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i'm still so mad about that story line. 3 films worth of plot and it feels like George forgor that Anakin has to become Darth Vader at the end. So he fast forwarded a whole corruption arc, which then made Anakin look like a moron who got swayed to the dark side and abandoned his moral compass & all his friends in the span of days because some clearly dodgy guy told him "you see the Jedi council Anakin? they're hiding something,,, clearly the most optimal path forward is to become evil, go kill some children"
I feel the same way, but the Clone Wars animated series really changed my opinion on what Lucas was going for with Anakin's fall. The movies didn't execute on the idea all that well, but when you add in the extra background the Clone Wars added, I think it made a lot more sense.
Nah the movies didn't magically become good just because Lucas gave us homework.
I never argued the movies were good
The novelization of the third movie is also great and does a lot more to show anakins internal dilemma and psychological state.
Like, the guy was having prophetic nightmares of his wife dying night after night and one of his closest mentors (number 2 behind obiwan) offers a way to ensure those terrible visions never come to pass.
and he was fighting in a brutal war for years and was basically not sleeping at all for days when palps really started making serious moves on him. sleep depravation is serious shit and jedi or not Anakin is a human
I especially hated the “Anakin killing kids” scene. It’s not very realistic that he turns in a few days to a child killer, maybe he could step aside while to clones do it, killing them with his lightsaber was too cartoonishly evil for me.
He had already murdered an entire village of sand people at this point. He was clearly capable of horrible things.
Yah, but audiences were like, "sand people? I can excuse that with casual racism."
He did it out of anger. It's very plausible. They just went a, b, c, d, z though. Skipped a lot of steps on his way to the dark side. Anakin needed way more development, or any development, in episode 1 if they wanted this to work over 3 movies.
I agree that he did already evil things, but I think there is a difference between killing members of an alien race for revenge, and slaying human children from your own community.
And I’m no way excusing him, I just think there could have been more nuance to the topic, there are steps of evilness they could have explored to make this more believable.
It’s also very interesting how some people are divided over this scene, e.g. a friend of mine had the exact same explanation as you mentioned, while another friend also found it a bit too much. I guess it’s just subjective, based on your own perception and understanding of “evil”.
To be fair, he did also kill an entire village of Tusken Raiders, including women and children, one movie before that. It's just that those movies are so weird and disjointed that this doesn't feel like a piece of character building that later pays off in the third movie, but rather a weird fever dream that you forget about almost entirely by the time Attack of the Clones is finished
Do tusken women not raid? Are they split by gender? Do they even have gender?
I ask only because I haven't seen these films since they came out.
I think so. I remember Anakin delivering the line, "I killed them all. Not just the men, but the women! And the children!" in such a ham-fisted way that I actually LOLed in the theater. But I also haven't seen those movies in at least 10 years.
Lol amazing, that poor kid
Hayden Christensen? Yeah, I agree. It's not his fault Lucas can't write normal human interactions.
Idk something about that description seems a bit too real given current events
Yeah it took the US 8 years, Anakin did it over a long weekend. Boom gottem.
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so anakin kneels in front of monster mash and pledges loyalty to the graveyard smash
Well they did show him love his mother a bunch and even having weird dreams about her so when Palpatine let's him know he can save her by learning the ways of the dark side he does everything because that was his main motivator all along
yea the motivation was good (story telling wise), but the time it took him to become corrupted was just too fast. Even if in universe it took longer than a couple of days, on our screen the whole arc was maybe 15 minutes