Lets talk all things Star Wars
Steve Sansweet has a giant Jar Jar made a of chocolate from 1999 that hasn't melted. It makes you wonder what kind of preservatives they used.
I´m asking myself what kind of high quality fridge Steven is using for his other food items. The popsicles survived two moves, a power failure or the fridge breaking down are my greatest fears.
Oh, just in case you don´t believe me, OdiWan72 can testify that my claim is true, he saw them with his own eyes. I have a few Pepsis from around that era as well, we plan to open them at the next props and Star wars buddy gathering.
sztriki
Sr Member
Or Darth Ane...?Darth Ception actually sounds pretty bad*ss!
Steve Sansweet has a giant Jar Jar made a of chocolate from 1999 that hasn't melted. It makes you wonder what kind of preservatives they used.
A few years back I found a Snickers bar at home, and I didn't think much of it.
Took a bite, chewed for a second or so.... quickly spat it out.
It looked normal. But I had to check the best before date. It turned out to be twelve years old. Those chocolate bars, are definitely not like wine.
Well since they're popsicles I'd just try them just for the heck of it!
Steve Sansweet has a giant Jar Jar made a of chocolate from 1999 that hasn't melted. It makes you wonder what kind of preservatives they used.
I've had white bread that will be good for weeks. I always look at it suspiciously because there's something not right there!
Speaking of this, my grandpa is 96 and last July we moved him to an assisted living place where you have your own apartment, but you have people that can help. Anyway we were cleaning out his house in February and he used to make homemade wine. I think he figured the oldest was from the 70s. There were probably like 10-15 jugs of various sizes still around. It didn't look good to me, but he insisted on tasting all of it.
One of them, I think a honey wine, was really good according to him and my aunt and uncle. I think people from that era who survived the depression are more frugal because they learned not to waste like we do now. Of course I wouldn't even touch half the stuff he will taste other than to pitch it!
Joek3rr
Master Member
The Soundtrack Show | Podcast on Spotify
open.spotify.com
I was recently introduced to The Soundtrack Show by David W Collins. Wow I've only made it through his 3 episdoes on Star Wars, and his 4 on The Empire Strikes Back. I really highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Star Wars or film scores.
cboath
Master Member
While i think it does make it more compelling, i don't see how vader's heart wasn't totally in it. He just came from slaughtering a bunch of kids, some basically toddlers, and teens and adult jedi. he HAD to have known a number of them and none of them did him any personal harm but that was no big deal.
So, sure he could have made things more compelling by not cutting that stuff, but ultimately portraying the turn the way the did with the immediate 'ok' to 'go kill a bunch of kids, etc' without the slightest hesitation is the killer (no pun intended). Sadly none of the omitted material mitigates that portion. If I just killed 100 people of varying ages, i'm not thinking twice about killing someone who i used to call my best friend or mentor.
Laspector
Master Member
This is one of the problems I had with those last episodes of Clones Wars. It's just like "Well, Dooku is dead, Palpatine was kidnapped and rescued, but that's just stuff off to the side....Oh yeah, by the way, Annakin just turned to the dark side, killed some kids...Just thought you'd like to know that,"
I think a lot of the perception of Anakin's fall it due to time constraints of the movie. TCW filled in some of that, along with the CW novels (yeah I know they aren't canon), but they couldn't adequately show it on screen. If I was a space psychiatrist I'd say Anakin had some other issues to go full Dark Side than just to save Padme. It's a big leap from "I'll follow this guy to save my wife." to "I'm going to kill some little kids so my wife can survive." Although Yoda did say once you set down that path you're doomed, so maybe there's something else going on where once you take one step, you're sucked in and instantly evil. Some of that may have been Jedi dogma from Yoda, so I'm not sure.
Joek3rr
Master Member
Not really Anakin's fall is really all three movies. From the moment he leaves his mother, its setting everything up.
