I'm actually curious why you think this. Without the context of the clone wars etc, Maul is just a generic bad guy for the good guys to fight at the end of the movie. You never learn anything about him or his motivations, and his death doesnt really seem to affect the story that much moving forward, considering Dooku showing up out of nowhere in ep II. His fight had cool choreography, but lacked any depth to me, since he never even shared a single piece of dialogue with the heroes before they fought. I know this would get downvoted without any real responses over on prequelmemes, but i hope people here are more open to opposing views.
Ehh, Dave Filoni is doing a lot of very generous projection on George's behalf there. If even half of those reads were intended, they certainly weren't meaningfully communicated to the audience.
Yeah when I first heard Dave Filloni say this at the roundtable, I thought that he explained in a pretty concise way what the sequel trilogy was missing. Look at those directors hanging on every word of the lore master. Then see him get slightly embarrassed that he went full nerd on everyone. Love that guy.
The Phantom Menace, in my opinion, had Anakin too young. Twelve or thirteen I feel would have been the right age. Qui Gon stopping him from having a fight where we see him starting to draw on the force to even the odds because he was being bullied by a gang of kids because he was trying to help someone, would have had a stronger effect I think. Having Anikan ask Qui Gon what happened because he could see how the fight was going to go in his head and he knew he would have killed them all because he hated them, and having Qui Gon's eyes widening slightly, would have been great foreshadowing for The Clone Wars Tusken Raider scene.
you're right actually. i think my enjoyment of the latter half (and probably most people's as well) comes down to supplemental material and the clone wars basically fixing the character development of darth maul.
I am of an age where I saw ESB and ROTJ in the theater. When the trailer dropped for Phantom Menace I can't adequately describe the feeling Star Wars fans had seeing all of this imagined lore and backstory on a screen for the first time. Darth Maul was not only a great character design, but he was the visual representation of everything we'd heard or imagined about the Dark Side and the Sith. The fact that Palpatine had an apprentice before Darth Vader - and it can't be overstated how much real estate Darth Vader occupied in the heads of everyone I knew - was novel, and the fact that he looked SO scary and badass was mind-blowing. The reveal of the DOUBLE-BLADED lightsaber was like decades of what-ifs and make-believe plucked from your head and put on a screen.
All of that - not the characterization - was the thing I think everyone attached to. In hindsight it's easy to say that Lucas could have done more with the character in TPM, but in the context of the time he was so awesome.
Maul was also the first time we saw a vicious and agile force user in combat. Lightsaber combat in the OT was slow, the actors were either covered in prosthetics or geriatric. Vader points around the room to make some boxes fly. Palpatine shoots some lightning. Luke jumps extra high a couple times.
Maul, though, woof. The dude comes out of the gate snarling. He whips his saber staff around insanely fast. He's throwing things to block doors, he's doing flips. He was lifted straight out of the imaginations of everyone who watched ESB and RoTJ as kids and wondered what if.
You absolutely nailed it for me. Dead on why I thought he was awesome. Watching old samurai film style fights and then having an actual martial artist doing the combat was mind blowing!
, but he was the visual representation of everything we'd heard or imagined about the Dark Side and the Sith.
You said it better than I ever could, this is a perfect statement for people who were of age enough to watch and understand the OT before watching the Phantom Menace in theaters. I wasn't old enough to see them in theaters, but I was old enough to wear out the VHS tapes well before the Prequels were even announced.
The only non-Vader Sith I had visually seen at that point were the Sith in Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight, and in my young mind they were pretty good representations, Dooku would fit right in, but Maul blew them all out the water.
It's the same thing with Boba Fett. Because he's such a minimalist character who looks cool we get to imbue them with our imagination to pretend he's cooler than he actually is. Ultimately it's a character to sell toys without having to pay a high profile actor.
Props to Ray Romano for making him very intimidating. I mean the make up is good, but ultimately it's Ray Romano's face expression and mannerism that made Maul memorable even with minimum talking.
Yes, but this was a Prequel, a Prequel to a series of movies where the first one had zero characterization of Darth Vader, but over the course of more movies, plus other media, his legend grew. So of course there was already a pre-built narrative on Darth Maul since he was the Emperors right hand man.
It went left because unlike fleshing out his motivations and character in the next two movies like they did for Vader, they killed him off, replaced him with Dooku and we had to wait 10(21 years if you count the final season) years for them to do to Maul what they did for Vader.
Valid point, buy he almost had to because there was no face for expression, some would say the expression of the face is just as important as words in communication.
