Another Star Wars thread? Darth Vader's arc

I was arguing with my brother about the Srar Wars movies. I think the original series has elements of genuinely good adventures. He says that both the originals and prequels are equally deplorable in terms of plot and acting but the prequels win out with hood special effects.

Anyway, I got to thinking about it and I know that Lucas considers the dhole saga a grand tragedy, telling the story of Anakin’s corruption, fall, and redemption. The biggest flaw in my view is the idea that Anakin turned to the dark side because his wife died. Sorry, not buying it. Some people do become sociopathic mass murderers but it’s never because of a grand romance that ended tragically. There’s something more to it, some internal malfunction or extreme childhood trauma. Anakin was a happy smart loving productive child with a loving mother and nurturing teachers to guide him. In his circumstances it takes much more than being widowed to become bloody monster. And that realization changes the story. It’s no longer a story of a good man that adverse circumstance engineered to create a tragic fall from one fatal flaw. It’s instead the story of someone who is already sick and monstrous inside whose inner psychopathy is finally exposed. It’s not a tragedy; it’s a horror story. It’s not Othello whose jealousy destroyed him. It’s Hitler, a monster who was able to rise high enough to effectuate his sickness on the world.

wrong

No, Darth Vader isnt Hitler. He’s more of a Mordred. (One of) the completely stupid things of the Shitology was to have him be an ADD teenager, prone to outbursts and whatnot. Jesus Christ, has Lucas even watched the movies he produced (admitedly he didnt direct them, I’m talking of Empire and Jedi)? The Darth Vader of ESB and RotJ is extremely cold, an icy menace. Same thing for the Emperor, every fan saw his apparence as being linked to his use of the Dark Side (or more simply, his actual age), now we learn that he had just farted in his own face.
Darth Vader as originally presented was once a noble knight, gifted with the Force, who got lost in a quest for ever more power (maybe the same could be said for the Emperor itself). What the fuck has THAT Darth Vader in common with the little emo prick of the Shitology?
It’s like comparing Buffy vampires to Dracula.

Prequels? What prequels?

I agree that it’s not really easy to feel as though the characters of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are suppose to be the same person. We get told they are, but there’s no real sense that it’s actually true. It would require at very least a whole additional story to describe how he went from the end of episode 3 to the beginning of episode 4.

Just to note that he undoubtedly turned to the Dark Side before Padme died. I’d argue that, by the time he’d led the Clone Troopers to the Jedi Temple to execute Order 66, he’d already turned to the Dark Side (if not before that point), and Padme was very much alive at that juncture.

I’d also posit that it’s a series of fundamentally selfish decisions which led him down the path to the Dark Side (most, if not all, of which were orchestrated by Palpatine). Palpatine fueled Anakin’s ego, and led him to believe that, because he was so special, he could be above the rules of the Jedi.

Droids in the hood, yo! :slight_smile:

He accepted becoming Darth Vader before Padme died. The straw that broke the camel’s back was believing that the dark side had powers to save her from the destiny that he saw in a vision. But like most prophetic visions in myth and fiction, it was his attempt to thwart destiny that brought about the tragic prophesy. He was taught throughout his upbringing that action, not acceptance, was what always turned the tide. Particularly his action and disregard the consequences. Because he was so effective in action he had never truly experienced the consequences of shooting first and asking questions later. His warning was the loss of his hand, but he ignored that warning or misinterpreted it.

The Jedi lost him because they eschewed any kind of attachment when the it is obvious that the human heart longs for and needs attachment. Palpatine encouraged attachment to Padme and everything else at all opportunities because he realized this was something Anakin and every human needs and that the Jedi would refuse to supply. Obi-Wan came closest to meeting this need with the Jedi, accepting what he assumed was Anakin and Padme’s secret attachment without ever openly acknowledging it. Obi-Wan also failed to reveal his own attachment to Anakin until after he turned to the dark side, finally admitting they were brothers and he loved him.

Anakin’s redemption was from his Jedi son Luke who demanded that Anakin save him because of the attachment that he was Luke’s father. Palpatine never thought this a serious possibility because he thought Anakin’s connection with Luke was about ambition, not about his memory of Padme.

