negative1 said:
i don't mind the fact that LUCAS changed the ghost of anakin,
in some ways it makes sense after watching the PT..........i guess
It does make sense, in a way, but it makes a completely different kind of sense than the original ghost did. Y'see, the most interesting conflict in ROTJ is not between the Rebels and the Empire, or the Jedi, and the Sith, but between Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi, and it revolves around the essential person of "Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker."
Ben--no doubt well-versed in Jedi philosophy--believes that Anakin Skywalker died years ago, and the machine-creature Darth Vader is really a different person. Luke disagrees, or at least focuses elsewhere, averring that Anakin Skywalker did not die, and that he and Darth Vader are one and the same person. This difference comes to a head in their diametrically opposed solutions to the Vader problem--Ben's solution is to simply kill him, Luke's is to talk to him as a father.
In the original ROTJ, Luke was unambiguously correct. Vader admitted it with his dying breath, and then rejoined his former mentors, who were forced to accept the correctness of Luke's position. For the ghost of Anakin Skywalker was not the ghost of a young man who died long ago, but an old man, who had seen too many horrors, was prematurely aged, carried an immeasurable weight in his heart, but looked with unbridled joy and amazement and his son and redeemer. ROTJ is the tale of a young man's rebellion against conventional authority, conventional religion, conventional philosophy, and how it saved the worst of the previous generation.
Now, in the new ROTJ, Luke is apparently not correct at all. Neither is Vader! For the ghost of Anakin Skywalker is the ghost of a young man who died long ago, not the same man who killed Palpatine and then whispered, "Tell your sister you were right." The new ROTJ is the tale of a young man's rebellion against conventional authority, etc., and he is simply wrong! Ben and Yoda always had the deeper understanding of the soul that animated Darth Vader, they simply didn't anticipate the machine would emulate dead Anakin Skywalker's compassion at the crucial moment.
Why the change? The most obvious possible reason is that Lucas simply wanted to create another superficial connection between the OT and the PT. There is another less obvious solution: Many people thought that Vader's death-bed conversion to the Light Side let him get off the hook too easily, that he must answer for his atrocities. It is a very Protestant concept, that Vader could see the light at the end and be elevated to heaven with the saints, and one that may not fit very well in the Eastern-themed cosmology of Star Wars. By replacing the aged Anakin with the young Anakin, we may see that the elder, murderous Vader did indeed die on the Death Star and only the younger, purer version of him was granted immortality (or something like it). Perhaps the Force rejected those portions of his life that were evil and only admitted the portions of his life that were good into the afterlife. A fanfic called "Dark Emperor" anticipated this concept years before the PT: Palpatine, having died his final death, was sent to the netherworld of the Force, where all his adult experiences were excised by the Jedi he had killed and he reverted to an innocent child. Both are fairly benevolent descriptions of the afterlife: In the former, you can always change yourself and get in; in the latter, everyone gets in but it changes you.
