Imperial efficiency
Just back from the late show of Revenge of the Sith. I don’t think the following observation can fairly be called a spoiler: the Empire seems to have made massive, massive strides in efficiency from its origins at the end of the current film to the period covered in the original trilogy. Apparently, judging by Luke and Leia's age at the opening of Episode IV: A New Hope, it took about 18 years to complete the first Death Star. After it was destroyed at the end of that film, it seems to have taken a year or so for the Empire to be well on its way to building a replacement, and the Emperor found even that pace too slow. At the beginning of ANH, the Death Star's principal weapon had not even been tested. Perhaps a year later, a fully operational new Death Star weapon was ready to destroy the forest moon of Endor. Interesting. It appears the rebels managed to defeat an Empire that really was at the height of its powers, killer-space-station-building-wise
Of course, it may be that the original Death Star had been finished for a while, held in reserve for deployment at a time of the Emperor's choosing. But every indication in ANH is that it was on its maiden voyage, and one would think that an Empire with a functional Death Star in its arsenal would not have hesitated to use it rather than let the rebellion drag on and on. So, evidently, they had just finished it about 18 years after beginning construction. Perhaps there were just a lot of conflicting demands on the Imperial treasury during those 18 years.
More likely, the Death Star's unlikely construction schedule had more to do with George Lucas's inabilty to hold back from filling his new film with little references to the original trilogy. There certainly are plenty of those. I was startled when it ended before showing us any early Y-wing fighters.
Like its predecessors in the I-II-III trilogy, RotS lacks some quality that made the original films so boundlessly entertaining. I think it really comes down to writing and acting. Critics reviewing the later films have sometimes said they carry on a tradition of stilted writing and poor acting. I used to think maybe I wasn't judging the first films fairly because they ingrained themselves in my psyche at impressionable ages. However, there is no question that IV, V and VI are qualitatively superior in terms of writing and acting. There are many memorable and charming lines in the originals but, so far as I can tell, none in the recent three. "Anakin, Palpatine is evil!" just doesn't do anything for me.
posted at 2:24 AM
1 Comments:
If you consider the size and complexity of the Death Star, I don't think it's unreasonable that it took 18 years to design and build the first one. And maybe they learned enough from that one to be able to build another one in a much shorter time frame.
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