All right, so everyone remembers the Grievous hype. The good General was introduced to the fans at the very end of the Clone Wars cartoon series. It was quite an introduction. Aside from some cheesy dialogue, the General was presented as a very powerful, very scary cyborg villain. Accompanied by a pounding theme that John Williams would have to go to great lengths to top, Grievous trashes several Jedi Masters, Knights, and a Padawan. Throughout the period between that episode and ROTS, Grievous was always spoken of with a mixture of dread and awe in HoloNet News and even stories in which he did not appear.

The implication was obvious: Grievous is ruthless, he is merciless, he is a brilliant tactical commander, and worst of all, a butcher of Jedi. And of course, he looked downright scary. By all accounts the good General would be a perfect villain for the dark and horrifying movie that Episode III promised to be.

When the movie tie-ins were released, the Grievous hype only gained momentum. In Labyrinth of Evil we see a character twisted by Sidious's manipulations; a once great General transformed into the brilliant, brutal commander of the droid armies. Nute Gunray seems to fear Grievous even more than Sidious in one scene. Grievous personally leads an elite force into Coruscant to kidnap Palpatine and kills several Jedi during the process. Even though Luceno makes it clear that Grievous is naught but a pawn in Sidious's larger game, the effect only increases the reader's respect for Sidious's prowess as a villain; it doesn't detract from Grievous's.

In the General's comic series we see that he has become a scrounge of the Jedi order, with Jedi obsessed with bringing him down. In Visionaries we see the horrifying tale of Grievous's recruitment to the Separatist cause, how his body was ruined by Dooku and remade into something he despised. Grievous made appearances as a villain in Boba Fett #6 and the Republic Commando game as a shadowy, mysterious villain. He was hailed as "The New Face of Evil" by the Star Wars Insider. Everywhere it was Grievous this, Grievous that.

To top it all off, Grievous played a large part in the third season of Clone Wars. In spite of the disregard for continuity demonstrated by the Coruscant scenes, the General is in top form as he dispatches several Jedi and relentlessly pursues Palpatine across Coruscant. In the Clone Wars Adventures comic, Grievous bests Dooku-trained Ventress and the seemingly unbeatable Durge. Both characters had been the day-to-day villains of the Clone Wars until Grievous's introduction.

Like Boba Fett, Grievous quickly amassed his own fanbase. Internet denizens tried to invent their own dialogue for the General-of-few-words. My own brother had already started a Grievous collection, which grew to include multiple plastic incarnations of the General, from action figure to LEGO mini-figure to the ridiculously cute Galactic Heroes midget figure. By the time May 19th rolled around, fans had seen Grievous in everything *except* for the very story he had been created for--Revenge of the Sith.

In his first scene on the big-screen encounter with the villainous, the deadly, the evil Grievous marches into a room onboard the Invisible Hand, accompanied by appropriately sinister music...and promptly keels over in a hacking, coughing fit. It soon becomes obvious that the General of ROTS is not the sort of villain we had been led to expect:

Grievous does not seek out Jedi combat; in fact he backs off and lets his droids do most of the fighting. The death of Shaak Ti, called for in the script, was cut from the final version of the movie, eliminating any big-screen Grievous Jedi killing. He is less of the action-movie Terminator style executioner and more a mustache-twirling villain of the movie serials Lucas loves. William's score appropriately blends pomposity with sinister undertones in Grievous's theme. He is skilled enough with a saber, but like the corrupt commandant or the medieval sheriff, he prefers to let his lackeys duel the heroes until the final act.

In spite of Grievous's precious lightsaber collection, the General's great pride seems to be in devising escapes. "Time to abandon ship!" Grievous chuckles, seeming to take as much relish in escaping as in leaving the heroes to their doom. His hidden launch platform on Utapau serves Obi-Wan well in his own escape attempt.

Because of his fondness for escapes, Mace Windu dismisses Grievous as a coward early in the film, and even Grievous's own underlings don't seem to fear him--the battle droid that delivers the Jedi captives snaps off a sarcastic "You're welcome!" when Grievous fails to acknowledge him.

And while Grievous's proficiency in Jedi Arts may have allowed him to collect several sabers, it doesn't take Kenobi long to disarm him. Again, we see more examples of Grievous running away to fight another day than his vaunted warrior talents. And all the way his hacking cough made me think less "woah, this dude is bad news" and more "my gosh, won't someone please get the General an inhaler!"

The EU didn't really prepare us for this side of Grievous. The cartoon tried to pass off his distracting cough as a battle wound from Mace Windu, but the behind the scenes information indicates that it is a predecessor to Vader's heavy breathing. Grievous coughs because he has an inferior version of the technology used to save Anakin, and he ends up with something that is humorous rather than scary. This and the Visionaries story "Deep Forest" indicate that Windu's Force-crush merely aggravated an existing condition; the cough was not caused solely by Mace.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie. I even think Grievous makes for a nifty antagonist. It's just that the depiction of Grievous pre-ROTS seems at odds with the character as presented in the movie. It's not a continuity concern, really, I just wonder if anyone else was surprised at how different the character was from what was expected. He isn't a dark villain for a dark movie; as a matter of fact, he and his wacky crew of droids seem to be present in order to provide a lighter tone for an otherwise dark and scary movie.

The situation does bring up some interesting issues in the EU, however. Remember Ki-Adi-Mundi, who was nearly killed by Grievous on Hypori? Remember how he passionately reiterated the Grievous threat to the Council two years after that event in Clone Wars? Okay, so then he turns around in ROTS and recommends that only Obi-Wan be sent to kill Grievous! Either Mundi has the greatest respect for Kenobi's abilities, or he really, really doesn't like Obi-Wan.

And a final question: now that the movie is out, which side of Grievous will the EU run with? Will it depend on the story, or will we continue to see Grievous the Jedi Hunter to the exclusion of his movie characterization?


Grievous update...while paging through my copy of The Art of Revenge of the Sith (a wonderful book, BTW), I noticed a blurb stating that Lucas decided to make the Grievous character a cowardly villian, rather than a killer, during May of last year. Since a good number of the Grevious projects mentioned were already released or well underway by this point, it seems that Lucas's sudden change in direction is the explanation.

TC