/ Cory Doctorow / 5:54 am Thu Aug 20, 2009

Poor design-choices in the Star Wars universe

John Scalzi's list of bad design decisions in the Star Wars universe had me LOLing when I should have been working:
C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design

Internet Archive Wayback Machine cache

81

  1. You can’t slide light sabers across each other. This is basic geek logic.

    What the star wars universe really needs is a wide spread shot gun. Can’t deflect that much lead.

  2. Points taken for sure, but how did Scalzi miss the AT-AT walkers used during that battle on Hoth?

    Upon consideration, it doesn’t seem likely a protocol droid woudn’t have a voice chip, but *as you’re watching* Empire, the whole Walker concept screams “ridiculous” to you at very high volume.

  4. I’m there with Rastronomicals on the walker issue. Let’s make a troop carrier that’s really slow, can’t take advantage of cover, has no rear facing weapons, and is easy to trip.

    On the other hand, if you accept that design can be driven by ideology as much as by practicality, the thought process behind the AT-AT starts to make more sense. The Empire wanted something that would literally tower over the landscape and dominate their enemies. The ground shakes as it moves! You can see how it probably evolved out of earlier, lower walkers (a somewhat more practical solution for all-terrain movement), but by the time of “A New Hope” the empire has experienced a couple of decades of total hegemony. As a result you get the cream of the Imperial Naval Academy describing the rebels as “rabble” and “scum” and you get scout walkers in the middle of a temperate rainforest.

    I agree with Scalzi about the Death Star. That thing is full of bad design. Heavy blast doors that open and close really fast? How many workplace accidents has that caused? They must have OSHA inspectors there every other week. Sure, stormtroopers are expendable, but what happens when a Grand Moff gets caught in one because he was on his Blackberry and not paying attention?

  6. Luke’s landrover seems like a bloody bad idea too. An open air car on a planet that must get regular sandstorms? And how does that thing stop anyway without any kind of ground traction? The sandpeople dealer must have seen him coming.

  7. @Trent – It has one, the Golan Arms FC-1 Flachette Weapon.
    Go play Jedi Knight 2 to atone for your sin of not knowing this.

    And Cortosis, the sabre resistant metal/crystal in the EU stories as being highly resistant to lightsabre cutting. And since it’s been made into flexible kevlar style weave for body armour, making a handguard for your sword is a pretty easy thing.
    On the flip side of that, it’s a very rare element. Thus why bother making handguards at all, when they can be sliced through so easily. No one but the most paranoid Sith is going to spend his time and resources hunting down the only metal in the galaxy that can prevent hand loss.

  8. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.

    C-3PO’s parentage is more the Tin Man of Oz and Kurosawa’s lovable peasant rogues from The Hidden Fortress than any “true” design or concept for a droid: hence his unrealistic, mythic, fairy-tale weaknesses. Scalzi’s funny, but kind of missing the point here…. although the “effeminate gay man” thing is horrible, and gets worse with time.

    Epic props, in Lucas’s stable of ethnic Others, to Sebulba, based lovingly on Nick the Greek from Kiss Me Deadly, who is in turn based on (and played by) California author, actor, and activist A. I. Bezzerides. Sebulba’s still gross, but it’s nice to see that Lucas is at least referencing cinema history with this stereotypical character. “Va-va-va-VOOM Annie!”

  9. Don’t you just hate it when the uber-nerd in your head steps in whilst you’re reading things like this and says “but don’t they know that, as stated in the film, the Sarlacc takes years to digest stuff and so seldom needs to be fed. Besides, how do they know that the Hutts haven’t been feeding the thing for years. They have to do something to pass the time on that remarkably dull desert planet.” He does have a point about storm trooper uniforms. If they don’t protect against guns then what’s the point?

  10. Aye to C-3PO, but that light saber hand guard crap would just look stupid. A jedi doesn’t need that because he would sense if his opponent would want to slide down the shaft to lop off his fingers. Everyone knows that, so noone tries those stupid tricks…

  11. I certainly would like a light-sabre. But I’ll say no to the light-handguard that will slice my finger off if I so much as touch it, thanks. Talk about bad design…

    Agree with you about threepio, though. And the excuse that he was made by an eight-year-old won’t cut it, unless he also made all the other protocol droids we see in six movies…

    The AT-AT is a perfectly good design. It takes a direct hit in the knee from a fixed artillery battery! Plus, it has the whole nazi weird-weapon-that-scares-the-enemy thing.

