“I’m haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that that kiss will not become a scar.”
This is without a doubt the greatest dialogue ever put to the silver screen. George Lucas has an incredible gift for so accurately capturing the full range of emotion and experience that defines the human condition in his masterfully crafted subtext-rich screenplays, such as Attack of the Clones. Shakespeare is mere Elizabethan trash compared to Lucas’ unparalleled artisanry of the spoken word.
I honestly doubt that a virgin teenager, which is romantically illiterate and who’s filled with a lot of repressed sexual desires would act like a charming young man, it’s totally unrealistic. And I know that, because I had to deal with the same problems a lot of times during my teenage years.
Yeah, but like… nobody wants to see this. And there’s no reason Anakin had to be written this way. Lucas decided to portray the Jedi as a weird cult that suppresses familial bonds and romantic attachments, but there’s no reason they had to be written that way. I always imagined Anakin as this well-adjusted, somewhat brash ace pilot. Not “roguish” like Han Solo, but just confident and principled. Yeah, it’s just my personal preference, but I would argue that this portrayal would benefit the story way more than what we got, because the entire point of Anakin’s arc is that he was supposed to be a good man who fell from grace. But the Prequels instead portray him as this emotionally unstable hormone explosion with homicidal tendencies from the very moment we first meet him. (Not counting Episode 1, which features an entirely different Anakin.)
Lucas seemed to think that portraying Anakin initially as this cherubic, innocent little child would produce such a stark contrast with Vader as to sufficiently fulfill the “fall from grace” narrative. Except the whole point of a “fall from grace” narrative is to track the character transformation as it plays out via personal choices. A little kid doesn’t even have a brain developed enough to make any dramatically interesting choices.
Michael Corleone would have been a useful model when writing Anakin, in a broad sense. I wouldn’t want Anakin to be as serious or as emotionally reserved - I mean it’s a Star Wars movie, it needs to be snappy and upbeat most of the time. But Michael Corleone provides a good template for the general arc required here - somebody that makes a series of individual choices, initially with honorable intentions, but slowly becomes more and more of a monster. Michael Corleone activates full Sith mode when he kills his brother-in-law and then coldly lies about it to his widowed sister.
But Anakin’s arc is also a bit different than Michael’s because Anakin ultimately has to be redeemed. Therefore he can only go so far in his evil antics, unlike Michael who can become irredeemable. Showing Anakin murder a group of little children is so over the top, and it really strains his eventual redemption. And yeah… obviously I know Vader must have done far worse things like probably ordering orbital bombardments that kill millions of people. But we never see any of that happen so it remains theoretical and therefore his redemption can still work emotionally. And Vader’s role in the destruction of Alderaan was passive, so we can sort of let it slide for dramatic purposes. But I mean, we can’t see him do things like murder little children, or sexually abuse someone or anything like that, because that would really make his eventual redemption emotionally untenable.