InfoDroid said:ben_danger said:i know this sounds utterly stupid, but one of my friends suggested TPM would have been better without anakin. i think he meant that the character wasnt that strong. but what IF ani wasnt even in it? what if he just appears in II onwards? i have no idea how and what it would entail, but perhaps the smarter forum members can ponder such an idea.
That's an idea that's so outrageous, that it just might work. Since the saga is generally considered "Anakin's story" by most, I don't think anyone (including me) has ever seriously considered cutting his story out of TPM. Visualizing it though, it's a definite possibility. I think it would work better in a "prologue" type arrangement though than in a standalone episode, but yeah, definitely something interesting to try.
--ID
Less Jake Lloyd is always a good idea and how much more less can you get but none? None less.
But if you did that what would you have left?
It is Episode One, unless you want to go for a totally new PT (see Animated thread) and Anakin is now the main focus of the saga and there really isn't much material in TPM to shift the focus elsewhere.
There are plenty of examples of how little near orphan Annie can be made more tolerable so deleting him when there is almost as equally bad material elsewhere in there to be repaired too does seem more harsh than radical.
Episode One is a different animal to all the films that follow it.
In an ideal world it would be "The Hobbit" to the rest of the films "Lord Of The Rings".
The story really needs to be restructured in the same way that Jedi does to make it start and end with a bang and introduce the main characters in a lightish/fun way with moments of darkness which hint at the shadow that is to fall in the rest of the episodes.
That's why I suggested starting the film with the invasion of Naboo while Amidala is on Coruscant, that way she has to fight to get back (like the heroes have to go through trials to get to Yavin and save it in ANH) and have her ship attacked on the way so she has to land on Tatooine.
Some of the dullness of TPM comes from the going back and forth between Naboo, Tatooine and Coruscant with Naboo throne room scenes and Council and Senate meetings bogging it all down.
If the heroes went from Coruscant to Tatooine to Naboo, the linear flow of the story would give it better pacing as an introduction to the Star Wars universe.