  12. Well I always figured that the Storm Trooper armor DOES protect rather well against conventional guns, and THAT’S why everybody uses blasters. It’s somewhat analagous to modern soldiers carrying gas masks and nobody using chemical warfare. There’s no good reason to assume that blasters shoot light, just that they shoot something that glows: globs of plasma, supheated tracer rounds, or hot rivits. Any of these makes more sense than actual light.

  13. I’m deeply offended. C3PO is NOT a “mincing gay man”. He’s British, OK? There’s a difference.

  14. Lots of things that may seem badly designed actually might have been good ideas after all.

    Consider the original (pre-oil and rockets) R2-D2. The ‘droid was about as low on the menial ladder as you could get: shipborne repairs only, no need to interact with the lifeforms on board. Not giving it language skills was a way of keeping it in its place. No constantly making nasty comments that the organics could understand, though it developed it’s own way of talking to accompany the audio data stream.

    The problem is that Lucas fudged later on: instead of keeping ‘droids uninterested in human affairs (and humans uninterested in ‘droids), he expanded their roles. The Queen rewarding Artoo instead of just treating it as an integral part of the ship and so on.

    I think most ‘droids don’t stay online long enough to acquire personalities in the Star Wars universe, but some do become self-aware. Perhaps the best archetype is from a different story universe: WALL-E…?

  15. Oh, and since we’re on the subject of poor design choices, how come they never had seat belts in Star Trek? The Enterprise was constantly getting assaulted and everyone goes flying.

  16. The AT-AT is a perfectly good design. It takes a direct hit in the knee from a fixed artillery battery! Plus, it has the whole nazi weird-weapon-that-scares-the-enemy thing.

    Well, it might be appropriately hardened, but it is still a troop carrier. How the hell are they supposed to get down from there?

  17. Think of a camel: it lies down.

    Or: they rappel from the belly hatch.

    Or: it cants one leg at an angle, and the stormtroopers use it as a slide. Wheee!

  19. To the evolutionary funkiness of midichlorians add their uncanny ret-conn-icity: unless I’m mistaken, there’s absolutely no attempt to biologically explain the Force, Jedi, etc., in the original films. But with The Fandom Menace we get those lovely midichlorians, Obi-Wan with a microscope, and other forgettable fluff. Boo, hiss.

    Keeper, look at the bottom of the original. Star Drek is next. One hopes J. J. Abrams’ seizure-inducing light-leakage futurescapes are at the top of the list.

  20. The walkers were used because a tank would sink into the snow on Hoth.

    As for bad design, I know that evil Empires probably don’t like health & safety bureaucracies but, seriously, someone needed to build handrails around all those bottomless pits.

  21. Boba Fett Diop@3

    You can see how it probably evolved out of earlier, lower walkers (a somewhat more practical solution for all-terrain movement),

    Which IS shown in the prequel trilogy, Boba Fett Diop: their are neat-o single-person walkers used by clones in Episode III, which are precursors to the AT-STs (on Endor, the big two-man mini-walkers) and the AT-ATs. Nice angle on the ideologically driven design.

  22. The walkers were used because a tank would sink into the snow on Hoth.

    Nonsense. Tracked vehicles are used all the time in arctic and antarctic environments. They’d actually be much faster than AT-ATs. It’s all about the width of the track. Plus, the snow on Hoth was pretty hard packed. The rebels were cutting bases out of it!

    As far as deploying troops is concerned: kneeling takes time, and you lose even more ability to aim your main guns; for rappelling you need highly trained troops, and they are still exposed to a lot of fire; and if one leg turns into a slide, you run the risk of your snow troopers climbing back up and shouting “Again! Again!”.

    Tdawwg:
    Yes! The big lower walkers at the end of Episode II also had roof mounted turrets that could rotate 360 degrees. Much more effective.

  23. @Bobba Fett Diop:

    Okay, good points. But you’ve yet to refute the Big Nazi Thing argument.

    Look at some of the weird stuff that the Germans were working on in WW2. Some of it did not make a lot of sense. I’m not a historian, but the popular view is that this was because they had a loony leader (rather like The Emperor, in fact) — and that, with more time, some of it would have gone into production.

