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krpalmerEven after completing my latest review for Saga Journal, I kept thinking about one loose end probably more personal than anything. I had mentioned that the "Fan Corner" section of "The Jedi Bendu Script Page" had "two 'Episode III' treatments of differing age and length but which both seem composed of equal amounts of pure, uninformed speculation." One of them, I admit here, I had already seen before; in fact, I had collaborated on a MSTing of it and an equally speculative article by the same person also on the Jedi Bendu page. As for the other, newer "Episode III" script, though, I glanced at just enough of it to convince myself it indeed had no particular "inside" connection to Revenge of the Sith and that was that. However, for some reason the curiosity that had been a part of my joining in on the "Fall of the Republic" MSTing (along with a determination that at least one person working on it wouldn't be intent on using it to revenge himself on Star Wars as it really was) left me wondering about the other script and whether it was somehow fair to have taken such a token look at it. The only problem was that I wasn't quite sure I'd like the experience... and a part of that was worrying about certain events that "everyone knew would be this way..."
Then, one day, I started managed to just start reading, and "The Republic Falls" actually didn't trouble me; it didn't feel like it had been churned out by someone trying to "make up for The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones" in the process, and it seemed to have sympathy for all the characters in its own way. However, it also safely avoided that really outside fear of mine, that I might somehow end up preferring it... In fact, I was left with a renewed awareness of the things perhaps even surprising about Revenge of the Sith that had seemed impressive and right to me on the very first encounter.
In an echo and a mirror of the movie's opening battle over Coruscant, the script begins with a Republic fleet apparently about to win the final battle of the Clone Wars by attacking the mysterious Nemoidian home planet, which is just a sea of mud on the surface, and I contemplated all the new worlds in the movie. True, George Lucas has a full force of designers to call on, and yet I can also think "description in text is free..." Anakin Skywalker is still stuck as a padawan, pointlessly rebellious and browbeaten by Obi-Wan and not accomplishing much of anything in that battle as his artificial arm and his lightsabre short out in the mud, and I remembered how much I'd enjoyed him having the chance to be an unencumbered hero at the start of the movie even as I concluded he'd been more successful in Attack of the Clones than he was in this script... Obi-Wan didn't seem to have much more to do, though, and I found myself missing General Grievous. (The most notable new character I can think of in the script, beyond "Admiral Tarkin," arrogant enough even when trying to run a fleet with no starfighters whatsoever but also petulant when overwhelmed, is a hacker, sorry, "slicer," the Jedi hire to tap communications. I did find myself wondering if that was somehow a nod to the online author of the script and the online audience...) Palpatine winds up bald and with a scarred forehead after a scuffle between a lot of Jedi and his red guard ends with a thermal detonator being set off, whereupon he dons a wig and a bandage, and I thought back to the unleashed power of his lightsabre duels with both Mace Windu and Yoda. Then, Boba Fett is force-grown to maturity in a tank so he can battle Mace Windu (but not actually kill him), the younglings are evacuated to a distant world and one named "Mara," two or three years old, says goodbye to Yoda, and a young blue-skinned officer shows up on one of the Imperial ships... I was sort of amused, though, that Mon Mothma says "This is where the fun begins" as she starts the Rebellion alongside "General Antilles," if without immediate success. Bail Organa is sort of left on the sidelines, and I was left struck by how much more vital he appeared in the movie.
After being expelled from the Jedi Order for marrying Padme, becoming convinced she's died in childbirth via the machinations of Palpatine, and getting drunk, Anakin kills Darth Tyrannus in a lightsabre-versus-red-guard-weapon duel, which pretty much amounts to his turning to the Dark Side, and I recalled the dark twists of how that happened in the movie. (Still, I was struck by the resonance to the lightsabre-proof staffs of Grievous's bodyguards...) Tracking Obi-Wan to Naboo, the Dark Side Anakin fires a Death Star prototype weapon into the ocean just so he can get to the Gungan city without his Sith-issue lightsabre shorting out again, and the final duel between him and Obi-Wan ensues, a duel that ends when Padme shoots him in the back and he refuses an offer of help to drop into a production tank for explosive spheres... With that, the water boiled out of the oceans rains back down, and Naboo mutates into Dagobah. The younglings may have survived, but the fate of everyone else on Naboo is left very dark... There was, I fear, a dark ambiguity for me at the end of the script, with Padme left to take care of Leia but in a seemingly catatonic and sinking state. I don't think I ever had to "make my peace" with her true fate, and yet I can accept and contemplate the ambiguities in it...
