[xenduck]

DL, thanks for your honest answers. im affraid my posts have gotten too long and i dont want people to think this discussions is jsut between the two of us, i want to hear everyone's opinion! so i am going to focus on what i identify to be our main conflict. it seems that PT bashers are always taking as law the words of a "crazy old hermit."
before i dreamt of a PT, i thought of ben kenobi as a prevaricating eccentric. he thinks stormtrooper are precise, that luke is the last hope till yoda corrects him and that the emperor has already won if luke wont KILL his father!
ben is a man who has seen all he believes in razed to the ground, he is no longer prepared to inculcate a fresh young mind to jedi dogma. he knows time is short and wants to get luke up to speed without wieghing him down with ancient history.
i offer a scene from the 'SUPER' special edition of ROTJ:

Luke: but ben, you said vader killed anakin.
Ben: well, anakin fell to the darkside, so its true from my point of view.
L: but ben, you said anakin was a pilot.
B: well, a pod is a flying vehicle, so its true from my point of view.
L: but ben, you said yoda trained you.
B: well, yoda helped me after qui-gon died, so its true from my point of view.
L: but ben, it sounds like you're full of shit.
B: you'll find that most nebulous phrases are based largely on bullshit and that one character's few lines of exposition should not be upheld as a solid basis for three other movies. remeber, no one mentioned you had a sister in ANH but that doesnt mean we wont see her in other movies. heck, ben isnt even my real name!

if you take the events of PT as fact, ben's statements become consistently vague. so what you see as a continuity error, i see as reinforcement. im not insulting ben, "he's as wise as he is powerful", but he has been alone in that hut for a very long time. "you must unlearn what you have learned."

[DragonLord]

Good point, and I agree that the whole "from a certain point of view" speach is annoying. However, he had to make up some kind of lie in the beginning. He can't tell Luke that the most evil person in the galaxy is his father. When he talks to Luke in ROTJ however, he should be more trustworthy. There is no reason to lie there, but every single line there is a continuity error! "When I first met your father he was already a great pilot (No) but I was amazed of how strong the force was with him (No). I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda (No)."

Furthermore, Ben didn't explicitly say that Luke had to kill his father, rather that he couldn't run away from his destiny: "you must face Darth Vader again". And besides, Anakin will slaughter every Jedi but two, and become the most evil character the galaxy will see in years, so anybody in Obi-Wan's position would see Vaders death as the only way out...

And the whole "that boy is our last hope", "you were our last hope" in ESB and ROTJ, I have my own view on.

The way I see it, if Luke can't face his own father, then neither can Leia, since she has the same problem of Vader being her father. That is the only explanation I have as to why he in ROTJ says: "Then the emperor has already won. You were our last hope" even though he talks about Leia in a second.

It's a vague explanation, granted, but somewhat logical. I would think along the same tracks, since it's sort of inhuman to think: "Well ok Luke, you can't kill your father. But maybe your sister can! Oh I didn't mention your sister?" =)


But I see your point, if one doesn't take anything Obi-Wan says too seriously, then many continuity errors disappear.

/ DragonLord

[Just another wretched fan]

not taking Kenobi seriously is the most annoying gusher assertion.

There is a literary term (some English major correct me) for an unrelyable narrator or character. Whenever a good author uses the unreliable narrator, at some point the reader must get the hint that the narrator is unreliable, and receive some sort of insight into the story because of it.

If we are suddenly supposed to realize that everything Kenobi said is unrelyable, then GL completely failed to express this in his movies, b/c i never got the hint that i needed to ignore Kenobi in ANH, ESB, and ROTJ.

There is no plot evidence for us to believe that Ben is supposed to be losing his senses from living in a hut too long. When it comes to the "crazy old man" comment, the movie blatently shows that Owen is lying to keep Luke at home and away from adventure. Kenobi is the man to be believed.

The undisputable discrepencies between events in the PT and dialogue in the OT, combined with a lack of reasoning to discredit anything in the OT, show that these discrepancies are actually continuity errors and not "plot reinforcement."

[xenduck]

im not saying obi-wan is lying or unreliable, only that he isnt thorough. if you look at the movies in sequential order, it becomes obvious to the viewer that obi-wan is not the man to get your info from, but rather the prequal movies; where we can see what ACCTUALLY happens. thats how GL has made obi-wan's discrepancies clear. when ANH came out there was NO indication that we shouldnt take ben's word regarding the death of anakin, only in later films did we learn about his dubiousness in this regards. in the same way we are learning in the new films that ben was generalizing for luke's sake.

yes, in some ways i am reaching for an explanation, but is there any reason this explanation CANT work?