  24. A fun subplot to the pending live-action series (life under the Empire, aww yeah) would be the ferreting-out of ideologically impure Empire geeks in favor of political yes-men designers: the geeks could revolt and go over to the rebels with fun maker-ish tech. James Hansen could cameo. Dare to dream….

  25. @ CAMP FREDDIE

    The walkers were used because a tank would sink into the snow on Hoth.

    False. False. False. False. Do you think Moose can walk on snow? If it’s compact enough for something weighing many thousands of tonnes to walk on it with four small feet, I’m sure a tank or something that HOVERS ABOVE THE SNOW would have been wayyy more efficient. The AT/AT is usefull almost entirely as a scare tactic only.

    Furthermore, why land the AT/AT’s soo far away? It would have been quicker if they didnt have to walk miles and miles to the base.

  26. Oh where do you begin?

    R2D2: Runs on little rollers so it requires a nice smooth surface to move. How the heck did it travel across the swamps of Yoda’s home or Tatooine’s deserts?

    Stormtroopers lack the basic ability to take cover. They stand in the open and get nailed every time. Obi Wan says that stormtroopers are notoriously accurate but every blaster fight shows them always missing wildly. Their armor is worse than useless and never blocks a shot.

    Light sabers can block blaster shots. Assuming blasters fire light beams that means that the person wielding the light saber can see the light coming before it has arrived. Ok, insert “They can sense you pulling the trigger” psychic mishmash here.

    AT-ATs can be tripped and have no self defense guns on their bodies. You build a giant walker that can travel across glaciers but it can’t handle a thin metal cable on its legs? Put a few guns on the body since 90% of the body is blind.

    Cannons on spacecraft are manually aimed. Even guns on current naval vessels are radar guided and computer controled.

    And don’t get me started on building a big straight pipe leading directly to the reactor core. Sue that engineering firm.

    Now I’m off to over analyze the Wizard of Oz.

  27. I don’t understand why he thinks you can just inject midiclorines (sp?).

    Under the same theory, people could just “inject” melanin to make their skin darker.

    Not to mention, it might be a higher concentration, not just count, or perhaps different types, just like blood. Even if you have a midiclorine “transfusion,” the body might reject it, which is a risk with most medical transplants.

  28. Death Star superlaser technician 1: So, anyway, I says, “Forget the dental plan, forget sick leave. I just want a railing. You know, one railing right here!”
    Death Star superlaser technician 2: Yeah, I know. I’ve almost fallen over that thing so many times. So what’d they say?
    Death Star superlaser technician 1: Get this: they said they’re worried we’d be leaning all day.
    Death Star superlaser technician 2: They said that?
    Death Star superlaser technician 1: Yeah.
    Death Star superlaser technician 2: Well, none of this will matter when we’re famous singers.

  29. I’m deeply offended. C3PO is NOT a “mincing gay man”. He’s British, OK? There’s a difference.

    Nope, no there isn’t.

  30. Ah yes, there is nothing like over analyzing something so you can suck all the fun out of it. I feel like I am back in a literature class.

    Why was a giant robot trudging across Hoth instead of a tank? Giant robots are kick ass.

  33. Most classic T.V. and movie sci-fi has people fighting battles with ridiculously impractical equipment and tactics, mostly for visual effect.

    When starfleet sends troops into battle they don’t get camouflage or body armor, they get brightly colored T-shirts and guns that shoot highly visible beams of energy that immediately draw attention to their point of origin. I’d take a team of 20th-century Marine snipers over that shit any day.

    On another note, I was watching “Blade Runner” last night and realized that in the Los Angeles of 2019 nobody has cell phones. I guess phone booths are just more film noir.

  34. Reminds me of the list of uncomfortable plot summaries:

    # STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
    # STAR WARS: EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Boy is abused by midget, kisses sister, attempts patricide.
    # STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI: Handicapped mass murderer kills septugenarian, is lauded.

  35. # STAR WARS: EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Boy is abused by midget, kisses sister, attempts patricide.

    I never knew David Lynch directed Empire.

  36. Star Wars isn’t Sci-Fi, it’s fantasy dressed up in pseudo science. You’ve got the good wizard, the evil wizard, mystic knights, good-king-turned-evil, long lost prince and the wandering adventurer saving the princess. Doesn’t every evil wizard have a bottomless pit in his magical fortress ? Besides it’s got ewoks for gods sake, EWOKS! Rationality does not apply.

