Debunking anti-PT articles/videos

I decided to leaf through my Sunday Times Magazine Special Collectors Issue on TPM, dated 16th May 1999 (well worth picking up on eBay for a few quid), which I've owned since it first came out. Still in good nick with very good colours. Nothing appears to have faded. In addition to interview text, it has some pretty large and very lovely black-and-white portrait photos of the cast. It's also amusing to look back at all the ads and images that are slotted between the Star Wars parts after 22 years (to be fair: they're not that dated, but they nevertheless place the film in a temporal context). Anyway, I went through it because I knew, among other interesting tidbits, there was a neat quote from Brian Blessed that is basically the antipode of what Ewan just asserted. Luckily, my memory wasn't playing tricks, and I found exactly what I was looking for -- a little more, in fact. So here we go:

www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ewan-mcgregor-obi-wan-star-wars-halston-4174111/


And from the Sunday Times magazine (p. 16):


Ignoring the condescension of the author...

Three cheers for the mighty Yorkshire gent, Brian Blessed! And an extra cheer, from me, because he saw Star Wars in my home city! Yay!

Even if Blessed was being hyperbolic, it's the sort of hyperbole Blessed can uniquely get away with. He's a total one-off, and yes, he's got plenty of Shakespeare under his hefty belt. I'd forgotten about his other statements (as above), and also the Joseph Campbell quote -- they are so good, I knew I had to include them. I hope they put Ewan "I don't want to be rude" McGregor's spiky remarks in deeper perspective.

ArchdukeOfNaboo  

Oh, wow! Quite a ravening little horde. Thanks for collating those. If you come across any more, please add them to the pile.

Have at it in your own time and in your own style -- I'm curious what you'll say! I'm happy to say more, but I'm about to retire for the night. I guess I made a crack on The Guardian one and dealt with the most offending paragraph, but it's really like shovelling snow in a blizzard.

I notice that several of those headlines have all sensationally cauterised Ewan's remarks the same way: i.e., they've eagerly grasped the message he was apparently transmitting that this Disney thing will be better than that Lucas thing.

Let's not forget that this marketing strategy has been hotly pursued by Disney employees since at least 2013, when President of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy at that year's Star Wars Celebration publicly reassured fans and the wider geek media that they'd be using "every tool in the toolbox" to bring the movies to life (including, I guess, SJW/cultural wars-savvy propaganda). Because... Jar Jar.

Try having no life!

(Semi-joke).

These films justify an extreme level of fanaticism, in my opinion.

Perhaps my zeal for defending them would have died down if people had stopped acting like dipshits after twenty years -- and if dipshittery hadn't have been sanctioned and co-opted by the gaslighting tactics of the biggest entertainment company on Earth.

That sounds angry. I'm not angry. And certainly not at you, Smitty. Just giving you some sense of where all this mad passion of mine is coming from! Good to see you back, too, by the way.   

Of course, it isn't just Disney's marketing that is tiresome, but Hollywood's marketing in general. I avoid watching interviews with actors and all of that because it usually involves some sales pitch about how the movie is doing its part to promote all of the right things. I'm def one of those people who is exhausted with and bored of the culture war, but that is all I will say about that to prevent the thread from going too off-topic.

Housekeeping

Just a boring/quick FYI:

I don't know why, but the Hollywood Reporter link became defective about a week ago, just days after the Ewan McGregor article was first posted. So I've gone back and edited my earlier posts and changed the URL to the new one.

Old one:

www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/ewan-mcgregor-reviving-obi-wan-going-to-the-extremes-to-play-halston

New one:

www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ewan-mcgregor-obi-wan-star-wars-halston-4174111/

Why do websites do this? Stick to one URL, especially when it's a major article, please! Or if you have to change it, make the old one point to the new one. Really irritating!

Also... this video:

medium.com/fan-fare/you-can-admit-the-star-wars-prequels-are-bad-and-love-them-anyway-76b2978ea41a

This seems like it is a defense instead an anti prequel article, but I never bought the " it's crap but I love it" argument, I feel like is contradictory, why would ypou love a product you know is bad?

I see this as a subtle attemp to tell people, "as soon as you agree with me, I have not problem with you liking them".

I can paste it here if you want to check it out, the author basically claims he love them, but can't believe that there a re people willing to defend it claiming they are good as movies, he even try to adress some of the most comon defenses. Call me crazy, but if I consider a movie bad, even thought I find it entertaining and admit it have some good things, why would I care about it to the point of love it?

