10 Important Star Wars Details That Are Almost Never Mentioned

The arena battle in Attack of the Clones is terrific spectacle, but the ramifications of its outcome are severely underplayed throughout the rest of the prequels.

To recap, Jedi Master Mace Windu leads a strike team into the Geonosis Arena to rescue Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padmé, only to be met by an army of battle droids. An all-out brawl ensues and many Jedi are slaughtered, with the survivors being rescued by Yoda, who whisks them away with some rather handy gunships.

Though it's obvious that the Jedi got their asses handed to them here, fans rarely think about how devastating this defeat truly was. Despite hundreds of Jedi entering the arena, there's only a handful of them left when Yoda shows up, meaning that a vast majority of what was supposed to be the most formidable fighting force in the galaxy was killed within minutes. Minutes!

Even worse, Mace tells Yoda before the battle "I will take what Jedi we have left", implying that the ones in the arena were all the Jedi that remained.

This is contradicted in Revenge of the Sith when we see a lot more Jedi in the Temple, but it was nonetheless foolish of Windu to risk so many of his warriors - and, potentially, the downfall of the Jedi Order - on such an ill-conceived rescue mission.

Weirdly though, the rest of the prequels fail to convey how catastrophic it was that so many Jedi died in such a needless manner. It's portrayed more as a temporary setback than the absolute disaster it actually was, and it's a minor miracle that the Senate still had faith in the Jedi Order after it failed so miserably.