  37. OK, I’ll give you the “mincing gay man” stereotype for C-3PO, but I still wanna know where people came up with the opinion that Jar-Jar Binks was a black-guy stereotype. Growing up, half my school was African-American, and I’ve never met a single one who talked, acted, walked, or behaved in any way similar to Jar-Jar Binks.

  39. Re: Makk’s comment … I didn’t think this took any fun out of Star Wars, but rather, was an effective attempt at humor.

    Or, as we say on teh interwebz: I LOL’d! XD

  40. You’re forgetting the REAL driver in SW design:

    Flunky: “Here are the latest batch of sketches.”
    Lucas: “Hey, I like that one. It would make a great toy!”

    1. You’re forgetting the REAL driver in SW design: Flunky: “Here are the latest batch of sketches.” Lucas: “Hey, I like that one. It would make a great toy!”

      Hmm. That describes how I do my produce shopping.

  41. Funny, I always laugh in A New Hope when the cantina bartender kicks R2D2 and C3PO out because they “don’t serve droids”. It’s not like Anthony Daniels or Kenny Baker could have made it down those steps into the joint anyway, and I wonder if that was just to avoid the obvious problem with the small flight of stairs on the set.

    In the prequels R2 suddenly busts out little thrusters enabling him to fly- which seems like a cop-out. That’s shark jumping imo, when you don’t commit to your known universe. I mean, R2 flying would have been so handy in so many places, later, in the original trilogy. That’s the problem with prequels, if tech is cooler and more advanced at an earlier point in time, how does it regress?

  42. Forcefields block all energy weapons, including lightsabers. They don’t, however, block physical weapons, such as normal swords, bullets, missiles, etc.

    Almost nobody uses guns, missiles, bombs, etc. as weapons, even though force fields don’t work against them.

    Then again, force fields are almost never used to protect anything, inspite of the fact that they are almost perfect defences against the only type of weapon that anyone uses.

  43. While we’re at it, let’s discuss all the logical fallacies inherent to The Berenstein Bears and Sesame Street. That would make about as much sense.

  45. What, no Tie-Fighter? I was designed with what amount to giant blinders on either side of the cockpit. Though I guess if you’re moving at light speed you’re really only concerned with what’s directly in front of you.

  46. What if the technology was like this by design? The bottomless pits were obviously for easy minion disposal. Pesky minions. Never could do anything right, other than give Vader choking practice. A pit is nothing to someone who can levitate a herd of llamas while eating breakfast.

    White plastic armor: So you expected it to protect you? Nah. This was to make you easy target practice; more the better that you couldn’t see out of the visor (and it matched the empirical decor.)

    What about the little rolling toaster droid? Tell me this thing wasn’t stupid by design. “Quick! Get that toast to section 1165778-b or you’re… er.. well, just get it there!”

    Midichlorians: Drugs actually. The higher the count, the more your system can handle. They’ll make you so high you’ll glow after you’re dead. But hey, at least they were were an upgrade from the analogchlorians. Your couldn’t telekinese a fly on those.

  47. JIMH:
    I actually always assumed (yes, as a kid) that Oscar had all sorts of catacombs down there into which he was squirrelling away all that garbage. Kind of a hyper mutated talking penis packrat.

  48. @43 DAEMON

    I could’ve sworn that in ESB, the star destroyers’ shields were being damaged by the asteroid field.

    but then again, i think i’ve seen blue harvest and the robot chicken star wars episodes more recently than the original triolgy.

  49. R2D2 is a repair droid designed to run around the inside and outside of a spaceship and repair it, not sit in bars in desert towns and make small talk.

  50. @cognitive dissonance #25

    The walkers had to land so far away because the rebels had an energy shield around their base. This is mentioned a few times during the film.

  51. I’m there with Rastronomicals on the walker issue. Let’s make a troop carrier that’s really slow, can’t take advantage of cover, has no rear facing weapons, and is easy to trip.

    Wow, that’s almost exactly what Ernie Pyle said about German 10-wheel troop carriers after the conquest of North Africa. See “Here is Your War” by Ernie Pyle, either the last chapter or the one before it.

