the average of Anakin of Shmi is equal or less in value.  He seems angry when it turns out to be Anakin, suggesting that Anakin is the more valuable of the two.  He is thus more than willing to take a bet of the pod racer in exchange for Shmi (or he wouldn’t have rolled for it), suggesting that she is worth near or less than the pod racer.  Later, Qui-Gon sells the podracer (its value hopefully increased by the fact that it just won a major race), and gives the money to Shmi.  Why doesn’t she use it to buy her freedom?  What else could she possibly do with this money?  If Watto has just ‘lost everything’ wouldn’t he be pretty happy to have some cash?

– The Senate seemed super happy to vote in no confidence.  Like, same enthusiasm as the end of Return of the Jedi.  There is almost unanimous open cheering after it’s mentioned.  I cannot express how excited the Senate seemed.  The second it is mentioned, the Chancellor sits down in defeat, as if he knows that his ejection is now all but a certainty.  If it’s as easy as just suggesting it, and everyone totally hated the Chancellor, why wouldn’t someone else have done it by that point?  Did everyone forget it was an option?

– Why doesn’t the trade federation just invest in more droid destroyers?  They can’t cost more than an entire ship of regular droids, and they are dramatically more effective, standing up to everything short of a Naboo fighter ship.  When Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are fighting two of them at the start of the film Qui-Gon admits it is a draw between them.  That means that these droids are potentially as effective as Jedi – and presumably a lot easier to make.  The regular battle droids are useless, but 20 destroyers probably could have easily wiped out every last Gungan on the planet.  1,000 might have single-handedly won the clone wars.

– Big picture here, how does the occupation of Naboo help ease the taxation of trade routes?  Was the Republic planning to build a toll booth on Naboo or something?  I really looked for subtext to explain this one, and there’s just nothing.  NOTHING. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

– Why do the Gungans have weapons that are designed for exclusively fighting synthetics when the main group on their world that they might get in conflict with are human?  There are no droids larger than an R2 unit shown among the population of Naboo.  Zero.  What is this stockpile of weapons for?  And why aren’t they dropped from orbit during the Clone Wars?  What are these weapons, anyway, and why are they never seen again?

– Okay, I’ve seen this elsewhere, but it’s just so ridiculous – child-sized fighter pilot helmets?

– Why did the trade federation need dozens of ships for the initial blockade, when there was no fighting going on, but only one to hold the planet against an organized attack, and after the Senate had been told of the invasion?  Where did the rest of the Trade Federation ships go?  Was there something more important going on?

– Anakin’s auto-pilot (he doesn’t turn off his auto-pilot until a decent amount of the battle has already passed) is able to outmaneuver several trade federation fighters (odds against him) as well as the main guns of the only ship needed to hold the entire planet, all of which are – by definition – themselves automated-pilots.  Why is it that the Naboo can build a better auto-pilot than a race of robots, or a race that built a race of robots?

– What is lightsaber battle room powering, exactly?  The planet?  Perhaps it generates a magnetic field for the planet to protect against cosmic rays, charged particles, and solar flares due to the fact that – since Naboo’s core is liquid water – Naboo would have no natural magnetic field?  ZING.

– Why would the control room of the battle droid ship (which Anakin flies past when going through the ship) have battle droids sitting in front of traditional computer monitors?  There is no evidence whatsoever of any organic life needed to run these ships, and visual transmission seems like the least effective way for two computers to interact with each other.  Are the USB ports all full?

– Why is it not addressed that there is a female member of Yoda’s race on the Jedi council?  Is the name of his race Jedi, given that 100% of them seem to become Jedi?

– This one was actually pretty mind-blowing for me.  How many of the Queen’s scenes is the Queen played by Natalie Portman?  Watching it again it’s really hard to tell when it’s Portman and when it’s Kiera Knightley, but it seems like they do deliver lines differently.  With the knowledge that there are two actresses in the roll – and making sure to really watch for when Portman is also on screen as Padme – it seems that Knightley is more responsible for some of the really flat and boring delivery, and Portman actually did a pretty decent job, both as Queen and as Padme.  Seriously, go back and check it out.

– What does the Queen give Boss Nass at the end of the movie?  It looks a lot like the weapons they were throwing at the battle droids – is it some sort of naturally occuring anti-droid weapon that’s specific to Naboo?  Is that why the Trade Federation was concerned with this planet?  Maybe Naboo was the one source of this material and they provided it through trade to those who made anti-droid weapons, threatening the power of the Trade Federation and their army of droids?  That would also explain why the Trade Federation switched from just capturing the Queen to trying to take control of the entire planet?  Can we just retcon that one in there?

Special bonus crossover question:
– In New Hope Han Solo says it will cost them 10,000 credits for the journey, and Luke balks at it, saying that “we could almost buy our own ship for that”; Han does not debate the point but says, yeah, but who would fly it?  Obi-Wan comes back with an offer of 2,000 now, 15,000 on arrival, and Han is pretty happy with the sum, even in what would seem to be Republic credits, on Tatooine.  Sure, Han is a smuggler and travels to a lot of different worlds, but Mos Eisley is a spaceport, and it seems like it wouldn’t have been too hard for Qui-Gon to just find someone like him to take his 20,000 credits. He also could have made the EXACT SAME DEAL that Obi-Wan later did, finding a pilot to give them transport for 20,000 and a slightly broken ship now and all the money on Naboo on arrival.

Anyway, see you next week!