Well spoken…err, typed. I agree.
If they had dumped all females from the prequels entirely they would have been better films.
eta: Comments directed to Blake.
Escalation of commitment - Wikipedia explains lots of behavior like that in real life, it’s yet another factor in a twisted psyche.
Causing the death of Mace was so traumatic that he felt the need to justify that event, yea his response was evil but that’s the point. By the time he found out that Palpatine didn’t have the power he said he did Anakin had already ruined his entire life beyond the point of return, what were his other options after he was an emotionally scared deformed cyborg traitor? Is it unreasonable to think someone might want to see the thing through at that point?
I really don’t want to turn a Star Wars discussion into a boring intro psych lecture, but you seem to really be determined that no sense can be made of this transformation when there is actually plenty of material presented to chew on. There’s more motivation there than in many movies with similar plots.
If you don’t “want to turn a Star Wars discussion into a boring intro psych lecture,” then discuss it from the perspective of cinema, not psychology. It matters absolutely none whether Anakin’s transformation is somehow plausible given what is known in modern psychology - what matters is that the movie does a good job of showing the audience his descent, in a way that said audience understands and finds believable. Showing, not telling,as Blake has already adroitly described.
Your argument is like someone trying to justify George’s invention of Midichlorians because similar sub-cellular organelles descended from independent life forms actually exist in reality (mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc). Ergo, isn’t it plausible that similar organisms live in the cells of Star Wars characters and give them access to the Force blah blah blah blah?
The problem isn’t the *science, *it’s in the fiction. George Lucas’s error in the prequels is bad storytelling, not bad world-building.
This. A filmmaker had some ideas and made some films about those ideas. The films were flawed and not to everybody’s taste, but I happen to believe their awful reputation is not fully deserved.
Yes, I liked IV - VI better than I - III. So did almost everybody else. That does not mean that the prequesls were entirely without merit.
In the end – I have to be the one to say it – they’re just movies. Not worth all the anger, if you ask me.
Amen to this. And when Palpatine tells him that, “well, you just sacrificed everything for my special knowledge–your life, your love, everything–but I don’t actually know how to keep someone from dying,” Anakin doesn’t go totally apeshit and kill his ass right then and there. It totally doesn’t wash.
Lucas spends all this time building a (mostly, IMO) believable motivation for Anakin - he’s totally obsessed with Padme and will do anything to keep her with him, unlike what happened to his mother - and then totally destroys it with the “well, hmm, OK” attitude he takes after he finds out that there is no special knowledge. That could’ve been the powerful moment; that could’ve been when Anakin fell. I certainly was all, “What?!! OK, this is where Palpy dies.” And it wasn’t. It totally didn’t work. Not even a little.
And that’s just one instance of where things fell flat on their face. “NOOOOOOOO” notwithstanding.
There’s an old joke.
Two Hollywood producers are lost in the desert and dying of thirst. They wander and wander until they stumble upon a motor home abandoned on a back road. Apparently it had broken down and the owner had gone to get help. Entering the motor home and opening the refrigerator, they find a huge pitcher of sweet, tasty ice cold lemonade.
The two producers look at each, grinning with joy.
“Okay,” says one to the other, “who gets to piss in it first?”
Well I seriously disagreed with the notion that the reasons behind the descent weren’t shown just fine. I mean they devoted the entire second installment of the trilogy to demonstrating Anakin’s character flaws, including actions ranging from simple selfishness to an act of shocking evil (indiscriminate slaughter).
I disagree with YamatoTwinkie’s assessment that Anakin went from “troubled guy with a few doubts to a hardcore master of evil in about an hour”. Sure the immediate events that led to him joining with Palpatine were rapid, but I think that made for a series of exciting scenes with a loads of tension that were plenty built up to. I was pretty breathless for the last hour of the movie, it wasn’t perfect of course, but I felt it was entirely earned. If anything they spent too much time hitting us over the head with how rotten Anakin had the potential to be.
So it obviously comes down to simply the movie worked for me and it didn’t work for you,fine. But if anyone cites a lack of development in a certain area with plenty of documented development, albeit development they may not like, I’ll point that out.
It’s not exactly the incentives of the character that I have trouble with; it’s that the things he does to reach those incentives don’t make any sense.
For example, we’re told that he loves Padme. That’s a fine motivation right there. She has been an absolutely noble character, so what does he do to try and win her over? He kills Mace and slaughters a bunch of children. Maybe he wants power, but he never does anything to take it. He appears to spend the next 20 years bowing and scraping before the Emperor; is he going to overthrow him or wait until he dies of old age? After a childhood as a slave, maybe Anakin wants independence. He questions everything the jedis tell him (“they won’t give me a seat on the council.” “they won’t let me be with Padme.” “They won’t let me come to confront the Chancellor.”), but then he believes everything that Palpatine tells him.
Now, maybe the only way to fix that would have been a ground-up rewrite, but I’ll give you an example of a small change that would have helped. Change the character of Padme, make her less of a saint. Show that she is slightly attracted to Anakin’s dark side. Show her being a little excited by the way they have to sneak around and keep their relationship secret. Show that there’s some reason to encourage his descent. Or make her less adoring of the jedi council. Show her as a senator who believes in what she’s doing, and distrusts the interference from the secretive, undemocratic Jedi Council. Make it Anakin’s love for her that plants the first seeds of doubt in his mind. Either way, make it clear after he’s turned that he has gone way, way to far. Let him see that he’s screwed things up and lost her, but that it’s too late to go back.
I’ll just throw in that I enjoy the Clone Wars animated series. So does my grade schooler.