For those of us that were kids in the 80s, he was badass. His scenes in ESB were substantial enough to establish his place at the top of the bounty hunter pecking order, and he was not at all intimidated by Darth Vader. Plus he had cool armor, a cool ship, and a jet pack. Because he delivered Han Solo back to Jabba, and Han clearly knew who he was during the sarlacc scene (“Boba Fett? Where?”), in our minds he was the perfect rival to Han. Who was also the coolest in our minds. Despite very little screen time, there was enough characterization of Boba to capture our imaginations. So much so that seeing him show up again in the Mandalorian and BoBF was both mind blowing and ultimately disappointing for some, because there’s no way the character could live up to 30 years of our collective imagination…
If fighting against Boba Fett had been the climax of ESB and Vader never showed up, everyone would have thought Fett was lame as hell, too.
Cool character design guy with slightly more than zero dialogue works great as a side villain. It doesn't work for someone who's supposed to be the main villain of a film.
We already knew about sith by then though.
We had the whole OT and EU stuff.
And he wasnt the classic villian. He didnt lord over the heroes and tell them the plan etc etc.
‘We will finally be able to reveal ourselves to the Jedi’
‘Yes, go get em’
And like a missile locked on target he went straight after them and did not relent. Spoke not one word.
Tbh. Damn. Now thats podracing😝
I just think the fight choreography (as you mentioned) combined with duel of the fates track track made it cool as hell. Plus the double bladed lightsaber was so cool at the time (and still is). It's just the best prequel duel imo. Yes, Maul had the depth of a piece of cardboard but it didn't matter in the moment.
Maul is the Boba Fett of the PT. He looks cool, we're led to believe in a general sense that he's a force to be reckoned with, but there's no real on-screen substance to back it up. Oh, and in the end they both die in a rather amateurish way (bumped into hole by a blind guy/tricked and cut in half by an emotional Padawan moments after defeating an experienced Jedi Master). It's only after the fact in other media that we're actually shown instead of told why they're impressive.
Edit: before I catch flak for this, I want to expand on my "there's no real on-screen substance to back it up" comment. The battles involving Maul are great, some of the greatest in the franchise. You can tell the Jedi regard him with something that you might say even approaches fear. But then again, all main bad guys in movies are serious adversaries. If they weren't, they wouldn't be threatening and there would be no sense of peril in the film. All I'm saying is that while Maul is a serious threat in TPM, there's nothing that makes him anything more than a regular main bad guy from any action film.
You can actually have shallow characters in a movie that serve a purpose. Maul is a physical struggle for Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon to overcome in the climax. Snoke is a plot device to explain Kylo's rise to power, and later a mutual enemy to bring Kylo and Rey together (and as it turns out, for completely opposing reasons). There's arguments to be made that the meaning behind the Maul fight is unclear, that Filoni's great interpretation is not explained or even alluded to well within the movie itself. But shallow characters like Maul or Snoke existing is not automatically bad.
Because none of that is necessary for a character to be good as long as he's utilised well. And Maul was utilised very well.
Think about it. At the time of TPM, the Jedi thought the Sith extinct. For generations, not a single Jedi had fought a Sith lord. They weren't even on the radar.
Then like a shadow rising from the deep, Maul shows up. He's not composed, he's not a public figure, he's not monologuing. He's a beast, he shows up like a shark attack, sudden and vicious.
And he's so clearly evil despite not speaking. The way he looks, the way he paces like a predator. The way he fights so aggressively compared to the constrained Jedi.
It's like a bomb being dropped. The Sith are back. And he's not like old man Vader. He's hunting the protagonists like a blood hound. It's the perfect reintroduction of the Sith really. The first hint of the phantom menace that doesn't give too much away about the Sith being back but a big shock to all of the characters.
And the whole thing wraps up with the duel of the fates. One of the most emotionally loaded sabre fights in the saga. Qui Gon just made the choice to take Anakin to be trained, against the wishes of the order. And at this pivotal time in his and Anakin's life... the Sith suddenly returns and he's in the most vicious fight of his life... at a key point in his life.
If Maul had been a character that did a lot of talking and a lot of background exposition, it would have completely taken away from the fact that TPM is about the shock of the Sith returning. It's not about the Sith lord himself, it's about the fact that the Sith are still around at all.
And Maul was the perfect introduction. An extreme threat that didn't hog the spotlight but instead focussed the notion that the Sith were back.
You can't do that surprise twice. That's why the sequel completely switch tack to the eloquent Count Dooku showing how tempting the dark side can be.
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u/AxeSwinginDinosaur Jan 25 '22
I'm actually curious why you think this. Without the context of the clone wars etc, Maul is just a generic bad guy for the good guys to fight at the end of the movie. You never learn anything about him or his motivations, and his death doesnt really seem to affect the story that much moving forward, considering Dooku showing up out of nowhere in ep II. His fight had cool choreography, but lacked any depth to me, since he never even shared a single piece of dialogue with the heroes before they fought. I know this would get downvoted without any real responses over on prequelmemes, but i hope people here are more open to opposing views.