Bigdaddy
Master Member
The way Anakin is portrayed in the PT makes him look like someone with a neurological impairment. Right from the start in AOTC he's narcissistic, delusional, obsessive and downright creepy. His turn in ROTS makes him pretty much unredeemable, the child murdering is enough for me to lose any shred of empathy I may have had left for the character by that point in the story.
I get what George wanted to do with the PT, show how Vader became the Bad Guy but come on...
You just can't build a sympathetic character that way, at least not for me. If I read a news story about some martial arts instructor slaughtering his students with a katana in class then saving his own kid's life, it's hard to imagine thinking "he was a good guy after all!" That's without piling on another 25 years of murder and mayhem!
Vader's redemption arc in the OT works expressly because the story doesn't put a face to the extreme depth of his evil, like frightened children or his pregnant wife gasping for air. More importantly it doesn't show HIS face committing evil acts, the removal of the mask is what finally humanizes the character. It allows the audience to separate Vader (or "Darth" if you're an old friend ) from Anakin.
I wasn't into the EU as a kid so I always imagined that his full turn to the dark side was after his injuries had forced him into the suit.
I didn't hate the PT when it was released but I was never able to connect it in my head with the OT. It felt like the authenticity of the SW universe had been traded for crazy action and visual effects. Much like a bakery display, it was cool to look at but just a lot of frosting on a cardboard cake.
I get what George wanted to do with the PT, show how Vader became the Bad Guy but come on...
You just can't build a sympathetic character that way, at least not for me. If I read a news story about some martial arts instructor slaughtering his students with a katana in class then saving his own kid's life, it's hard to imagine thinking "he was a good guy after all!" That's without piling on another 25 years of murder and mayhem!
Vader's redemption arc in the OT works expressly because the story doesn't put a face to the extreme depth of his evil, like frightened children or his pregnant wife gasping for air. More importantly it doesn't show HIS face committing evil acts, the removal of the mask is what finally humanizes the character. It allows the audience to separate Vader (or "Darth" if you're an old friend
) from Anakin.I wasn't into the EU as a kid so I always imagined that his full turn to the dark side was after his injuries had forced him into the suit.
I didn't hate the PT when it was released but I was never able to connect it in my head with the OT. It felt like the authenticity of the SW universe had been traded for crazy action and visual effects. Much like a bakery display, it was cool to look at but just a lot of frosting on a cardboard cake.
I was talking to my cousins and we were talking about things that should be made canon from the old EU. So if you had the power to bring one thing into canon, what would it be? By one thing, it could be an entire book series, game, or just a character. My pick was the Republic Commando novels. It would take some retconning to do it, but I think it would still fit right in. They'd have to figure out what they did with the clone implants because that wasn't a thing then, but I think it could work.
CT1138
Sr Member
Lucas did keep the shot of Anakin shedding a tear on the balcony on Mustafar. I think we're meant to get the impression that he's feeling somewhat regretful for how far he's let himself take this whole thing. I think the problem with the whole thing is this:
He wanted to show a story in a black and white mentality, when it clearly has many many shades of gray. He wanted Darth Vader to be the bag guy, but he wanted Anakin to be a good person who was just placed into a bad situation and makes a very bad decision that he finds himself incapable of walking away from. The problem is we never see the good person Anakin was in the course of the movies themselves. We just get Lucas focussing more on Anakin's dark path, and we don't get enough of seeing the powerful, yet compassionate Jedi Obi-Wan remembers in the the OT.
All this prequel talk made me think of these. It's worth a watch to get a really unique take on what the prequels could have been. A friend told me about these and while I initially scoffed at it because I figured the damage had already been done, I took a chance and watched them all through. This guy takes a really interesting and nuanced look at how under the hands of a more capable writer the prequels could have been amazing movies in their own right but also enriched our understanding of the original trilogy.
cboath
Master Member
The problem is, the clone wars showed the fall substantially (and that's not a strong enough word) better. They showed him wanting to do the right thing, end the war etc and crossing the line all the time to do so. Would NOT have been hard to put that into the prequels. And FFS, you HAD to have a better reason to flip on a dime like that to go slaughter the whole temple.
