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Originally posted by: RRS-1980
With the technology at hand and experience under its belt ILM should have done in ROTS a space battle that will steal the first place once held by ROTJ battle.
What do we get?
Chaotic mixture of space vessels, we can't follow who is who, who's winning etc. Too much time devoted to those stupid buzz-droids, as if this was more important than the space siege of Coruscant - darn, that's the capital of the whole known universe! Instead of it I'd like to see a classic "dogfight" (read: fighters' maneuver fight), what was presented to us in ROTJ and ANH-SE. Star Wars always followed the unmentioned rule that space battles should take plane in one plane, as if it was a classic naval duel. See the ships that evaded Death Star blast - they're in circle more or less on the equator level, not "everywhere around". Imperial fleet was positioned on one plane, facing Rebels. In ROTJ when the ships exchanged fire they were side by side - not "hanging upside down" like in ROTS.
Compare the scene when Lando pursues a fighter around a Rebel frigate - this (I remind you - we're in 1982) is still FX masterpiece for me.
I gotta agree with Darth Simon about fighter orientation, I also gotta say that, if you read the RotS novel with a much longer space battle script, you'll find the parts they kept are not actually as cool as the parts they cut . . . which makes me a very sad boo. There are some great setups in there that were chucked for the buzz droid sequence. ( Which is also in there, I'm just saying, if one had to go . . . ) I understand the buzz droids made it necessary for them to crash into the hanger, but not only could they have found another excuse, even this is less cool than in the book.
"Reaching into the Force, his mind followed the starfighter's mangled circuitry to locate and activate the sublight engines' manual test board. With a slight push, he triggered a command normally used only in bench tests: full reverse.
The cometary trail of glowing debris shed by his disintegrating starfighter shot past him and evaporated in a cascade of minature starbursts on contact with the hangar shield. Which was exactly what was about to happen to him.
The only effect of full reverse from his failing engines was to give him more time to see it coming."
Do. not. understand. choreographer's. choices. Oh well, at least none of the other fights were like the atrociously orchastrated stuff in episode ii.