That really does bother me. It may be the only thing that rely bothers me about the prequels, but it’s a real problem. Ok midichlorians bother me, but so do the Ewoks.

20 years past between episodes 3 and 4. A lot can happen in two decades. I submit that 20 years of being by the Emperor’s side and living as half machine would turn anyone into the cold, evil bastard that Vader was in the original trilogy.

Ooh, ooh. Can we rename Anakin’s whiny decent into sociopathy the d-hole saga?

Bullshit.

Just the way Alec Guinness says the line “he’s more machine now than man” about Darth Vader is more compelling than all the slick CGI multi-billion-dollar bullshit of the prequels.

Anyway, the way I see it, the prequels are illegitimate. They’re not part of the same universe as the original movie. Yes, they were created by the same person, but so much time elapsed between the two trilogies that they are in effect products of totally different schools of moviemaking and of storytelling.

This is why Darth Vader of the original trilogy doesn’t square with the shitheel Anakin of the prequels.

The cliche that evil is produced by childhood trauma and sob stories is a bunch of bullshit. Anakin was someone who loved power and who figured he’d rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven.” The fact that his position as Darth Vader was a form of servitude notwithstanding, it clearly seemed a step up to him from being a light Jedi and having to work harder spiritually to become powerful in the ways of good. So he took it. Like a lot of people in the world, he was corruptible.

Dhole story went off the rails when Lucas failed to make an effort towards explaining why they had to leave a little boy’s mom enslaved–if his point was the Jedis are heartless assholes, he needed to make that point plainer (and his story less tragic), and if his point was that the Jedis are a force for good, then they had to take her with them, or come back with $$$ and get her. As the story stands, it’s just stuff and nonsense.

IIRC, there’s a clear “reveal” shot of Anakin’s face just as he turns to start slaughtering children, where you can see that he has the same fried-egg eyes that Sidious has - which shows that he has, indeed, fallen completely to the Dark Side. What’s interesting about this is that there’s an immediate physical transformation. “Falling to the Dark Side” doesn’t just mean you have a habit of making bad ethical decisions, it means your body has been invaded by an alien force that can alter your physical structure. And it happens almost instantly: one moment, Anakin is a frightened but decent young man, torn between his passions and his duty, confused about what’s right or wrong, who in an instant makes a bad decision for all the right reasons. One hour later, he’s hacking children apart with a laser sword without a second thought. That’s not a normal progression of moral decay. That guy is fucking possessed. He has been invaded by an alien force that is radically changing both his body and mind.

And we know what that alien force consists of: midichlorians. Microbes. Teeny little bugs. That live in your blood.

So, what the whole “Force” thing comes down to is, essentially, a species of microscopic parasites that infect humans, and attempt to turn them into hideous, inhuman killing machines. Through dedication and iron will, some people infected by them can control them, and prevent themselves from being corrupted, even use the creatures’ powers for their own ends. But if their control ever slips, just once, the parasite will utterly dominate them, mind and body, for the rest of their twisted, unnatural lives.

Sounds more like a Japanese horror movie when you think of it like that, doesn’t it?

Also: excellent post, Second Stone.

this is the part that bothers me, actually. nobody shifts mentalities that quickly. it’s a steady descent. it’s utterly implausible to have someone go to bed one night, have a nightmare (and not an especially explicit one at that), and wake up the next day evil. I refuse to believe that it’s THAT easy to become THAT evil within a span of mere hours.

yes, i know lucas tried to hint at a propensity of evilness by having him kill sand people, constantly berating obi-wan, and being just reckless in his behavior but really… to go from a loose cannon with a sense of vigilante justice to mowing down kids by the dozens with robotic efficiency? i don’t buy it. at least have him show a LITTLE conflict. a LITTLE emotion. i mean, isn’t emotion what the dark side feeds off of?
ALSO, i wish it was shown more that anakin was REALLY freakin awesome as a jedi, and that’s why sidious chose him to convert, and not obi-wan or someone like that. like the scene with dooku? obi-wan should have gotten his ass handed, and anakin just walked up and diced him up without a hitch. the looming threat of anakin becoming god-like with his force powers, being obi-wan’s padawon AND being more powerful, etc… THAT’S what would set up the scenario that hey… power is corrupting this guy.

