Is Disney "Star Wars" universe imploding?

[Awesome Possum]

The comics show that Vader just enjoys killing people. RO was him having a great day at work. His fight with Obi-Wan could be seen as him taking his time, savoring his final fight with the man who crippled him and who he likely hated more than anyone else in the galaxy.

 

[Tuskin38]

and in both ESB and ROTJ, he still wasn't 100% sure about killing his son.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Yeah, he's just toying with Luke in ESB. He's more concerned with wearing him out than fighting him. He's even fighting with one hand for most of it. He only gets mad and cuts off Luke's hand after Luke hits his arm in a spot that's still flesh.

 

[Reverend]

Yeah, it's pretty obvious that in ESB at least Vader isn't trying to kill Luke at all. His objective from the very beginning of the movie was to capture him. Initially I think he'd hoped to do it without Palpatine knowing about it, but after his little holo-conference that idea went up in smoke. Hence the carbon freezing chamber.

It's always seemed somewhat ambiguous to me what Vader's intentions were in RotJ. My read was that by that point, Palpatine had him on such a short leash that'd he'd pretty much given into despair and resigned to the reality that either Palpatine would make him kill Luke or sit back and watch Luke kill him and take his place (I mean he had seen that play out already with Dooku.) Note that there's no more "...rule the galaxy as father and son!" talk, it's all "...I *must* obey my master!"
For most of the fight, Luke (who is more of a match for Vader now) is fighting defensively only, which makes it difficult to gauge how much Vader is really trying for the kill and how much is his just toying with him again. I'd say he's certainly conflicted, but his determination to survive, mostly out of spite has been his primary motivation since Padme's death so I think it's about 50% not really wanting Luke dead and 50% not willing to just roll over and die. The tipping point only comes when he indirectly senses Leia and in doing so presses Luke's berserk button.

 

[JD]

My reasoning behind writing that is because, in RO, he's jumping all over the corridor flinging his lightsaber around and force-slamming and choking everyone as if he just popped a ton of uppers. He's almost on par with Ren with what looks like a tantrum-induced rage...

ANH, which happens not-too-long after RO but long enough for Vader to catch his breath back, has Vader being calm, collected, being quite controlled in just force-choking one person, much slower with his lightsaber and in a more emotionally tight fight against Old Ben Kenner Toy Obi Wan Kenobi, and his voice sounds a bit different. And never once did the audience get the impression he had emotional issues of the sort Ren had.

I just wrote the differences between RO and ANH's Vader scenes as the difference between how action is handled today's big movies vs how it was handled in small movies back in the late '70s.

 

[Awesome Possum]

It's really hard to treat two films made 40 years apart as one continuous event since the language of film has changed so much. I just try not to think about it too hard. They're movies and entertainment, not a chronicle of realistic events.

 

[Refuge]

I just wrote the differences between RO and ANH's Vader scenes as the difference between how action is handled today's big movies vs how it was handled in small movies back in the late '70s.

They weren't small movies back in the '70s. 'Star Wars' in context of its times was huge. Rogue One hardly would rate in comparison.

 

[BillJ]

Rogue One was so forgettable for me, that I don't even remember the scenes with Vader. And I've seen it twice.

 

[USS Firefly]

Rogue One was so forgettable for me, that I don't even remember the scenes with Vader. And I've seen it twice.

Well, Vader was the one in the black suit, and black helmet. And he used a red lightsaber

 

[JD]

They weren't small movies back in the '70s. 'Star Wars' in context of its times was huge. Rogue One hardly would rate in comparison.

OK, ANH might not have been a "small" movie, but that doesn't change the fact that today's action movies are very, very different from '70s action movies, and the expectations have changed drastically.

 

[fireproof78]

They weren't small movies back in the '70s. 'Star Wars' in context of its times was huge. Rogue One hardly would rate in comparison.

Star Wars was a surprise for its time. It was not suppose to succeed as it did.