[Renegade]

STAR WARS (all of them) sucks because:

1. Its endlessly unoriginal
2. Its plagiarised
3. Its inspired by Fascist ideology and mysticism
4. Its meant to sell merchandise on unprecidented scales
5. Its full of rediculous truisms which can mean anything to anybody
6. Its full of bad dialogue and bad directing as noted by Alec Guiness, Ewan Mcgregor, Harrison Ford and Anthony Daniels
7. Its directed by the man who brought us Howard the Duck
8. George Lucas is a greedy, fat, sick, adolescent in a grown man's body
9. It misused too much good talent
10. It has brainwashed way too many of my generation

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You are insanely moronic.

1) It's not supposed to be original, its supposed to be a pretty basic story, that just happens to draw you in.
2) "Inspired by Fascist idealogy"? I don't even know wtf that means, but I'm guessing your trying to sound smart. Next you'll be ranting about free market capatalism..
3) Assuming its all for the "money", whats wrong with that? The idea of believing your product will earn you money and making it good is always a driving force for innovation/storytelling.
4) "Ridiculous truisms which can mean anything to anybody".. again trying to sound smart. But neway, if you actually take time to look at most of the good movies, they give ambiguous themes and stories. It's meant to be open to interpretation.
5) Badly directed? Well he only directed one of the OT's and ya I agree he sucks at directing (as seen by the PT) but thats precisely why the OT IS good.
6) "it misused too much good talent".. well for starters even Harrison Ford admits (despite not liking Lucas's directing) that SW sky rocketed his career. Most of the people, despite not agreeing with his methods, still benefiting greatly from being in the movies or were in fact not even that good actors to begin with and died off after the movies.
7) How did it "brainwash" your generation? That's like me saying LOTR has "brainwashed" my generation... wtf does that even MEAN. How can a fictional story brainwash someone? Are they being turned into those "fascists" that you so talk about?

[Jordan]

ESB took a run of the mill action flick and turned it into a dramatic seires. That movie had the best character interaction, good sabre battle, the best models, and the greatest story.

ESB the best SW there is.

[Casual Fan]

There is one item in ESB that has bothered me since I first saw it, and has bothered me enough to mar my enjoyment of the movie.

In Star Wars: A New Hope, the Millenium Falcon comes out of hyperspace and the heros see a Tie-Fighter. Obi Wan remarks that a ship that small wouldn't be wandering around space by itself, since it has no hyperdrive. And sure enough, the prescence of the fighter indicates that the Death Star is nearby.

And this makes sense, as we are shown throughout the OT both small fighters and large space destroyers and cruisers. The fighters seem to do most of the fighting, but the larger ships are there to transport the fighters through hyperspace.

But then Luke decides to go to Dagobah in his single-seat fighter, and does so. Evidently, it has a hyperdrive.

So what exactly are the larger ships for anyway?

[diligent_d]

Ties don't have hyperdrives. X-Wings and other rebel fighters do.

[Trigormike]

And the falcon is a freighter, i.e. a goods ship, so it needs storage space.

[Mnesymone]

People have brought up the hyperspace issue before, so watch the scene again.
"It must have followed us!"(Luke)
"No, it's a short-range fighter."(Ben)

Ben specified that the fighter was a short-range model, implying that there are hypercapable fighters in common use otherwise he wouldn't have had to specify. So, conceivably, the x-wing could be a midrange ship, in fact it would make sense that the Rebellion would use hypercapable fighters since they don't have capital ships.

The heavier ships are used for big stuff - fighter carrying, planetary bombardment and siege, deploying assault groups, long-range application and also it makes sense to use larger ships for a lot of purposes - e.g. you can't really board and search a freighter with a single-seat fighter, nor can you destroy large freightercraft with single-seat fighters unless you've done your homework and know where to hit it.

[Tpolg]

So let me get this straight.  The Empire is hunting for the rebels, (sorry, hunting for Luke).  They (he) could be anywhere in the galaxy. Now here's my plan!  Lets get a few pods, say five from each Star Destroyer, and shoot them out into space.  We'll allow one pod per planet, so by the end of the week we should have thoroughly searched about .001 percent of 500 planet's surfaces, and a grand total of about .00001 percent of all the planets in the galaxy.  Yes, that's a cunning plan!  Let's play tidily winks to while away the centuries until we get a result.