"I was in Second Grade when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out. My dad took me to see it in theaters opening weekend, and I’m sure it was the biggest movie event of my life up to that moment. You see, I was already a huge fan of the movie long before I saw it. My shelf was covered in toys from the movie, including the collectable Mountain Dew cans that featured information about different characters, cans I was convinced would be “worth something” some day, so long as I didn’t crack them open and drink the contents. I had a small bust of Jar Jar’s head that opened to reveal a miniaturized playset of the Gungan city. I had a lightsaber (of course) and many many Lego sets. I had basically created contexts in my head for these things for months, and when I saw the movie, I got to see how it all fit together. I was obsessed from the first moments. My dad was not as impressed. As an early lover of Star Wars he had been excited to see the franchise continue, to fill in the gaps in the lore. He wanted to see how exactly the Empire had formed, and how Vader had grown from a precocious boy to a galactic tyrant.

Even as a 7-year-old, I could tell he was disappointed. He let on that he didn’t think it was very good but quickly settled back into his diplomatic way of talking about a movie with someone much more impressed than himself: he brought it back to the parts he did like. The lightsaber duel between Qui-gon, Obiwan, and Maul was an impressive action piece, a huge improvement on the lightsaber battles of yore. The podrace was a massive action spectacle. Qui-gon’s death was legitimately shocking. He brought up the ways in which this movie mirrored the plot of A New Hope, making the two movies rhyme. It went over my head, I was thinking about how much I loved Jar Jar.



Aside from being a very cool scene, the podrace also spawned a very fun N64 racing game.

History would vindicate my father. Unfortunately, he passed away before I was old enough to revaluate them alongside him, to see the holes he had identified, and admit that he was right or offer up an alternative read. The general perception of the prequels in the years that followed was that they were simply not as good as the original trilogy of movies. The writing was bad, the character names were laughably on-the-nose, and the movies were too long. They were stuffed with action set-pieces that contributed little to the plot while leaving out critical scenes that provided much-needed depth. Contextual information about the universe was often relegated to the big art books that accompanied each release, or novels that came out in between. As a young kid I didn’t care that much, but as I got older, I began to feel weirder and weirder about the fact that I couldn’t fully answer basic questions like “Who ordered the Clone Army, and why?” after just watching the movie. (Before anyone tries to explain to me that I would know the answer to this if I simply read such and such novel or watched The Clone Wars, that’s the point: I shouldn’t have to go outside the movie to answer basic questions about the plot of the movie.)

The understanding that the prequels are universally bad has shifted somewhat in recent years. It began with everyone knowing at least one person who thought the prequels were really good, but from there it has ballooned to the point that whole facebook groups exist to defend the prequels. Even suggesting they aren’t very good in any given Star Wars community is going to be met with a lot of resistance. Most of this ignores the critiques of the writing and filmmaking to point out that many of those criticism can be applied to the original trilogy as well. They also tend to focus on the ways in which the prequels “rhyme” with the originals. They tend to focus on the symbolism present in the trilogy. One recent example in a group I’m in was gushing over the fact that the youngling that Anakin confronts in the Jedi Temple looks kind of like a young Anakin, symbolizing that by turning to the dark side, he is killing his former self. This is an interesting idea, but it takes more than an interesting idea to make a movie great. Still, I admire the effort.

Because the truth is that these movies fail on multiple levels to different degrees, but at the same time, I can’t change the fact that I love them. These movies are not only an important part of my childhood, they are, at the end of the day, Star Wars. And I love Star Wars. I have never met a Star Wars that I didn’t enjoy, even if I had big problems with it. It’s hard to imagine what could happen to shake my faith in Star Wars so completely that I refuse to go back. I have big, big problems with The Rise of Skywalker and yet I keep coming back for more. So here I dare to tread the middle ground: I’m going to outline, in broad strokes, some of the things that make these movies not work, I’m going to dig a little into the specific issues that exist within them. And then, I’m going to explain why it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, loving Star Wars is an exercise in loving something that fails in many many ways, but which is so large it can always go back and fix things later. The Clone Wars tv series fills in so many gaps in the prequel trilogy that many people consider them essential to any watch through of the movies. You may or may not find it essential to watch a long tv series in the middle of a set of three movies, but some fans apparently do!

