I think Anakin would have worked better if he was portrayed differently. He is so unlikable. So unrelatable. A problem of the prequel is there no Luke Skywalker to latch onto. No real central protagonist, even though Anakin is supposed to be that. Is he supposed to be an Anti-hero? Lucas didn’t seem to know where he wanted to go with the character.
Hayden acts like he is portraying dark and conflicted/selfish and arrogant. But where is the good friend and star pilot. Damn fool who follows old Obi-Wan on an idealistic quest.
Anakin and Obi in AOTC and ROTS interact with playful camaraderie. Anakin snipes in direct petty arrogance once at Obi AOTC. I think the movies flaws is that it doesn’t start building their friendship enough in TPM. Not because of Qui-Gon, because I think both can be done.
That being said, if Anakin and Obi didn’t have the turmoil, I don’t think it’d make much sense for Vader to wanna kill him. I suppose that could just be about his injuries, but personally, I like the tense emotional resentment and bitterness of a brother who feels like he has to prove he’s better kinda angle to me.
You don’t have a believable through line of the Anakin who wants to use power to restore order to the galaxy, because he has zeal for justice, but the ends justify the means. And the more he uses the dark side, the more he digs himself into a place where he can’t escape and The Emperor is waiting to grab a hold of him.
That is what I wanted to see the Shaw Anakin become Darth Vader. The Horror Gargoyle in the Mask, the machine man.
But that has nothing to do with how Vader turns away from the dark side in the OT and it doesn’t parallel Luke’s potential to turn, which was done by Palpatine and Vader using those he cared about to try and manipulate him.
He is a slave to the Sith as much as he was a slave on Tatooine and a slave to the Jedi. He really is an undeveloped person and a pathetic and pitiable wretch. Frankenstein’s monster, and a terror to the galaxy.
And Padme’s dreams and Anakin’s ambitions they all are manifest in their children.
People dislike that, but apparently that was what George wanted a scared kid trapped in a machine body. A young man who lost his mother and his wife. And his true sin was not in his evil acts, it was his desire to hold onto them selfishly.
I think one spirals into the other, if Anakin had not been so selfish, I think the idea is that he wouldn’t have done the evil acts, as he wouldn’t have viewed it through the lens of getting what he wants only.
I don’t see the issue with being the scared kid thing, as Vader’s penchant for lashing out with violence, I think showcases his immaturity.
Condemned to live as Darth Vader because he tried to change fate based on a vision of the future. Like Oedipus trying to outsmart the oracle. If he accepted the nature of things and dispassionately let them fade into the force, he would have been a good Jedi or so the films attempt to say. Letting people stay slaves is fine too, it’s not the mandate of the Jedi to free them.
It’s never stated that letting people stay slaves is “fine”. And Anakin’s conflict is never about freeing slaves, it’s just about his mom. Freeing slaves is never said to be wrong in the movie. But it’s something no one is any position to do in TPM. The slaves have bombs in them, so Qui-Gon and Obi can’t do anything about it. In overall context, to take action to rescue the slaves could cost the slaves their lives.
Most Anakin problems are rooted in Lucas’ late decision to age him down to single digits instead of letting him be a middle-school kid/pre-teen.
I think that disconnects from the softer angle and the longing for a parental figure that I think a lot of main relationship dynamics hinge on. Qui-Gon works, to me, more as a potential dad figure that is lost if Anakin isn’t a teen, and the loss of that is what Palpatine steps into, emotionally manipulating Anakin, again I think works more with him as a child vulnerable and such. His dynamic, in concept, with Obi, I think works more as a brotherly angle of Obi being responsible for Anakin, and when Qui dies, Obi takes on the responsibility of raising his brother basically, which leads to a relationship that while is still one of love is also one of tension and rivalry and bickering, because Anakin doesn’t respect Obi as a dad figure and Obi struggles in being a mature guardian figure, because Palpatine has usurped that role for Anakin, and down the road of the character I think takes away the weight of what Vader killing Palpatine in Return Of The Jedi is, to me, which is: Vader rejecting the dad whose manipulated and oppressed him and used him nearly his whole life, to be a selfless dad in giving up his life to rescue his son.
And honestly, his whole weird conception of the Jedi as super-repressed monks - which is only just now in the last 10 years getting seriously investigated as a terrible thing to have been in the first place. And frankly a massive disconnect from what he was alluding to in the first three movies. They were clearly samurai-ish, so there was obviously a code, but he turned them into deranged monks and then mandated we’re supposed to think of them all as good guys ANYWAY.
They never do anything really villainous in the movies as a collective, so why would we see them as bad guys?
Also, I don’t see what is in the OT that is contradicted by the jedi’s depiction in the PT. They seem to have all the same main rules and goals to me.
The truth is simply that he didn’t really have a handle on basics like characterization and plot when he came back from a self-imposed creative retirement, and he never got that handle he USED to have back. He wrote all his heroes like robots and undercut any real dramatic forward motion whenever he could, and instead of making it better he fell back on “I meant to do it like that, of course” and because he’s the CEO there’s nothing you can really say to that.
But yeah, if Anakin starts at age 13 you have so much more opportunity to infuse him with a roguish personality from jump, and it’s easier to build that forward in the next two movies. But instead you start him at 9 and now nothing about him makes a lot of sense, or reads as recognizable human behavior.
Why should he have a roguish personality?
But then again choosing to make him more or less the main character of not just the prequel trilogy, but BOTH trilogies (by default) by retconning the story to be about Anakin Skywalker’s fall and redemption (even though he never actually GOT redeemed at the end of Jedi, he just did one good thing for his kid before dying) he also completely goofed. Anakin should have been a SUPPORTING CHARACTER at best, and the POV should have been either Padme or Obi-Wan. But it obviously would have never occurred to him to make the Prequel Trilogy be ACTUALLY about Luke & Leia’s mom, in the same way the Original Trilogy was about Vader’s kid. Not Vader.
I think Padme is the main character of TPM. I think AOTC is more an ensemble, though I actually think Obi is more the main heroic protagonist of AOTC than anyone else, as he’s the one whose driving the main plot forward. I think ROTS is the only movie where Anakin is the central protagonist, which I think makes sense at least.
Vader died to rescue his son out of a selfless love I think, and is depicted I think at the end of ROTJ to have become a heroic character again.
Padme isn’t in the OT, so I think it’d be a narrative disconnect to make her the one the trilogy is about wholesale, and also I think it’d not showcase much in the way of story structure for Anakin becoming Vader.
It never occurred to me, either. But damn, now I love the idea.