Lots of people here are married, no one's marching into a day care and killing everyone to save their spouse. You may feel a strong desire to do so, but no one does it.
Solo4114
Master Member
I actually don't find that dialogue more "compelling." I find it to rather whipsaw back and forth between character motivations in a way that ultimately muddles them.
E.g., Obi-Wan says "I've failed you and i want to save you! You're not too far gone!" Then Anakin says "The Jedi are evil!" then Obi-Wan says "You're too far gone and doomed!!! I'll destroy you!!" Then, fighty-fighty-fight-fight, then Anakin gets all chopped up and says "Save me! I want to be good!" and seems to really mean it, and then Obi-Wan is all "Whatevs, bro. You're a monster" and lets him turn into a charcoal briquette.
So...what's the motivation for the characters here? Does Obi-Wan want to save him or destroy him? Does Anakin wanna be good or evil? It's all over the place. I mean, you can have characters shift back and forth between these positions, but you can't have them do it in the span of a single fight like that. It doesn't make any sense. "I can save you! You're really good! Wait, you're EVIL! I'll DESTROY YOOOOOUUUU!!!" "I'm eeeeeevil! I chopped up kiddos! But wait, now I'm chopped up and I wanna be goo--JUST KIDDING I'LL EAT YOUR SOUL!!!!!! RRRAAAAAAGHHHHH!!!!!"
So, here's the thing. Yes, the story "starts" in TPM as he leaves his mother. You can see the a-to-b-to-c of it. But is it effectively handled? No, not really. It's the difference between me saying "Anakin does X, then Y, then Z" and actually taking you on the emotional journey in a way that paces the communication of that story effectively. I don't think the PT is well paced or well told at all, although the core idea is...ok-ish. Not what I'd prefer for his motivation, but at least it basically follows.
The direction, performances, and script just don't really carry the journey effectively. It's the wrong mix of "show, don't tell" and "don't show or tell, but say what you were trying to do after the fact in an effort to clarify." And yes, when you say "Anakin and Obi-Wan were brothers. Qui-Gon was a father figure that was taken away from Anakin early on, and Obi-Wan couldn't fill his shoes, and then Palpatine did and turned him to evil," I can kinda see the outline of that in the films. But the fact that you have to draw a big highlight around that after the fact rather suggests that the message wasn't all that clear early on. Plus, it doesn't exactly map on to the earlier interpretation which is about emotional repression and unresolved separation anxiety, which I think are far more front-and-center.
I think a huge amount of that is the fact that they take so much time to do TPM. As a story on its own, TPM is...fine, I guess. Jar Jar is stupid and annoying, and much of the design choices were underwhelming. But if it wasn't part of the saga, and was just, like, a two-part episode of "The Clone Wars" or something, as some flashback, it would be ok. But as part of the overall saga? It's a massive waste of time for the story you're trying to tell. It could be handled in exposition in other films that instead spend their time showing Anakin's state of mind during the war, and then tying that much more effectively to the fall of the Republic itself. The gradual embrace of totalitarianism, all in the name of ostensibly doing it for higher purposes, grasping for quick and easy power in an attempt to solve some problem but corrupting yourself in the process, etc., etc.
But when you're limited to about roughly 7-ish hours to tell your story, man, you ain't got time to dick around with kiddie-Anakin and his super fun adventure going pod racing. Like, seriously, probably about 1/4-1/3 of TPM is devoted to getting off Tatooine. And it doesn't matter. Most of that stuff is totally irrelevant to the larger story of Anakin's fall. The same with all the Jar Jar fart jokes. Those are all just...things that happen, and you only arguably need to show them because something happened before them and if you don't show them then it raises a question of "But how'd they get out of that?" when the truth is NONE OF THAT STUFF MATTERED, or rather only maybe 20% of what was shown matters to the overall story.
Similar threads