[Just another wretched fan]

im not saying obi-wan is lying or unreliable, only that he isnt thorough. if you look at the movies in sequential order, it becomes obvious to the viewer that obi-wan is not the man to get your info from, but rather the prequal movies; where we can see what ACCTUALLY happens. thats how GL has made obi-wan's discrepancies clear. when ANH came out there was NO indication that we shouldnt take ben's word regarding the death of anakin, only in later films did we learn about his dubiousness in this regards. in the same way we are learning in the new films that ben was generalizing for luke's sake.

yes, in some ways i am reaching for an explanation, but is there any reason this explanation CANT work?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

its an explanations...but

a) how long did it take you to think it up
its just proves that its a very weak plot

[CowboyCurtis]

yes, in some ways i am reaching for an explanation, but is there any reason this explanation CANT work?

But this changes a character that we had NO GROUNDS to disbelieve in the first place.

One "white lie" from Ben about Vader was enough, but to take that as an excuse to fully turn this character into a full-blown delusional LIAR is absolutely wrong as a writer to do to a character.

You may be saying that you're not making Ben to be unreliable, but that is exactly what you're doing. Like it or not.

[xenduck]

a) it didnt take me any time at all. as i said, ben always seemed shady to me, with his mind tricks and sideways glances. and also, as i said, after seeing the events of the PT for myself, i have no choice but to question ben's information.

i dont think his information is that far off the mark, it's just vague. it has always been vague, now we know EXACTLY how and why it's vague.

[xenduck]

further more, im not trying to subjecate the OT to the PT, im only saying that, with just a little imagination, they link up perfectly. so i offer a couple more scenes from the 'super'special edition trilogy.

ANH
Ben: when i first knew your father he was a podracer. he flew in the boonta eve race and won his freedom, oh he was a slave, by the way. and he got us the parts we needed to get back to coruscant. and then there was this time he got stuck in a nubian starfighter cockpit and the autopilot took him into a scapce battle.then he crashed into the hangar of a trade federation droid control ship and blew up the main reactor. thus saving all the gungans. man, im still amazed at how strongly the force was with him!
Luke: could we hurry thid up, gramps. i gotta get home or uncle owen is gonna kill me!
ben: fine, we'll just say he was a pilot and forget it. sheesh

ROTJ
R2: now that you've rescued han, what are you ganna do next?
Luke:i will go to the degobah system, there i will learn from yoda, the jedi master who instructed me.
R2:wait! what? you were trained by obi-wan!
Luke: yes but he was killed, so i got more lessons from yoda. in the same way that after qui-gon was killed obi-wan got a few lessons from yoda in the ten years between TPM and AOTC.
R2:oh. thx for taking the time to explain that to me
Luke: its just a good thing im not a ghost and you're not about to pass out.

ben's info is tottaly accurate, just not explicit.

This post has been edited by xenduck: 28 April 2005 - 12:31 PM

[CowboyCurtis]

Do not infer into the film what isn't there. What is there is there. The novelisations expounded upon the films and in NO way do they reveal anything of the nature you're implying.

Point blank--you are wrong, you know it.

[xenduck]

oh phew, im sure glad that's settled!

no really, ill stop inferring when you stop being so litteral. ill stop reading between the lines when you stop taking everything a character says at face value. after all, there has to be balance...

[Despondent]

Here's some balance:

People are bending over backwards to apologize for GL.

Others are falling on their faces in frustration.


And Nobody can stand by the canon. Always in motion, the canon.

[xenduck]

it occurs to me that guys who hate the PT probably wont watch it very often. so i begin to wonder just how many times you guys have seen TPM or AOTC. are you readily familiar with the material you're bashing? i saw both PT movies 8 times in the theater alone, so you can imagine how many times ive seen it on dvd. that certainly doesnt mean i know more about it than anyone else... i was just curious if you watched them more than once or so before condeming them... thats all...

[Despondent]

TPM: theater, four times (hangs head.) On TV, 1.5 times.

AOTC: theater, twice (ashamed.) DVD: One Time (annotated review somewhere here)

Suffice it to say: Enough times to know better.

[Chefelf]

TPM: theater 2 times, DVD 3 or 4 times

AOTC: theater 1 time (reluctantly), bootleg AVI 1 time, DVD 2-3 times, HBO 2-3 times

ROTS: probably once in the theatre and the DVD a time or two.

[DragonLord]

TPM: theater 1 time, DVD 1 time

AOTC: theater 0 times DVD 1 time

ROTS: probably theater 0 times, DVD 1 time