One of the first big issues with even parsing the plot of the prequels comes from the fact that there are a number of scenes that were written, storyboarded, or even shot which never make it into the movies. These range widely in terms of importance, and some were repurposed later in video games or in TV series, but a few come to mind that would have brought some things together. For example, Phantom Menace cuts a scene showing Qui-gon making a second attempt to include Anakin’s mother in the bet that eventually wins Anakin his freedom. Without that scene, it can feel like Qui-gon simply didn’t try that hard to free Shmi, which means that in not trying, he has personally failed Anakin. This is important because of what we consider Anakin’s motivation to be. Does he turn to the dark side because he was failed by specific Jedi, such as Qui-gon, or is he lured to the dark side because he is faced repeatedly with the failures of the republic to act according to its principles? Qui-gon giving up on Shmi too soon sells the idea that Qui-gon himself is cruel. If he tries harder and fails, it shifts focus back to the real issue: that Qui-gon shouldn’t even have to win the freedom of a person, because slavery isn’t supposed to exist in the Republic, but this is an issue too large for one Jedi to solve. A similar issue crops up in a deleted scene in Attack of the Clones. When Anakin is at Padme’s home on Naboo, she meets Padme’s father in a deleted scene. This scene reveals that Padme’s father was not born into the nobility. A commoner who was lucky enough to build up his position talks to a former slave who is only free because of his natural talents. Both a outsiders to the republic’s high society, and their conversation can help us to understand that the republic is not perfect.

But what’s really telling is what we got instead of these scenes. The podrace is important because it’s the means by which Anakin’s freedom is won, but it’s also a major action scene, rightly discussed by all leaving the theater. Likewise, the battle between the Gungans and the droids on an open field is exciting, but both of these scenes also seem to exist mostly to show off George Lucas’ ILM technology, which he licensed to other studios. These scenes are great, yes, but it’s hard not to feel like they have been included at the cost of scenes that might carry over more of the emotional stakes of the film. This is repeated in Attack of the Clones when we’re treated to a long sequence in a droid factory on Geonosis that does little to move the plot, and was in fact added only in reshoots. I don’t know that the scene with Padme’s father was cut to make room for this, but the fact remains that one scene is in the film and one in on the cutting room floor.



This production shot from the arena battle on Geonosis shows how little reference the actors had to work with. At the time, very movies had been shot in this way.

This is compounded by the fact that since the tech is so new, the application of it is uneven and in some places quite bad. Throughout all three prequel films, actors are repeatedly filmed on massive greenscreens. Whether or not this led to some of the stilted performances for which these movies are famous is hard to know: very few of these actors would have had a lot of experience working on a digital set before these movies. Human actors struggle to look Jar Jar in the eyes, clearly tempted to meet Ahmed Best’s gaze instead. Best would have been looking through Jar Jar’s neck, with his face removed in post. The lighting on the greenscreens is notoriously hard to match to the lighting in the studio, making the actors “pop” off the screen in a way that they don’t when they film in an actual location. The scenes on Tatooine and in the Naboo Palace remain among the nicest looking in The Phantom Menace for this reason. With each installment, these issues improve, but by Revenge of the Sith we’re still a long way from achieving the solution in The Mandolorian (using giant plasmascreens so the actors can see the scenery while filming) or even the more integrated and stylized look of something like 300.

The point of all of this is to say that because the movies essentially function as a tech demo for Industrial Light and Magic, they necessarily stumble at some functions of film as basic as properly lighting characters. The practical effects still look pretty good twenty years later, while the CG looks laughably bad. This is no clearer than when faced with Yoda, who appears as a puppet in Episode I, but flips around as a CG frog man in II and III. Now, those effects look bad. At the time, they probably seemed rather real, but at the same time, things like Yoda doing a flip seemed so incongruent with the character we knew, not only from the Original Trilogy, but also from his depiction in The Phantom Menace, that I remember people laughing in the theater.

Other issues exist in the narrative itself, and none are more glaring than the portrayal of Anakin in, especially, Attack of the Clones. Seeing Darth Vader as a young slave boy in The Phantom Menace was interesting, that he was a sweet and curious little boy made his eventual transformation into one of film’s most iconic villains even more tragic. With that movie ending with Anakin at the academy, it would fall to the next installment of the series to show the ways in which Anakin first began to turn away from the Jedi. Unfortunately, this is probably the greatest thing that Attack of the Clones bungles. Anakin begins the film as a spoiled brat who won’t take “no” for an answer. By the end of the film, he will not only have married Padme (Portman, despite her considerable talent, can never muster even the slightest bit of chemistry with Christenson), but also he will have slaughtered an entire community of Tuskan Raiders in revenge for them having killed his mother. His impulsiveness, his connections to loved ones, and his willingness to commit horrible acts of violence are all supposed to demonstrate his eventual willingness to join the dark side. The problem is that we don’t really get a very convincing view of anything else about Anakin. The curious and sweet kid is gone, but we never saw where he went. The portrayal goes so far in showing us what Anakin is capable of doing that it never makes it clear that he has to choose between the Jedi and the Sith. It seems like he’s already gone dark, and all that’s left is for him to change the color of his lightsaber.



