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05/20/2005 Entry: "What to expect on the Ep III DVD,"
What to expect on the Ep III DVD, or the mystery of General Grevious. Okay, I saw the movie last night and, yes, its the action-packed lightsaber porn-fest every star wars fan is going to love, but there's definitely some missing footage, if not an entire missing backstory surrounding the droid general, Grievous.
As not to spoil anything, click on "Link to this entry" below for the entire entry.
The movie opens up showing a droid called General Grievous who pretty much runs the entire separtist rebellion army. Think of him as a robot general Lee, but he's not really a robot at all. Usually, we don't see droids this smart, animated, or with such responsbilities. This droid also has a cold.
Not to get too geeky here, but this robot has a cold or a serious cough. He also has humanoid eyes and later on when Ben Kenobi kills him, its revealed he has a humanoid system of lungs and possibly other organs. So he's really not a droid at all, he's a man/machine mix known as a cyborg. A cyborg with a cold, that is.
This cold is not explained, nor is it explained why Grevious can weild lightsabers, so far something only Jedi and Sith could do. Well, there is a line where Grevious says "Count Dooku taught me how to use your Jedi lightsaber" then proceeds into a fairly short lightsaber battle. This could have been inserted later after they decided to cut what I'm assuming was an interesting backstory.
The most interesting part is when Kenobi kills Grievous and looks into what's left of Grevious's humanoid organs and kinda sits there scratching his chin and thinking. You'd think this would lead into some kind of exposition regarding the sith using some nasty dark force power to merge man and machine. Or something. But it doesnt go anywhere.
It looks like it was an editorial decision to cut this character's backstory. I'm not saying this was wrong, because this was such a fantastically paced movie, especially for an action movie. There wasn't too much exposition or unrelated scenes. The action scenes themselves were broken up very nicely. Ignoring the cult of star wars, this is a good example of how to cut an action movie.
Anyway, a couple obvious theories come to mind.
- Grevious is a sith that was resurrected by technology like Vader was. Maybe during early production they wanted to bring back Darth Maul. Why Maul? Well, he has his yellow-red eyes and he's a sith the audience is already familiar with. Maul was cut in half, thus leaving all the parts necessary to build Grievous. It would help explain the ease of bringing Anakin back to life from near death. Grievous was the 1.0 sith cyborg thing. Vader is 2.0. They learned from their mistakes. Also, it would explain Grievous's little collection of lightsabers. The first one he got could have been Quin-Gon Jinn's, the jedi he killed in the Phantom Menace. Which could have led to Ben Kenobi recognizing the lightsaber, realizing who he is fighting, and getting very, very pissed. Instead, their fight was almost without drama, with Kenobi smiling, being smarmy, and over-confident.
- Another theory is that the immortality often talked about in the movie was actually using technology to keep people alive, with a dash of the force thrown in for good measure. Darth Sidious alludes to being the apprentice of the sith lord who mastered immortality technology, learned all he could about the immortality techniques, and killed that lord in his sleep. Sidious could have been working on cyborg immortality and could use it to keep Padme alive as an incentive to get Anakin to join him on the dark side of the force. This also could explain his uncanny ability to get all those clones built and how he engineered a special code word to get them to kill the jedi.
Granted, this is all speculation, but there really was no explanation why there's a droid with a cold and humanoid organs in this movie. Perhaps when the DVD comes out there will be some sort of explanation on the original intentions of the Greivous character.
Also, wtf was the deal with the Frankenstein scene? Everyone in the theater was laughing during a dramatic moment. It was pretty silly.
See also: Starwars.com on the making of Grievous.
Replies: 4 comments
read this and it'll make more sense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Grievous
Posted by eL_sTiKo @ 05/21/2005 01:23 AM CST
Yes, I know. That's the "extended universe" which is info which comes from comics, games, books, etc. Everything but the film. My post is about the film, not the extended universe. There's a big difference there. The key questions aren't what was written after the fact, but what was lost in production and why.
Or do they call it the expanded universe? I don't remember. Regardless, its simply not the film and this post is about elements missing from the film.
Posted by lowbot @ 05/21/2005 01:30 AM CST
I would not dismiss the Clone Wars series from Cartoon Network for insight into Greivous. My understanding is tha Lucas officially commissioned Tartakovsky to create the cartoons to fill in the gap between eps 2 and 3. The storyline directly directly leads into the opening of ep 3 as you see Greivous kidnap Palpatine. The lightsaber collection he has in the movie include the sabers he took from the Jedi he killed that were protecting Palpatine from capture.
Posted by Jason @ 05/21/2005 10:47 AM CST
After seeing "Revenge of the Sith", my wife and I kept going over bits of bad dialogue we wished they'd rewritten. We both enjoyed the flick, but it had some very winceable moments. We decided that Anakin should've rasped his questions about Padme's fate and reacted to Palpatine's response before the Vader mask was put on. Instead of screaming, show the pain and loss in his eyes, and then let the mask of Vader fall, clouding them forever. It would've eliminated the silliness of Vader's hysterical response as well as being thematically appropriate. None of James Earl Jones' lines were worth hearing.
Here's one more wacky idea: Personally, I'd love it if someone re-envisioned and rewrote the prequels as a series of minimalist stage plays. Where the prequels depended on spectacle, the stage versions would depend on dialogue. They'd be like mirror images of each other.
Costumery could be inspired by the film, but might better be accomplished by simply choosing basic outfits that reflect the character. Threepio might simply be played by an actor in a yellow t-shirt, for instance. Large speakers would be placed on each side of the stage, and the appropriate music and sound effects could be played through them, as well. The opening crawl would be physically printed on black fabric and unrolled on stage, pulled by wires. Lightsabers would be wooden yardsticks dipped in fluorescent paint. Jar Jar and the Gungans would not exist in this retelling.
The challenge as a playwrite here would obviously be immense, but NPR produced some wonderful radio dramas of the original Star Wars trilogy that might show the way. At any rate, I bet it would be a lot of fun to try.
Posted by Dan Z. @ 05/21/2005 11:09 PM CST