Anakin’s initial turn to the dark side could’ve been fleshed out just a little bit to make it more plausible from a storytelling perspective. Anakin disarms Mace, Palpatine tosses him out the window. Anakin says “What have I done?” and Palpatine says Anakin did the right thing, Mace had clearly gone off the deep end and had to be stopped. Anakin is a touch horrified but is still willing to follow him for his secret knowledge to save Padme.
Then Palpatine reveals that he doesn’t actually know how to prevent death and gives the whole “We’ll figure it out together” line. Anakin is furious. He almost kills Palpatine, and is taunted to do it much like Luke was in ROTJ. Anakin thinks better of it and leaves. Of course, the events in that room were on surveillance and everyone in the temple saw what happened, so a bunch of jedi come after Anakin. Anakin is so full of frustration and rage from preceding events that he doesn’t even try to explain himself, he kills any jedi that try to arrest him. After everyone in the temple who tried to capture him is dead, he surveys the scene, and it is then that he realizes he’s burnt all his bridges and that he has no one else to turn to but Palpatine.
This establishes an initial relationship between Vader and Palpatine that’s more sith-like. Vader pledges his loyalty, but secretly harbors resentment for Palpatine’s lie. Vader will work with Palpatine, but once he gets what he needs from him, he’ll have his revenge, then run away with Padme and everything will be ok. All this can be told explicitly in Anakin’s creepy speech to Padme on the lava planet. Padme’s freaked out, Anakin flips out, and in the end, Anakin loses Padme, and at that point literally has nothing to live for other than servitude under the emperor. He still harbors a resentment and anger toward the emperor for many years, until he sees Luke getting fried and decides to finally take his revenge against Palpatine.
All this was sort of given to us in the movie as it is, but it’s not really shown, it’s stuff we have to fill in ourselves, and if we have to do the storytelling ourselves then what’s the point of a movie?
I think a lot of it is a combo of nostalgia and age.
I was the target kid age for the prequels - when TPM came out, I was 13. I had seen the original trilogy, but it never aged well for me, and I enjoyed them but never had the mythical attachment most Dopers - who saw them as kids - did.
They were still marketing these movies to people who were my age, they couldn’t make the Dark Side too glorified or tempting because the advertisers would freak. What happened was a bunch of fans grew up and wanted a more sophisticated story and the prequels still stayed at the level of the original trilogy.
Heck, I’d’ve been okay if they’d shown Anakin using the force to cheat during the pod-race without realizing it, i.e. he weaves dismissively at a rival racer that’s gotten to close and the rival abruptly spins out of control and crashes. Anakin doesn’t KNOW he’s telekinetically displacing the threat, to him it’s just a childhood habit of waving away things he doesn’t like, and sometimes they do indeed go away, providing enough reinforcement for him to keep doing it, and in the high-kinetics of a pod race, nobody, including him, has ever made the connection.
At this point, he’s an amoral lump of clay. Obi-Wan tries to mold him in the ways of the Jedi but… y’know…
You all b*tch about Lucas, but 2 days after he is dead, a megacorp will buy up the Star Wars rights, & then you’ll wish you had Lucas to kick around again.
Because the films that will happen afer that… :smack:
I’m in my 40’s and watch Spongebob. If the new trilogy had been *exactly *as sophisticated as the original, that would have been fine with me.
The original trilogy had memorable characters with clear motivations. You knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. Their experiences changed them in believable ways, and who they were at the end was a natural evolution of what they’d gone through on their journey.
The characters in the new trilogy are forgettable ciphers. They regularly do things that don’t make any sense. Their motivations are incoherent or nonexistent. As a result, its impossible to develop any sort of sympathy for them. They’re just a bunch of boring nobodies. And all the special effects in the world can’t save a movie about a bunch of boring nobodies.
I 'unno, they did right by Casper the friendly ghost.
Back in the early 90’s Star Wars was closer to dead than it is now. Then it got a jump start with stuff like the Dark Empire comics, the Thrawn trilogy books, the toy line being relaunched, and the cleaned up THX versions of the movies being released to VHS (not to be confused with the Special Editions, mind you).
I always wondered if I should have felt burned for buying the OT on VHS back then when the adverts warned that it would soon be “gone forever” :dubious:
Even before Jar-Jar Binks and midichlorians, there were Ewoks. The least liked feature of RotJ, and they make TWO Ewoks movies? Or that matter, The Star Wars Holiday Special? Or Howard the Duck? In hindsight there was plenty of warning that Lucas had a one-time visit from the Star Wars muse, and the rest was improv.
I would say that the first Star Wars movie was aimed at the 14-year old in all of us, but afterwards Lucas seemed determined to write for the 6-year olds. The first movie was about how effin’ hard growing up can be, and yet how glorious it is when you do. The sequels seem more about being stuck in childhood. First Luke struggles and argues with his mentor Yoda, and then is stuck with the fear of becoming his father. The prequel trilogy is about an evil Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up.
Others have speculated on what this may say about Lucas’s personal issues.
They did? I saw that movie in the theater, and when I walked out I don’t know if I could have told you what I had just spent the last two hours watching. I remember a rather lousy way to bring in Boba Fett as a small boy. I remember what was possibly the worst romantic scene I have ever seen in a movie and I’m still not sure what the point was. I learned more about the plot of that movie playing the release of Lego Star Wars Complete on the PS3 than I did actually watching the movie. Hell, I just had to read the Wikipedia entry just to see what the whole plot actually is. And I was so unimpressed by the movie I haven’t wanted to see it again.
The movies were ok. Plots decent enough(the originals were not stellar cinema either). What killed it for me were the anakin/padme scenes, most specifically the dialog, but the delivery wasn’t anything to write home about either.
I find all three quite decent if i fast forward through the scenes anakin and padme talk to each other.
What would make me happy? Take Zahns Thrawn trilogy, throw scads of money at it, and put spielberg in charge. Lucas can be in charge of the technical stuff… He’s good at that.