Star Wars prequel questions

[Morrus]

But it seems the whole spiel was also about giving his rule more legitimacy then just "I have more troops".

We’re talking about the guy who built the Death Star to dominate the galaxy through fear. He’s quite content to use power as his legitimacy.

Having this legitimacy stifles his opposition from mounting a resistance.

Well clearly not! Star Wars very famously tells the story of the resistance.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It's a common enough playbook. You gin up a controversy of some sort, raise an army of thugs/clones, send them into sensitive areas where they will meet opposition, then declare martial law as the situation deteriorates. Boom - you're Emperor!

In your fiction perhaps, that would never happen in the real world. People have seen Star Wars and could spot the plot from a mile away.

 

[djotaku]

In a way, the whole CLone Wars exist to create a huge kill zone for Jedi, Ruin Explorer? Might work.

But it seems the whole spiel was also about giving his rule more legitimacy then just "I have more troops". Having this legitimacy stifles his opposition from mounting a resistance. The "people" chose him as their leader, so even if he's a terrible being and turns everything to sh*t, doesn't he belong there? Even if I think he needs to go, can I convince my peers of that?
And we know that resistance against his rule - even if he controls the military - is possible, it happens in the OT! But if might have started sooner if he had appeared as conqueror.
Of course, all that rationalization isn't really presented on screen...y th

To me the whle plot of clone wars is saved by the cartoon. Too bad we weren't doing prestige TV back then. I think the prequels might have worked better as TV. (Although not with Lucas as a writer)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

We’re talking about the guy who built the Death Star to dominate the galaxy through fear. He’s quite content to use power as his legitimacy.

Well clearly not! Star Wars very famously tells the story of the resistance.

Maybe stifle is too hard as a word? "Delay"? I mean he got two decades of rulership out of it, didn't he? Would that have worked if people hated his guts from the start? No, he really needed to lay on the oppressive regime hard to really lose their hearts and minds!

 

[djotaku]

Maybe stifle is too hard as a word? "Delay"? I mean he got two decades of rulership out of it, didn't he? Would that have worked if people hated his guts from the start? No, he really needed to lay on the oppressive regime hard to really lose their hearts and minds!

I know it's science fantasy, but this is pretty realistic. How often do regimes completely nullify resistance? Almost never. It can even low-key simmer for generations (looking at Quebec, Basque, and Catalan)

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

And I think that stuff works awesome if you're Luc Besson doing Fifth Element or something. Not so much Star Wars given what it's become.

I think it goes back to excellence of execution. The digital environments of the prequels don't feel real, but when you look at LOTR or The Fifth Element, they do. Heck, that goes back further - look at the matte paintings of Blade Runner versus Hawk the Slayer (though I would argue that a bad matte painting compositing ages better than bad CGI, in part because we're still seeing a physical object).

It's also about the writing. The hyper-layered New York City feels like it could be a real place, whereas the droid factory does not - it's pointlessly cavernous, goes on forever to allow all the action of the scene to unfold.

 

[Maxperson]

He--as Chancellor--has the clone army of the Republic.

His apprentice--Dooku--is overseeing the construction of the droid army on (Geonosis?)

It seems to me he's running both armies. If he's not, then I reiterate that the plot is not clear to me.

I think it was a necessity in order to get those armies made in the first place. Neither the Republic, nor the droid creators(their name escapes me) had an army or need for one. To get the Republic to accept the clones, the Republic needed an enemy that required the clones. In order to create the droid army, he needed the creators to need an army for some reason, which in this case was to break away from the Republic and take over some worlds.

Without those two powers threatening each other, they wouldn't have bothered to create the armies and situation Palpatine needed to take over, which was via emergency war powers. Once they were at war, it would have been impossible, even for a Sith master, to just stop the war and bring both armies together under his command.

 

[amethal]

I assume the whole point of the Clone Wars was to kill off all the Jedi and thereby demonstrate the superiority of the Sith.

Seizing power as the ruler of the galactic empire was a secondary consideration - it's not clear if the Emperor actually gets anything out of it other than it being a massive ego trip, with vanity death star projects and the like. Ruling the galaxy seems to be more trouble than it's worth.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In a way, the whole CLone Wars exist to create a huge kill zone for Jedi, Ruin Explorer? Might work.

But it seems the whole spiel was also about giving his rule more legitimacy then just "I have more troops". Having this legitimacy stifles his opposition from mounting a resistance. The "people" chose him as their leader, so even if he's a terrible being and turns everything to sh*t, doesn't he belong there? Even if I think he needs to go, can I convince my peers of that?
And we know that resistance against his rule - even if he controls the military - is possible, it happens in the OT! But if might have started sooner if he had appeared as conqueror.
Of course, all that rationalization isn't really presented on screen...

I do think the Jedi Kill Zone is the major reason for creating the clones, because from the get-go, they were built with chips to control their behaviour, including a secret option which wasn't "kill all Jedi", but was communicated to the Kaminoan designers as "Oh Jedi might go rogue, we need this option to target individual rogue Jedi". But Palpatine always intended to take them all out. I would say there is maybe an analogy to the way we see laws and legal instruments created today which often purport to be about "efficiency" or "protecting people" the like, but in practice could very easily be used to mass-deprive people of basic legal rights, and certainly that sort of thing was on Lucas' mind (the first prequel was pre-9/11 and pre-DHS etc., but the later ones and later material about this era were after that).

 

[djotaku]

I think it goes back to excellence of execution. The digital environments of the prequels don't feel real, but when you look at LOTR or The Fifth Element, they do. Heck, that goes back further - look at the matte paintings of Blade Runner versus Hawk the Slayer (though I would argue that a bad matte painting compositing ages better than bad CGI, in part because we're still seeing a physical object).

It's also about the writing. The hyper-layered New York City feels like it could be a real place, whereas the droid factory does not - it's pointlessly cavernous, goes on forever to allow all the action of the scene to unfold.

Yeah, I think you and I agree, I didn't didn't say it elegantly enough. If the director is being artistic (hence Fifth Element) I'm ok with random artistic things that may or may not make sense. (whether that's clothing, buildings, cars, weapons, etc) But Star Wars has evolved to this place where people take the canon seriously - there are timelines and novels that flesh things out and so on. So things develop more scrutiny which means the locations should make more sense. (To a point, it's still a series with a space wizard quasi-religious quasi-military organization) Or to put it another way, if we put aside the exploitative aspect of it, I can forgive Red Sonja's chainmail bikini because it's part of that genre of stories that came out of the 1900s-1950s. But in a modern fantasy telling that takes itself more seriously, it's just dumb to be that exposed to weaponry compared to the others in the party.