Command the mechanized Terrans, psi-powered Protoss, and insectoid Zerg as they vie for map control of eight unique environments. Build your base and conscript your army in a real-time, military sci-fi vision of the future.
"The Jedi remain stranded on Mortis, and the Son, aligned with the dark side of the Force, renews his efforts to convert Anakin as the Jedi prepare for a decisive confrontation. Anakin is stunned by images of his dark future. The Son promises him the power to avert this destiny.
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The Father recognizes that the Son has broken the rules of time. He wipes Anakin's memory of these future visions, and steals the Mortis Dagger to end the conflict. The Father impales himself, thus preventing the Son from stealing his power. The Son, stunned by this, is run through by Anakin. With all three Force wielders destroyed, the imbalance in The Force disappears on Mortis. The three Jedi are transplanted back to the galaxy proper, apparently at the moment that they disappeared."
Anakin descends into the Well, which lies hidden in the fiery bowels of Mortis, where he is met by Son. Son attempts to draw him to his side by revealing visions of a future of suffering, including a duel against Darth Sidious, the death of Jedi, betrayal on Mustafar, and the destruction of Alderaan. Fearful, Anakin refuses to confront the images and is overwhelmed by anguish. Son offers to help him change his future and prevent what Anakin has seen, and Anakin chooses to go with him. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan is on his way to the Well to check on Anakin. Upon arriving, he finds him poisoned by the Dark Side and in Son's company. He uses the force to push Obi-Wan's speeder into the dangerous magma. Obi-Wan wants to asks a question to Anakin, but he tells him that he is sorry. The Son and Anakin then depart. Obi-Wan is now stuck in the Well and is unable to escape, but he can go die in the magma. Obi-Wan contacts Ahsoka, instructing her to disable the shuttle (just right after she has managed to repair it), but before she can go about the task, Anakin arrives. Just in time, Ahsoka manages to sabotage the power systems, get away and recover Obi-Wan. Worried that the two will join forces with Father, Son departs to prevent this, enters his sister's tomb and recovers the Dagger.
Left alone, Anakin is confronted and questioned by Father. Anakin maintains that he will cause great suffering in the future. Father erases Anakin's memory of his future to break the hold of the Dark Side on him, and the two are rejoined by Obi-Wan and Ahsoka at the monastery. Son arrives soon afterwards, and Father pleads with him one last time to let go of his plans. When Son refuses to give up, Anakin attacks him, shortly followed by his friends, but Son proves too powerful for them. In order to strip his son of the Force which he has bestowed upon him, Father takes the Dagger and turns it upon himself. Shaken by remorse, Son recovers and makes peace with his father, just before he is run through by Anakin's lightsaber. With his dying breath, Father proclaims Anakin the Chosen One since he has brought balance back to this world and promises that he will do it again, but warns him to beware his inner self or else he will bring doom to the galaxy. With that, Father's body vanishes.
With the death of Father, the Force that has permeated Mortis dissipates, and a falling crystal shatters on the tip of the monastery's tower, enveloping the three Jedi with a blinding flash. When they come to, they find themselves back in space inside the shuttle and being contacted by Rex. They are confused to learn that only a moment has passed since they lost contact with their cruiser, but recover sufficiently enough to complete their rendezvous.
Yoda wanders through the desert landscape of Moraband, where an illusion of a giant serpent emerges. Other specters of Sith warriors appear, but they cannot make Yoda afraid, nor can they hurt him. Meanwhile, Count Dooku feels that something is wrong, and he is immediately called back to Coruscant by Darth Sidious.
His final trial complete, Yoda awakens from his nightmarish vision, and the Force Priestesses state that he will train with Qui-Gon Jinn and learn to retain his identity in the future. Yoda begins to see the future and hears what will someday be his last words, that "There is Another Skywalker." Back on Coruscant, Darth Sidious and Darth Tyranus realize they have failed to break Yoda, learning that they need more time if they are to succeed in completely wiping out the Jedi.
by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it's a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that's tragic in ways he can't comprehend. That's how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last--a child's eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague's aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it's concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he's a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth's ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in "madness and apocalyptic visions," and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole's references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.
Aside from the aforementioned lens choices, Gilliam's auteurist stamp is most clearly evident in the film's few scenes set in the future, envisioned as a haughty bureaucracy running on ramshackle retro-futurist technology in the mode of Brazil. One remarkable set consists of a chair that slides upwards before locking into position high on the wall, in front of an orb mounted on a mechanical arm and covered in video screens (watchful faces, or just single eyeballs, are visible on several of them, as is Cole's own face, staring back at them). Gilliam made an indelible image by putting Cole in the chair, the metal ball intruding on his personal space like a curious xenomorph drooling over Ellen Ripley. (He was later successfully sued by the late artist and architect Lebbeus Woods, who claimed the design had been cribbed from his quite similar illustration "Neomechanical Tower (upper) chamber.") The idea of surveillance introduced here is echoed later in the film, when Cole and Railly turn away from a passing police car and pretend to be window shopping. Peering into the shop window, they're shocked to see that their faces are displayed in a 10-foot-high close-up on a stack of CRTs facing the street. Much of the time, the film's production design incorporates real locations, as the production couldn't afford to build out all of the interiors that would be required. For example, when Cole arrives in Philadelphia, he's admitted to a psychiatric hospital. These scenes were shot at the Eastern State Penitentiary, originally opened in 1829. Gilliam presents the place as a disturbing, frightening purgatory populated with an encyclopedia of mental-illness clichés. He gets away with these stereotypes, barely, not just because Pitt has such fun chewing the scenery, but also because it's clear the film does not mean to be unkind or stir rancour. These are just men and women behaving in superficially bizarre and sometimes comic ways, subject to influences and urges they don't understand and can't resist. For Gilliam, the whole world is like this.
If you can power through any misgivings about the depth of Cole's and Railly's relationship, the rewards are ample. Part of the enduring appeal of Twelve Monkeys comes down to the intelligent construction of its time-travel scenario, with a number of finely-hewn, interlocking pieces fitting together just so as the story races towards a predetermined ending. The film is catnip for science-fiction fans in that it constitutes an explicit feature-length consideration of the temporal paradox--the apparent contradiction inherent in many time-travel stories. Audiences may expect Cole's investigative work to pay off as he identifies the perpetrator and prevents the spread of the virus, saving countless human lives and, just maybe, earning himself a happy ending in a society he helped save. (In an unsubtle touch, he's even given a saviour's initials.) But this conventional story would present a paradox: if the virus never spread, then Cole would never become a time traveller in the first place. Some SF writers have engaged with this kind of "consistency paradox" by positing multiple parallel universes that branch off in radically different directions at pivot points, including those dictated by the actions of time travellers. In this case, Earth could exist in at least two different universes, one wrecked by plague and the other, created when Cole manages to stop the virus, unscathed. Cole, however, is tasked with gathering information, not with saving the world, or any version of it. Twelve Monkeys makes this plain for those who are paying attention; Cole spills the beans barely 12 minutes in, when Railly asks him what he's looking for: "Won't help anyone. Won't change anything." His assessment is correct, and it is one dimension of the tragedy at the heart of Twelve Monkeys--the more optimistic Cole becomes about the future, the more inescapably his own destiny closes in around him. 2ff7e9595c
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