Well, two weeks ago, Brigham Young University held its annual sci-fi/fantasy symposium--Life, the Universe, Everything. For three days straight, a section of the student center was like a con with people in weird costumes, panels arguing about everything and lots of cool guests. In particular, it was fun because David Wolverton, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta were visiting authors.

I went to a panel on Friday morning that included David and Rebecca and it was discussing "Why do we like villains?" While David never got onto the subject of just why he laughed when I named Isolder as a villain, they did talk about ways to make villains more believable.

With that in mind, I was thinking of the villains of the SW movies. What makes them effective or not?

Dooku: The man seems to have no motivation. When you have a villain that gets all of his evilness from the books and onscreen generally goes "oh, crap, what can I drop on them so I don't have to fight any more?" it's not very believable. I'm not saying that he wasn't evil at times, but it seemed as though George were trying to make him conflicted as a predecessor of Vader and it just didn't come out as anything other than him being a party pooper with an overinflated opinion of his accent.

Maul: And speaking of no motivation, all we know about the guy is that he wants revenge and he's got a lisp. Maybe that's why he wants revenge, but I personally like a villain that I can somewhat sympathize with. In the OT and PT both, that was accomplished with the duel dialogue. In TPM, there WAS no duel dialogue. Sure, body language abounded and I loved his tendency to gloat and taunt, but I'm looking for more than a halloween costume to make me hate a guy.

Grievous: I hate the guy, not for his speech impediment or because I sounded like him last week when I got a lung infection, but because he's calculating and cold and there is no negotiation with him. That's a good thing! Finally, someone we can't count on to be nefarious. When he was killed, it was a necessary evil because he was just that.

Vader: Coolest bad guy ever. He's got the inner conflict that he tries to quash by murdering his own men when they fail him. He's got cool dialogue. He turns into the good guy at the end, eyebrows and all! So what if his reasons for turning to the dark side seemed to be written by someone who obviously learned romance in the 7th grade and never got quite past that.

Palpatine: Personally, I believe very strongly that Satan exists and when my mom told me about Palpatine being evil incarnate in ROTJ, I could believe it. I could believe it even more in the context of a line from The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." I mean, my mom, the one who thought Palpatine was written as Satan on-screen, walked out of TPM and went "Well, things will go badly, but I'm glad that they have that nice Senator Palpatine on their side." I like that his motivations were highlighted so well and that he had so much ability to twist the inner workings of those around him.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on our bad guys.