In any case, I'm sure summarizing a mere "fanscript" in direct competition with an actual movie may not be absolutely fair. Nor does it help me get a real appreciation for just how these "fan works" are supposed to comment in any way on the site's grandiose aim of outstripping all "official" material about the making of the movies. Still, the experience was an interesting one.
Then, one day, I started managed to just start reading, and "The Republic Falls" actually didn't trouble me; it didn't feel like it had been churned out by someone trying to "make up for The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones" in the process, and it seemed to have sympathy for all the characters in its own way. However, it also safely avoided that really outside fear of mine, that I might somehow end up preferring it... In fact, I was left with a renewed awareness of the things perhaps even surprising about Revenge of the Sith that had seemed impressive and right to me on the very first encounter.
In an echo and a mirror of the movie's opening battle over Coruscant, the script begins with a Republic fleet apparently about to win the final battle of the Clone Wars by attacking the mysterious Nemoidian home planet, which is just a sea of mud on the surface, and I contemplated all the new worlds in the movie. True, George Lucas has a full force of designers to call on, and yet I can also think "description in text is free..." Anakin Skywalker is still stuck as a padawan, pointlessly rebellious and browbeaten by Obi-Wan and not accomplishing much of anything in that battle as his artificial arm and his lightsabre short out in the mud, and I remembered how much I'd enjoyed him having the chance to be an unencumbered hero at the start of the movie even as I concluded he'd been more successful in Attack of the Clones than he was in this script... Obi-Wan didn't seem to have much more to do, though, and I found myself missing General Grievous. (The most notable new character I can think of in the script, beyond "Admiral Tarkin," arrogant enough even when trying to run a fleet with no starfighters whatsoever but also petulant when overwhelmed, is a hacker, sorry, "slicer," the Jedi hire to tap communications. I did find myself wondering if that was somehow a nod to the online author of the script and the online audience...) Palpatine winds up bald and with a scarred forehead after a scuffle between a lot of Jedi and his red guard ends with a thermal detonator being set off, whereupon he dons a wig and a bandage, and I thought back to the unleashed power of his lightsabre duels with both Mace Windu and Yoda. Then, Boba Fett is force-grown to maturity in a tank so he can battle Mace Windu (but not actually kill him), the younglings are evacuated to a distant world and one named "Mara," two or three years old, says goodbye to Yoda, and a young blue-skinned officer shows up on one of the Imperial ships... I was sort of amused, though, that Mon Mothma says "This is where the fun begins" as she starts the Rebellion alongside "General Antilles," if without immediate success. Bail Organa is sort of left on the sidelines, and I was left struck by how much more vital he appeared in the movie.
After being expelled from the Jedi Order for marrying Padme, becoming convinced she's died in childbirth via the machinations of Palpatine, and getting drunk, Anakin kills Darth Tyrannus in a lightsabre-versus-red-guard-weapon duel, which pretty much amounts to his turning to the Dark Side, and I recalled the dark twists of how that happened in the movie. (Still, I was struck by the resonance to the lightsabre-proof staffs of Grievous's bodyguards...) Tracking Obi-Wan to Naboo, the Dark Side Anakin fires a Death Star prototype weapon into the ocean just so he can get to the Gungan city without his Sith-issue lightsabre shorting out again, and the final duel between him and Obi-Wan ensues, a duel that ends when Padme shoots him in the back and he refuses an offer of help to drop into a production tank for explosive spheres... With that, the water boiled out of the oceans rains back down, and Naboo mutates into Dagobah. The younglings may have survived, but the fate of everyone else on Naboo is left very dark... There was, I fear, a dark ambiguity for me at the end of the script, with Padme left to take care of Leia but in a seemingly catatonic and sinking state. I don't think I ever had to "make my peace" with her true fate, and yet I can accept and contemplate the ambiguities in it...
In any case, I'm sure summarizing a mere "fanscript" in direct competition with an actual movie may not be absolutely fair. Nor does it help me get a real appreciation for just how these "fan works" are supposed to comment in any way on the site's grandiose aim of outstripping all "official" material about the making of the movies. Still, the experience was an interesting one.