As I said I thought Mace did that to him when they abducted Palpatine at the end of the second Clone Wars TV series. I don't tink he coughed in the scenes after the opening of the movie.
Darth Vader has an artificial breathing nose he shouldn't need. Grievous has a hacking cough from time to time. Sith Lords don't make their cyborgs perfect, so the can control them. With real lungs, it allows the likes of Dooku or Palpatine to force choke them.
I'm not sure yet. I've only seen it once (seeing it again this Tuesday) and the initial excitement had me wanting to rank it very high, but since then the hype has died down a bit and a few niggling details have kind of been holding it back for me. I need to see it at least one more time before I can rank it comfortably. Putting it ahead of the PT but behind the OT is really easy but also really obvious. I'm really tempted to say TESB > ANH > TFA > ROTJ > ROTS > TPM > AOTC, but again, too soon to say for sure.
"Artificial breathing noise" makes more sense than a hacking cough. How are you supposed to take a villain seriously when he looks like a robot with a bad cough?
Well having finally seen it a second time, I think I definitively have to rank TFA below all three OT movies now. It's obviously got a lot of great stuff in it, and I love the new characters... but unfortunately everything involving Starkiller Base in the second half feels so utterly uninspired and unnecessary that it just drags the movie down for me. And yeah, I realize ROTJ recycled the Death Star as well, but at least that time we got a truly amazing and spectacular space battle out of it. And then you factor in the thrilling skiff battle and Luke kicking ass as a Jedi and facing down Vader and the Emperor...
Over the last week, I watched TFA one more time, and I also watched the original trilogy again, since I hadn't seen those films in a while. So now I am placing TFA higher than ROTJ. I find ROTJ to be tedious and formulaic, and just lacking the immediacy and excitement of ANH and ESB. And then there are the teddy bears. I now find that ROTJ's only saving grace is the character development and the resolution to the Luke/Vader story. Basically, I tend to watch ROTJ only to wrap up the ESB storyline, but never for its own sake. So here's my new ranking: ESB ANH TFA ROTJ . . . . . And the rest. Kor
I rewatched the OT myself recently and mostly stick with my original assessment I made up-thread. (I suppose minus the insertion of The Holiday Special as a joke to how bad the prequels are.) I don't own the PT on DVD and don't really want to own them, so cannot really re-evaluate my feelings on them. Though, at the same time, Rifftrax has released a new App that "auto-syncs" their audio-only commentaries with your play of the movie being riffed and downloading of the App right now gets you free use of the SW riffs during the Open Beta period.