  52. even if C-3PO *is* a gay stereotype, i say as a gay man that he is the least offensive portrayal as such in most movies i’ve seen.

  53. And I say as a British man that its ok for him to be British too, if he wants. Any difficulties with immigration are his problem however.

  54. C-3PO is an asexual machine. It’s only due to cultural bias that we (or the characters in the film) refer to the robot as a “he” at all.

  55. Disagree on C3P0. Were he suave and adept he could come across as threatening. He’s designed to be inoffensive and slightly helpless, prompting those around him to feel protective. Also, he’s like the Red Cross, not supposed to be fighting, so it’s encumbent on him to run away in combat. Recent experiment that was posted on a real “robot” that lost it’s way in the city, followed on hidden camera by it’s owner, found people helped it out.

  56. @#14

    Agreed on droid personalities. C3PO and R2D2 were such interesting droids because they had a wealth of memories. In the novels, a lot of droid owners seem to be accustomed to the practise of essentially “reformatting” their droids every couple of years to avoid irksome personality traits.

    This is an item in the Star Wars universe that was never dealt with. Luke always tended towards treating his droids as persons who happened to be his servants. He was always polite to them, even when he was upset. When asked by a deck crew member if Luke wants a replacement astromech, Luke says “No way! That droid and I have been through a lot together. Right R2?”

    This stand in stark contrast to most Star Wars characters who treat droids as objects, and subject them to verbal and sometimes physical abuse.

    The question becomes: when a droid has been continuously online long enough to have a consistent personality, does that make them worthy of some basic respect? Or should we continue to treat them as tools?

    After all, the Cylons were created by man…

  57. If you are fighting a guy so bad at sword-fighting that you can slide down his sword and chop his hands off… then might as well just go right for the neck or chest! Hand guards are like training wheels!

  58. But even some of the staffage droids have some kind of subjectivity: droids get ripped apart and squeal in pain; there’s that one that gets red-hot metal put on its feet. Even though they don’t use articulate speech, they seem to be sentient, aware.

    Ditto the awesome, bitchy Separatist battle droids from the prequels: “Roger, roger,” and all that. While less-distinguished than a “personality” like R2, they do seem to have individual characteristics, responses to stimuli, etc.

    I think the main reason Lucas never goes very far with this is that he’s simply not that interested: as said above, he’s way more into robots and aliens as funny, scary, etc. Others rather than as sci-fi thought-experiment objects, like Dekkard in Blade Runner say. But I’ve always thought Lucas’s animate robots were some of the better parts of the whole Star Wars mythos.

  59. FTA:
    You’re saying that as director, George Lucas couldn’t have told his actor to try a different interpretation? As in “No, less mincing, more Lorre?” I’m unconvinced.

    Lucas is such a shitty director, that it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t give a damn whichever way any of his actor chose to portray a given character.

    1. George Lucas has directed four films in the last 36 years. He’s a special effects entrepreneur, producer and writer. He’s only a director in the same sense that Shaq is an actor.

  60. @schmod: thank you thank you thank you… many hours have been lost to laughter today as a result of that link.

  61. I always loved the open laser channels in both Death Stars. It’s implied, from the people standing around being blinded when the laser goes off, that the laser channels within the Death Star are in some sort of atmosphere.

    I always imagined the fate of poor Myric Jons, the last maintainance tech to be working on the laser of Death Star II when the Emperor suddenly decided to commission it. One moment he’s fixing a fiber optic data feed, the next he’s vaporized before he even hears the fire order!

  62. Good point, Antinous.

    It would have been better to leave directing in the hands of a more capable person, as he did on ep. V and VI; but by that time, all the characters’ performances were set, so there was no turning back.

  63. At some point between the prequels and the original trilogy, Artoo’s thrusters clearly stopped working. Maybe the the war’s driven the price of thruster fuel up to crazy levels.

  64. George Lucas has directed four films in the last 36 years. He’s a special effects entrepreneur, producer and writer.

    A director, then! Glad that’s settled.

    At some point between the prequels and the original trilogy, Artoo’s thrusters clearly stopped working. Maybe the the war’s driven the price of thruster fuel up to crazy levels.

    I think the phenomenon is more directly attributable to the developments in CGI technology in a galaxy far, far away from R2’s….