you have a super-powerful jedi that just sliced dooku up like it was nothing - something that yoda and obi-wan couldn’t, you have him MOCK obi-wan instead of BITCH about obi-wan, you have him asking to be given knight status and refused by the council, you have him meditating on his own, exploring his own force powers… THAT’S a descent. THAT’S an ARC. on Naboo, instead of him shaving apples for padme, why not have him force-bend the water at the waterfalls to make a double-rainbow? a TRIPLE rainbow? any jedi can levitate an apple, but how many can divert millions of gallons of water kilometers away to spray in such a way that the sunlight will create triple rainbows?

yeah. that’s how powerful he gets.

and how does he fall from grace? order 66. it’s not a bunch of clones shooting jedis in the back. how retarded is THAT plan? heck no. it’s an all-out assault on the jedi temple. a temple where there is significant jedi resistance, not just a bunch of kids waiting for yoda to tuck them in. dozens of full grown jedi masters, and vader is there to take them all on. he hacks through all of them and he’s all sorts of cut up. there are holes in him, but you can see “force waves” holding him together.

i mean, if you have him LOSING to obi-wan that implies that vader ISN’T the most powerful jedi in the universe. he’s not even better than obi-wan, who’s not even on the council. in fact, he’s just kind of a crappy jedi, who’s easily manipulated and that qui-gon really had no reason to pluck this kid out of tatooine, the council had no real reason to think him the chosen one, etc because apparently the chosen one is just any jedi who’s dumb enough to be swayed by a bad dream and vague promises.

There are many, many reasons to dislike the prequels, but for me it all boils down to one, unforgivable storytelling lapse: the three prequels are supposed to be the story of an epic tragedy (Anaken’s corruption), but as an audience we aren’t given any reasons to care much about Anaken’s descent.

All of the other stuff - the incoherent and inane plot, “mitocorians”, CGI overload, all of it - could almost be overlooked, if only there was some sort of reason to care about this main character.

Are you actually being serious? He was a slave for 10 years, after which he had to leave his mother behind forever in order to spend his time with a bunch of old magician dudes, most of which considered him to be extremely dangerous, or believed him to be “the chosen one”. He’s living a hard live as a monk, depraved of any fun or genuine human connection. Not to say that they portrayed that very well in the prequels or that it justifies him becoming Darth Vader and slaughtering “younglings” (BTW, loved Mr. Plinkett’s remark on that in the Episode III review), but IMHO that’s enough to mess anyone up.

I’d like for pancakes3 to write the script for the Starwars reboot. Those 6 paragraphs gave me more of a charge than all the CGI wankery in dhole story.

The only thing missing is what pseudotron rubber rubber and Pitchmeister alluded to: some real angst at having his “rescuers” leave behind his mother (ideally to a much more brutal slave life).

Say, for example, Anakin gets saved by Obi-wan or (better yet) Qui-gon in a spur of the moment “No, you can’t just watch a kid get killed like that no matter how reserved you are” situation. His mother is left behind in horrible conditions (later to be bought/rescued whatever by Owen). Qui-gon - who would otherwise have been censured by the council for his interference - dies as scripted. Once the situation is over, the council refuses to go back and save his mother because of the endemic reserved-non-interference ivory-tower bullshit patterns they’re stuck in.

Obi-wan ends up acting as mentor and appologist for the Jedi while training Anakin. Anakin holds the nugget of rage against the Jedi, but seeks to learn because of parent-transference onto Obi-Wan, and a kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome. At least part of his arc is his intention to go save his mother once he learns enough and is allowed to - an intention that is frustrated in later sequences until it ends up being too late.

Get rid of the “he’s too old to start training” nonsense. The council as a whole senses great danger in the small boy, but agree to allow his training, perhaps because someone (Yoda?) acknowledges that they bear some responsibility for the direction of his life.

That leaves the whole mess being started because of a split-second decision made from the heart by one man “in the moment”, leading to a bunch of reasonable, ethical choices which eventually tear apart the Republic. That sounds about right.