Admiral Ozzel clearly states that they have thousands of droids.

Lucky those speeders have "harpoons and tow cables."  It might be our only hope of stopping them.  What a load of bollocks.  I guess that ion cannon that just shot down a star destroyer with a single shot, is no good.  What about blowing up big pits in front of the walkers?  Or since they only move at 1 mile an hour, just running up to them and chucking a grenade in the back door.  Oh wait, Luke does that later...

The ion cannon is an ion weapon. It does not work on grounded vehicles.



I have some problems with ESB, but some of your stuff is really stretching.

[azerty]

I give you hundreds of reasons why this movie is rubbish you feel victorious when you can refute a couple of them as nitpicking?

First, a quick refutation of your refutation, and then on...

How many stars in the galaxy? 100 billion minimum and 400 billion maximum, according to the 10 seconds of research I just did online.

Admiral Ozzell may have thousands of probe droids searching the galaxy, but even if we assume they used 999,999 probe droids (otherwise he would have said a million), then 999,999 divided by 100 billion means that each probe droid would have to search 100,000 systems. And, if we assume that all the planets will be earth sized, and that earth's surface area is 197 million square miles, you don't even have to do any math to see that using probe droids to search a galaxy is ridiculous. Use the force, Darth. And score zero to the lazy scriptwriters for mathematical accuracy.

However, his has NOTHING to do with why Empire Strikes back is rubbish. Individual nitpicks can't ruin a movie, (especially a space fantasy), cause you can just make up stupid pseudo technological reasons to explain all the stupid shit afterwards, and who's gonna argue?

Let's be serious in our criticism for a moment, because I know you'll never be convinced that Ion cannons should be able to point in directions other than up, or that X-wings can have hyperdrives, despite their size, or that Luke's radio can't work on Hoth, or that you don't need spacesuits in space, and all those totally lazy plot devices that the lame scriptwriters came up with.

This is a character driven movie - story over plot! All right, let's look at the characters:

The characters are all boringly static. Lando contributes nothing that Solo didn't already give us. Another scoundrel with a heart of gold. He couldn't decide what to do, but in the end chose the right thing. Seen it all before, and in a far more convincing and dramatic manner... (Did Solo come back for Leia, for money, for Luke, for the rebellion, or did Chewie start pulling Solo's arms out of their sockets until he turned the ship around? We'll never know for sure.)

Why did Lando change? Cause he's handsome and Hans buddy, (or something... who cares?) Even if they had introduced Lando only to kill him off later, it would only be a lame ass way of pretending to kill Solo to try and add some depth to the lame ass story. Even in Star Wars, Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, all of Alderann, Obi Wan, and Biggs are killed.

In Empire (the supposed "dark" movie), nothing significant happens and nobody is killed. Not even one dead Jawa or smoking skeleton.

Solo is an even bigger disappointment in terms of lameness. There's no subtlety to him anymore. In Star Wars he was far more complex. For example, he had a chess board on his ship, but the subject was never broached about why a guy who seemed unlikely to be interested in such an intellectual game would have
something like that on board. In Star Wars, sometimes he seemed to be a bad ass pirate, and at other times he seemed so scared that he looked like he was about to drop a load in his pants. He blew Greedo away with no hesitation, but then he was freaking out on the Death Star. Is Chewie his dog or his partner? What exactly did he smuggle in that ship of his? The new Solo? No way HE plays chess. He's just a bad ass pirate all the time now. He´s too popular now to deviate from the "bad ass" template; the fans might object. Instead, just have him delcalre that he is a "gorgeous guy" a few times, and strut around like a frat boy. So does he play chess, or does he just hang out in cantinas drinking lite beer?

