This thread is sort of all over the place as of late, so I hope no one minds me going off on my own little thing.
I really liked Bosk1’s post about the few changes he believed would have made Ep3 stronger. They were well thought out and articulated, and I agreed with 99% of what he wrote. This despite me enjoying Ep3 very much. I thought about this process in relation to Eps1 and 2 and realized it would be quite a bit to chew on, but when I kept thinking about it, I kept coming back to only one thing (actually two, one smaller thing covered later*): Anakin and Padme’s relationship.
I’m not a screenwriter so I’m not going to be overly critical. I thought the storyline of Palpatine assuming control throughout Ep1-3 was well done. Weaseling his way into the Chancellor’s seat, the creation of the clones, assuming control of the senate... It’s not Shakespeare, but it plays out well and doesn’t cause any major ripples in the transition to Eps 4-6.
But then we come to Anakin and Padme. He meets her when he is 8-10(? I have no idea) and she somehow managed to have a major impact on his psyche, without really doing anything for him. Are 8-10 year old boys that impressionable, such that for the next 10 years he would long to be re-acquainted with her? Especially considering he has been flown off to Jedi training? And then, once they meet again, she becomes attracted to him, despite their obvious differences (and down-played age difference)? Is it because she likes the ‘bad boy’ in him? Whatever it is, it feels about as phony as a three dollar bill. Then they fall in love and have dreams of starting a family, even though they know their separate paths would prevent that from being possible. Aside from the angst-ridden ‘love’ scenes, this whole arc was terribly conceived. Why have them meet when he is a boy? It isn’t significant enough to spend an entire movie on it. If the only significant parts of his arc at that stage is that he’s a freed slave, misses his mother, and pines for Padme, they could have established that with a couple lines of dialogue and eliminated the need for everything that transpired in his storyline in Ep1. For that matter, why is it important for them to fall in love? No one said Luke and Leia’s parents were deeply in love with each other. Obviously it makes the loss of Padme mean more to Anakin, but that didn’t play out that well anyway. It felt like his ‘turn’ was based on a hodgepodge of separate issues, none of them feeling convincing when taken individually, and barely even when taken together. Bosk1 and ReaPsTA and others have addressed this well earlier in this thread so I won’t go in to it here.
*As for the rest of Ep1, why does the fate of the galaxy hinge on a trade embargo with an insignificant planet like Naboo? When they blew up Alderaan, a planet we only saw through the viewscreen of the Death Star for two seconds, we were all “OH SHIT!!!” but we shrugged our shoulders at the fate of Naboo, because it feels so insignificant and empty. This is what Palpatine hinges the first stages of his masterplan takeover on. And we don’t feel any sense of urgency, panic, danger throughout the course of the whole movie the way we felt during the first five minutes of Ep4 with the Star Destroyer closing in on the rebel ship.
Sorry if this was rambling. Please comment, agree, disagree, whatever. Writing this beat working at least.
Topic: Star Wars Discussion Thread v. Rogue One (Read 455591 times)