  66. @ Ill Lich #46 – no, the TIE Fighter doesn’t have lightspeed capabilities, so…oh God.

    I’ll just move over here and never know the touch of a woman.

  68. TDAWWG said

    unless I’m mistaken, there’s absolutely no attempt to biologically explain the Force, Jedi, etc., in the original films. But with The Fandom Menace we get those lovely midichlorians, Obi-Wan with a microscope, and other forgettable fluff. Boo, hiss.

    AMEN.

    You are NOT mistaken, in fact, in Episode IV Obi Wan is specific:

    The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

    I gagged on my oversize Coke when they trotted out that midichlorian crap in Episode 1.

    Then again, I was already cursing under my breath uncontrollably as I watched the lives of slaves portrayed as middle American hum drum on Tatooine.

    “Hi Mom, I finished my slaving for the day, can I go and work on my robot that I couldn’t possible build and then go fly my speeder I couldn’t possibly fly?”

    “Sure honey, after you finish your milk! I’m a slave house wife! Oh also, you were immaculately conceived, tying this story inexplicably to the Bible. Have fun!”

  69. Why did the new, not yet fully constructed Death Star come with a tentacled garbage disposal monster pre-installed?

  70. @24 TDAWG:

    the geeks could revolt and go over to the rebels with fun maker-ish tech

    If I recall correctly, this is exactly what is supposed to have happened with the X-Wing. It was developed for the Empire (based on the clone fighters), then the program was scrapped in favor of TIE and the designers went over to the rebels.

  71. Ah, that’s correct, Robulus! But I suppose after retconning Obi-Wan’s speech must read as the mystical mumbo-jumbo of a desert-dwelling crazy hermit, stranded on Tatooine without his Midichlorian sampling kit. Bah.

    Malgas, thanks! Check out the relevant Wookiepedia article:

    The X-wing was originally designed by Incom Corporation for the Empire by Vors Voorhorian, but the entire engineering team defected to the Rebel Alliance with the prototypes hidden on Fresia.

    Gotta love them disgruntled Empire engineers.

  72. @71 JFrancis:
    No, the blueprints have changed again, and we’re not putting in the zoo. I don’t know what the heck kind of eggs you bought, but please just throw them out.

  73. What about Ice Cream Maker Guy? Are we supposed to believe that, in the advanced future (okay, advanced past in another galaxy) they wouldn’t have developed a better way to make ice cream? And that the ice cream maker would be so important that, during an emergency, it would be the one thing someone would want to save?

    http://www.geocities.com/ocb75/

  74. #58: Gotta argue the point with you there. Hand guards are not like training wheels. Depending on the style of fencing and the type of sword, the hand guard can be used to trap and break the opponent’s blade, to trip or otherwise entangle the opponent, or to strike the opponent in the face. Check out Talhoffer or Fiore dei Liberi for a lot of nasty tricks involving sword pommels and quillons.

    It is possible to parry or divert an opponent who’s trying to slice off your fingers, but it’s tricky. Better to have at least some sort of guard on your sword.

    That being said, the swordsmanship in the first three films is primarily based on kendo, and is poorly choreographed and executed. The duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader is especially cringe-worthy. (They look like they’re on a fencing piste.)

  75. Actually they don’t even look like they’re on a fencing piste- they look like they’re aiming for each others weapons and not the target. Which is exactly what they’re doing, and in slow motion at that. But good fight choreography is about making it look real, and in reality a parry stops an attack that would hit. If an attack is off target, an experienced fencer does not parry. A counterattack is more likely.

    I’m pretty sure Sir Alec wasn’t physically or contractually down with the weeks of intense of training it would have taken to produce a believable on-screen duel.

    Anyway, just about my only praise for the prequels is that the swordplay improved tremendously.

  76. What lightsabers really need are wrist straps, like a Wii controller. How many times did they drop those damn things?

  77. Anyone who dislikes the prequel trilogy needs to do themselves a favor and check out fanedit.org

  78. The Sarlaac’s not so ridiculous, it basically does exactly what an antlion larva does – sits at the bottom of a pit and waits for something to stray into it. Seems to work for them, so why not a massive desert critter?

  79. If Vader can anticipate moves before they happen as can luke because they both “use the force” then how the hell can you ever complete a light saber battle???

    Only possible conclusion is vader wasnt taking his Centruum!

Comments are closed.