I enjoy the Star Wars movies, but I’m not nearly so rabid about it as many of my generation. Perhaps that’s why I’ve especially liked two things I’ve read recently: this, a detailed reflection on the several awful drafts of the first Star Wars script before the 1977 movie was finally made, and this, a run down of some of the biggest logical loopholes in the physical designs of that universe.
The best part of the latter is reading the superior comments from readers, and the best part of the former is seeing just how many of Lucas’s original ideas–which were far too lame and got cut from the first Star Wars film he made–mostly got recycled and ended up in the prequel trilogy. As if we needed more vindication for hating Episode I.
Speaking of the prequels, here’s a huge failure of reason from Episode II that I’ve never figured out. Why the heck does the Republic, much less the Jedi, trust the clone army in the first place? Obi Wan finds that the army was created–allegedly–under the secret auspices of a dead Jedi master, but was clearly done so without the consent of the Jedi council. Further, the army was patterned after a mysterious bounty hunter who tried to kill Obi Wan. And didn’t it strike anyone as suspicious that this army just happened to show up at the precise time that the Republic found its resources strained by new hostilities and in need of more muscle? Shouldn’t that alone have made people leery of bringing these guys on board?
I mean, if America were suddenly under increasing siege, and the president’s advisers found that someone had just finished secretly training an army for decades under the orders of a former high ranking general–but who had launched the program without the authorization of the president–and those soldiers had been trained and molded in the exact pattern of a known terrorist, wouldn’t you think we just might not send those guys right into action for us?
Please, if you can, someone explain this to me.
Gently Hew Stone 