We saw Darth choke a guy with the force in the original, to make him shut up when he was talking shit about the force. (THAT had a point; "Do you belive in the
force now, asshole?...") Okay, let's have him do the same thing TWICE in this movie, and it doesn't have to have a point this time. Don't want to expand him as a character too much, don't invent any new interesting force techniques or anything, just rehash the same old stuff. Yawn. Here's a better idea; why doesn’t he just put a permanent squeeze on their lower colon? Make their digestive system run in reverse or something! It would be very amusing to watch Admiral Ozzel spewing projectile turds from his esophagus just before his head explodes– now THAT will motivate the rest of 'em.

But the worst of all are Luke and that little green turd, Yoda. What is the point of all that? Luke is supposed to be learning about the force, but he spends all his time pissing and moaning instead. Can't even get his own ship out of the bog, (which should have been his final exam, actually - "when you can raise your ship, it will be time to leave..") Nope, Yoda just burbles on about the importance of patience, and "Don't try.. do!", and then hands the ship to an impatient Luke, who did not "do", but instead "tried", and then claimed it was impossible. Nice lesson, Yoda! Luke doesn't listen to ANYTHING Yoda tells him - don't take your weapons intio the cave, don't go to Bespin, stay and finish your training, etc. Yoda doesn't teach Luke anything, and Luke is incapable of learning because he is incapable of listening.

Yoda was right - he could not not teach Luke. Luke doesn't grow at all. He may have taken his first step into a larger world back on the Falcon, but he seems to
think he has already arrived at the summit. There is no internal conflict, no external conflict, he just runs a few lamps of the swamp, and levitates a rock, and leaves, fully trained. He swears he'll come back to "complete his training". Hell, he hasn't even started yet! What a wanker.

So in the end we have characters who are either static, (or worse, characters who are reduced in stature) treading water for 2 hours spouting really bad dialog and
acting like dumbasses, as has been described in detail above. Oh yeah, Leia and Solo and their "chemistry". Chemistry in this case means "pretending to argue" to
show that they really like each other, but can't admit it. They were more interesting in the original, and their arguments seemed more legit - in the detention block tunnel, the garbage masher, just outside the Falcon, and after the tie fighter atack. Here it's just a tired continuation of those same little spats. Neither of them really change. Well maybe Solo changes from a doer to a talker. He DID leave at the end of Star Wars. In Empire, he talks about it, but you know he ain't going anywhwere.

This post has been edited by azerty: 20 June 2005 - 03:43 AM

[Tpolg]

Wow, I point out two little things and get all this! This is great; some of the best reading I have had sense Chefelf's Comedy of Master Yarael Poof the wise.
I would just say touché, but perhaps if I keep aging you on you will keep producing?
Let’s see how about the Xwing. It was not about strength they knew he was going to be strong, it was morale training Luke needed. The test was of fortitude, hers your ship, you can leave but you should chose to stay. Rather like Anakin's test in AOTC, we know you have an emotional connection to this girl, so we are sending you home with her to see if make the right choice.
Funny, they both failed, but at lest Luke had the balls to admit it.
And calling Yoda a turd is uncalled for.

[Mnesymone]

The probe droid thing is somewhat stupid.
The probes don't have to search Imperial worlds.
The probes don't have to search uninhabitable worlds.
The probes don't have to search star systems without planets, which last time anyone checked, was the vast majority.
The sensor technology in SW in good enough that the ground scanners on Yavin 4 can, at the distance the Death Star was from them, distinguish individual fighter-sized signals, then a probe droid could probably do a great deal of scanning quite quickly, especially if there was a power source a la A HUGE SHIELD GENERATOR to lock on to.

And Darth Vader just wanted Ozzel dead - character development doesn't mean change in murder weapons. If you feel you need to see Vader's use of the force develop, how about his telepathy with Luke at the end, or his telekinetic assault on him.

[civilian_number_two]

The probe droid comment, I think, is silly. You want to bring in the absurdity of using droids to search the vast geography of the entire galaxy, then you have to bring up the absurdity of an Empire/Rebellion war that spans an entire galaxy. Which would mean you thought STAR WARS was stupid to begin with, and if you thought that, then why even pick on EMPIRE? That'd be like critiquing MISS CONGENIALITY 2. Yeah; it's nit-picking.

