Ummm it was kept a mystery about vaders true identity until it was offically confirmed in EP VI.
So I i think it was great that they hid palps true identity, we all knew it, but for someone who may just be getting into STARWARS it would be cool to see, however vaders revalation in EP V wouldn't be as good.
Sidious was never revealed until ROTS, and not all fans knew it, as there are levels of fandom.
Spoilers are not a fault of the filmmakers, they're a fault of the viewer who chooses to become a spoilee. While it was a given we knew Anakin was going to turn, the how and why were the secret. That was the single motivating factor for me. Lucas has said the PT is Anakin's story, and the OT is Luke's story. All the PT political machinations and rise of the Empire were a delicious side dish.
And the core thing to remember is the PT are prequels... we know Anakin's going to go bad. I never thought nor expected the PT to be some kind of identical twin in every way to the OT because we know Vader was Anakin. Being a prequel is an enormous weight around the neck of th PTs. But I accept that the thing I want to know about, the rise of Vader, the clone wars, the Empire, were all things that were to be explained.
Could you imagine a PT to LOTR? This is how the witch king went bad, fell in love with the witch queen, had baby aragorn & etc. Naaaah.
It doesn't seem like Palpatine being Sidious was really meant to be a surprise
to viewers, just the characters.
Anybody should have been able to realize who the guy in the robe really was...
THere was never a point to hiding Sidious' identity. TPM ends with: oooh... at least that strange man in the hood didn't get that treaty signed, that treaty for... for.... waht was it for? Why did he want it.
AOTC goes like: oooh there is that hooded man again. So now he has recruited Dooku to start a war... oooh... is that what the treaty was for?
ROTS: Why didn't you tell us, that would have made Palpatine much more interesting?
*reads ANH novel* Oh wait, here, back in 1977 it says Palpatine, a senator , becomes Emperor. And this Sidious guy looks exactly like the Emperor in ROTJ... So what was the fuss about hiding his character??? THERE WAS NONE!!!!
they may have well of had a big sign pointing at Palps saying ITS HIM!!! at the end of TPM after the "who was destroyed the master or..." quote and the sombre music finishing on Mcdiarmid which followed
i think Lucas made the Prequels in mind for future fans discarding our knowledge of Palps
McCallum said he hopes these flicks will one day be seen as one big story in order by fans ......guess that doesnt mean us
When Palpatine's doing his Sith stuff he dresses like a Sith.
That doesn't seem unreasonable. If there was meant to be any mystery regarding
Sidious's ID, it clearly was just for the duration of Ep. One.
Maybe Lucas did that for kids who will come along later, who knows?
From a suspense point of view it would have worked much better if we had known the nice senator was really a bad guy. That would have made Palpy and Sidious more interesting, and the threat for our heroes would be clear. Now we're all left in the dark and therefore not caring.
What was the treaty about?
Why did they go about all this trouble to kill Padme? Just to please the weak Neimodians who act like obedient dogs to Sidious up to the end? OB1 finds out his mystery by doing not that much: going to Kamino, surviving the fight with Jango, and accidentally overhearing the reason for the attacks on Padme.
All that 'mystery' sucks... GL can't write a who-dunnit... He should have sticked to the storytelling style of the OT. That would have worked much better.
Well, it ain't your story, is it? AOTC was a great mystery, I was shocked at it becoming a mystery, but that's what it was. A whodunnit that switches to a mystery entangled with a love story, and then a huge, multi-layered finale! Whaddya mean we're left in the dark and don't care? 'We' do care! Everybody thinks they can do Star Wars better than GL. Well, you can't. Yah Yah Yea Lucas can't write, tell me something I don't know. Every single SW movie has cringe-worthy lines, big deal, that's part of the fun! Lucas is writing it in the style of the Saturday morning serials. It ain't Shakespeare.
I don't think I can do SW better... I do think Lucas can do better, because he did.
An dit's not about lines, or story. But it is about storyTELLING. I used to be the thing he was good at, with SW, Indy and even in helping out Coppola in the late 80s...
You were shocked at AotC becoming a mystery.. ? That sounds interesting..
Funny thing is, I actually started screaming half way the movie realising that the movie was becoming a chaotic weird film with the clones being good guys and no threat at all.
i watched ROTS on sat night on tv and enjoyed it!
i was on my 6th can of K by the time Order66 came up and was well into it
so there you go
under the influence ROTS isnt so bad
i reckon ill need a hit of pcp,a couple of grammes of coke,a hit of heroin,2 tabs of LSD,half a bottle of tequila and a shot of absinthe for AOTC to work for me though
I think a huge thing that everyone is missing here is replay value of a particular SW film, and that is what seperates the OT from the PT for me, and in the end that comes down to quality, which is all one big IMO.
For me personally, there are only two great SW films, ANH & ESB, and the rest have great moments, and bad moments, but ROTJ always gets an edge over the PT movies simply because it is the ending of the OT, so in a sense, you want to have closure. The PT has to be watched with the OT, as it cannot standalone, yet the OT can still be watched without the PT, as it stood by itself for 20 years as nobody thought the story was incomplete in 1983, we just wanted more!
And this is where everyone seems to miss the boat, do you want to watch an OK/average movie countless times? I like the PT story and how it gives an epic scale now to the OT and the saga overall. But I really can't sit there and really watch TPM & AOTC that much, cause they are just OK movies. I can watch ROTS more, because it really delves into the red meat of the story we waited for, but in a sense it is married to a worse TPM & AOTC the same way ROTJ is married to a better ANH & ESB. Now compare that ANH & ESB and I have watched them hundreds of times in my life, cause I truly love those movies, and ROTJ hitched its wagon to me loving it, cause it was just one OK movie, but now you are asking me to watch 4 OK movies hundreds of times?
I just think the OT had that rare combination of great characters, edge of your seat action, and great drama, while the PT is more of a plot driven trilogy, with not a good characters overall, and though I don't think the PT is as bad as everyone says, I don't think it is great either.
Last edited by chewy16 on Apr 10th, 2007 at 01:00 AM
ROTS doesn't even have replay value for me; I browse through my collection sometimes, after an easily watchable film I can loose myself in, stop on ROTS, then remember how awful the first half is, and move on.
But I definetly agree that ANH and ESB are "the" great Star Wars films.