I get where you're going with the character development, but I don't agree that having a chess board in the background makes you an interesting character. It's only a little more than set dec. In fact, the only point of the thing was to show some "holograms," technology Lucas found so fascinating that it earns a sighting in the Holiday Special of one year later. I agree that Han was more interesting when he shot Greedo first, when he almost didn't risk his life to help Luke, but let's face it: that character arc was played in the first film. He'd developed into an ally, a friend of these people, and he was LESS badass in EMPIRE than in STAR WARS; not more. Frankly I think reversing the development from the first film just to reuse the character you already know is lame, and would have been the opposite of what you're suggesting happened. It would have been like when they brought Tommy Lee Jones back for MEN IN BLACK 2.

I thought Vader was quite different in EMPIRE from STAR WARS, but apparently going from second banana and a mysterious rival to Obi Wan to the leader of the Imperial fleet and hell-bent on capturing Luke, to having secret plans to overthrow the Emperor for his own purposes is all diminished because he chokes a couple of guys. Fair enough.

And of course there is Luke, embarrasingly cocky farm boy cum Jedi knight in training. I think the point of his interaction with Yoda was that he was a different sort of guy from Ben, and would stop at nothing to help his friends. He risks his life and loses. Ok, he doesn't lose his life, he only gets a hand cut off. I agree that EMPIRE is not as "dark" as folks always make out, but I won't go and agree that it's less deep than STAR WARS. It's more emotional, and it builds on the first. For all the "darkness" you mentioned in the original, it ended aggresively happy, while EMPIRE had the courage to end with a few unanswered questions. If that all makes it "crap," then I guess I like crap, because I sure hated JEDI, the film that took the time to answer all those questions, and badly.

[Harvey Globetrotter]

"Let's be serious in our criticism for a moment, because I know you'll never be convinced that X-wings can have hyperdrives, despite their size"

The size of a hyperdrive is relative to the size of the ship. You can put one in any spacecraft, however for the Empire, which has enormous capital ships to carry their enormous fleet of fighters, it's not necessary to put hyperdrives on their fighters. The rebels, however, don't have huge capital ships, so they put hyperdrives in their fighters.

"or that Luke's radio can't work on Hoth, or that you don't need spacesuits in space, and all those totally lazy plot devices that the lame scriptwriters came up with."

When do these issues come up?

"The characters are all boringly static. Lando contributes nothing that Solo didn't already give us. Another scoundrel with a heart of gold. He couldn't decide what to do, but in the end chose the right thing. Seen it all before, and in a far more convincing and dramatic manner... (Did Solo come back for Leia, for money, for Luke, for the rebellion, or did Chewie start pulling Solo's arms out of their sockets until he turned the ship around? We'll never know for sure.)"

The OT galaxy is littered with selfish scoundrels. Society has devolved since the days of the Republic. The Rebellion is a small organisation, and it differs from the rest of the Galaxy in that its selfless. Han and Lando are kind of symbolic of people being brought back around to the days of high-minded idealism.

"In Empire (the supposed "dark" movie), nothing significant happens and nobody is killed. Not even one dead Jawa or smoking skeleton."

The atmosphere is dark, other than some atmospheric lighting. It doesn't have a happy ending. Most of the planets are rarely light, unlike, say, Tatooine and Endor. This is why it is darker.

"For example, he had a chess board on his ship, but the subject was never broached about why a guy who seemed unlikely to be interested in such an intellectual game would have something like that on board."

Oh. My. God. That is so dumb. I don't know where to begin. I like Chess, but I also like football and naked women. And being an arrogant twat. But does this make me complex. Uh. Go die.

"We saw Darth choke a guy with the force in the original, to make him shut up when he was talking shit about the force. (THAT had a point; "Do you belive in the
force now, asshole?...") Okay, let's have him do the same thing TWICE in this movie, and it doesn't have to have a point this time. Don't want to expand him as a character too much, don't invent any new interesting force techniques or anything, just rehash the same old stuff. Yawn. Here's a better idea; why doesn’t he just put a permanent squeeze on their lower colon? Make their digestive system run in reverse or something! It would be very amusing to watch Admiral Ozzel spewing projectile turds from his esophagus just before his head explodes– now THAT will motivate the rest of 'em."

Idiot. Idiot idiot idiot. Idiot.

The idea is that Vader is obsessed with completing his goals, and as a leader with free reign over the fleet he does not tolerate failure. The point is, he kills them in a fashion that intimidates other officers. If you want colon twisting action, go watch Van Helsing and be inflicted with nausea by its suckiness.

To be continued.

[diligent_d]

In Empire (the supposed "dark" movie), nothing significant happens and nobody is killed. Not even one dead Jawa or smoking skeleton.

Right, other than a few hundred Rebel soldiers, a shit-pot full of Stormtroopers/Snowtroopers, a dozen Tie Fighter pilots, and a handful of Imperial Officers. Other than that, I guess no one dies.

[azerty]

Just re read this old thing, and Jesus H Christ some people do spout some crap! I want to let it slide, but ...

OK, quoting WESS - "Star Destroyer is shot down? I think not."

Better watch again, Wess old boy. That ion cannon blows it out of the sky.

-----------

Quoting BE THE REDS - "Luke isn't the leader. It should be obvious to you that..."

Better check the old scroll up again matey, it says something along the lines of "A group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker have set up a base..." Remember, the scroll up cannot lie. Read it.

-----------

Quoting TPOLG - "Admiral Ozzel clearly states that they have thousands of probe droids" Yes. Lets do a boring arithmetic lesson together;

400,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy. (That's billions, by the way).
999,999 probe droids (One less than 1 million)
Area of an earth sized planet 197,000,000 square miles

say one percent of the stars have 1 habitable planet. (That's one in a hundred by the way)
also say only one percent of each planet is habitable.

So .01 x 400,000,000,000 = 4,000,000,000 possible planets (That's 4 billion)
and .01 x 197,000,000 = 1,970,000 square miles of possible habitable area per planet.

total area to be searched 4,000,000,000 x 1,970,000 = 7,880,000,000,000,000 square miles. (That's 7000 trillion square miles)

OK, lets say each of the probe droids can search 10,000 square miles a minute, (100 miles by a hundred miles) Let's also say the probe droids instantly travel from planet to planet and place to place, so no time is wasted.

7,880,000,000,000,000 square miles divided by 999,999 probe droids divided by 60 minutes divided by 24 hours divided by 365 days = 149.9 years. That's a long time to be sitting on the toilet waiting for inspiration.

Don't worry, you'll be able to do these kinds of computations too, when you reach the 8th grade.

-----------

Quoting TPOLG - "The ion cannon is an ion weapon. It does not work on grounded vehicles." Well I read a report from a guy who used to live next door to Clive Revill, and he said it DOES work, and he should know, so NYAH.

-----------

Quoting HARVEY GLOBETROTTER - "Luke's radio can't work on Hoth, or that you don't need spacesuits in space, and all those totally lazy plot devices that the lame scriptwriters came up with. When do these issues come up?"

Well how about when Luke runs into a blizzard and nearly snuffs it instead of saying "Hey dudes, I'm in a cave, pick me up" into his radio? And Solo, Chewie and Leia all get out of the Falcon on an asteroid in space, wearing stupid respirators that your average painter would chuck in the bin as useless. Are we all watching the same movie???

-----------

Quoting HARVEY GLOBETROTTER (About my comment about Empire being a "dark" movie)

"The atmosphere is dark, other than some atmospheric lighting. Most of the planets are rarely light, unlike, say, Tatooine and Endor. This is why it is darker."

There is no answer to this one. Harvey, you're a fucking genius, I admit defeat.

I won't even go into his pseudo technological explanations about the physics of hyperdrives, etc, because he's right - you can just make up any kind of answers you want. So yes, the Empire doesn't have the cash to equip their small ships with hyperdrives, but the rebels do.

-----------

Quoting DILIGENT D - (In response to my statement that nothing significant happens and nobody is killed)

"Right, other than a few hundred Rebel soldiers, a shit-pot full of Stormtroopers/Snowtroopers, a dozen Tie Fighter pilots, and a handful of Imperial Officers. Other than that, I guess no one dies."

I meant nobody with a NAME, whose deaths might move you emotionally. Even Star Wars had Biggs, Obi Wan, Owen, and Beru all brutally killed, and Star Wars is considered light weight kids stuff. Even Artoo gets popped, come to think of it.

-----------

Why do I even bother responding? Because this is the top viewed thread in the entire Empire Strikes back section. This is the case even though I notice that you jam tarts have opened up two pansy-ass diluted versions of this thread with names such as "A couple of problems with ESB" and "A criticism that caught me off guard" to try and water the whole thing down. Yeah, post your responses in either of those two, cause I guess it's too hot for you in here.

[civilian_number_two]

Quoting TPOLG - "Admiral Ozzel clearly states that they have thousands of probe droids" Yes. Lets do a boring arithmetic lesson together;

400,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy. (That's billions, by the way).
999,999 probe droids (One less than 1 million)
Area of an earth sized planet 197,000,000 square miles

say one percent of the stars have 1 habitable planet. (That's one in a hundred by the way)
also say only one percent of each planet is habitable.

So .01 x 400,000,000,000 = 4,000,000,000 possible planets (That's 4 billion)
and .01 x 197,000,000 = 1,970,000 square miles of possible habitable area per planet.

total area to be searched 4,000,000,000 x 1,970,000 = 7,880,000,000,000,000 square miles. (That's 7000 trillion square miles)

OK, lets say each of the probe droids can search 10,000 square miles a minute, (100 miles by a hundred miles) Let's also say the probe droids instantly travel from planet to planet and place to place, so no time is wasted.

7,880,000,000,000,000 square miles divided by 999,999 probe droids divided by 60 minutes divided by 24 hours divided by 365 days = 149.9 years. That's a long time to be sitting on the toilet waiting for inspiration.

Don't worry, you'll be able to do these kinds of computations too, when you reach the 8th grade.

-----------

This seems to be a real sticking point for you. Consider this: There is a Civil War ranging across an ENTIRE GALAXY, and one of the weapons of the Empire is a space station the size of Canada rolled up.

You accepted a load of nonsense in the first STAR WARS; what's so wrong with the probe droids?

Ok, apparently it's important, and apparently when searching a Galaxy for a fleet of rebel ships, one is expected to scour every square inch. I disagree. Even as a 12-year-old I second-guessed that, and figured that the Empire had reliable Intelligence that led them in a few directions, like say huge sales of Ion Energy Cells near Ord Mantell, or whatever. And I figured they were just searching in areas and systems that seemed likely, based on other shit they already knew.

I agree with most of what you said about the dialogue, but disagree that it was any better in STAR WARS. STAR WARS had the advantage that we hadn't met this universe before, or any of its people. So a lot of the dialogue got used for exposition. EMPIRE had little ground to cover, story-wise, and all it had in its place were situations for the characters. Most people think that EMPIRE pulled off those situations pretty well, even if the film didn't tell us any more about the universe. Like when Leia says she loved Han, a lot of folks figure she had reason to say it. A good counter-point would be the MATRIX sequels, which delved heavily into story advances, at the cost of having any interesting situations at all. And most agree that the story advances were like the rantings of a madman outside the liquor store. Most also agree that all of the character stuff from both MATRIX sequels could have been written on a chewing gum wrapper.

Luke in the snow, supposed to be because he was running from more of those snowmen, or that was the implication. No space suits in space: an homage to sci fi paintings of the early days of the genre, before real exploration had taken place and before most folks had an understanding of the sort of hardware involved in that science. Seriously; read some comic books from the 1940s, or at least take a look at the cover art. The STAR WARS movies are fantasy with a space backdrop; they aren't science fiction.

Care to give us your 1000 words on how ships wouldn't make sound in space, or how the fighter planes get to ignore the gravity of the huge planet they're fighting in front of? Come on.