The Neimoidians recall harmful stereotypes from iconic serials like Flash Gordon, a major influence on Star Wars.

I don’t want to belabor the point, because I have made my case by now: the movies have a lot of problems. But the most immediately cringe-inducing of these problems when watched in 2021 is the inclusion of racist stereotypes. Jar Jar’s fakey patois comes to mind immediately, as does the Trade Federation’s aliens which seem to be heavily based in Silver Age orientalist villains like Ming the Merciless. Much ink has also been spilled over Watto, the slave owner who loses Anakin in a bet and the way he trades in obvious and rather disgusting anti-semitic stereotypes. It’s unclear whether these were intended, or if George Lucas was trading in tropes he had borrowed from the old film serials that inspired Star Wars without interrogating them, but their inclusion is baffling and a major spot on some already troubled films.

There’s much else to discuss as well. There’s important contextual information that was left in massive art books. The Jedi are depicted in conflicting ways (are the heroic saviors of the Republic or are they outdated relics that have let the Republic fall into disrepair?). Major questions, like what caused Dooku to defect and who ordered the Clone Army, remain unanswered in a satisfactory way. Star Wars is broken, but I love it anyway.



I appreciate that the excellent Clone Wars series exists to answer these questions, to provide a more nuanced and interesting view of Anakin, and to trouble some of our understanding of the Jedi as an order, but I still love the three imperfect movies it sets out to fix. The podrace is as exciting to me at 29 as it was when I was 7. Watching Obiwan skirt asteroids as he tries to evade Jango Fett feels like about as dynamic space flight as we can get anywhere on the big screen. Anakin and Obiwan’s final showdown has some clunky lines but remains an emotional scene, a true marker of the exact moment that Anakin is lost forever. I even find some meaning in the fact that Jar Jar, whose charms no longer work on me, is the one to cast the vote that dooms the Republic. The broad arc of the narrative is spot on. It’s an engaging tail of forces beyond anyone’s control coming together to thrust a tyrant to power. Palpatine isn’t nearly as on top of the events of the films as we’re lead to believe, and he certainly catches a lucky break here and there. No one person could have done anything to change the full course of events. Unlike the Original trilogy, where one person deals a massive blow to the bad guys at multiple points, the prequels are a story without a hero. That comes through in the films, even if so much else is lost. George Lucas is imperfect, but his mind for political allegory and worldbuilding remain strong.

So, are they bad movies? Yes, on many levels. Am I going to go home and rewatch them all as soon as possible? Yes, absolutely I am."

Right, so, this one... Fuck it, I'll do it (Natalie already gave in, after all  )...


Fixing something is never simple -- or, at least, rarely as simple as people imagine. Moreover: Who says the character of Anakin Skywalker needs fixing?

Nevertheless, it's good to read they grew up with the prequels and consider themselves a fan.


Ah, yes. The inevitable qualification where half the trilogy is torn up and completely rewritten. Also: STOP SHOUTING AT ME, DUDE!


Ugh! Leave the dialogue alone. If you find it inadequate, that's fine -- but it worked for you as a kid, right? You were able to follow the story and pick up the gist of what was happening, even though some of this stuff is pretty complex and intense for a little kind to wrap their mind around. Maybe pause and have a think about that. 

It's also just plain annoying to run into a little side-bash in the middle of some thesis/cookery suggestions to "improve" some aspect of the prequels. Just stick to the main argument and leave those little digs for another article. 

Anyway, at least they recognise Lucas had a vision and a clear arc in mind for the character. I'll give him a point for that.


"After a forced, rushed love story, he wants to save his wife from dying". Talk about oversimplifying. This isn't like Anakin had a bad root canal, or cracked his tooth on a toffee apple Padme made him for their anniversary, and then decided to join the Dark Side because Jedi dentistry sucks. You're only excluding a boatload of variables and all manner of minutiae in-between. It isn't even that Anakin wants to save Padme from dying (necessarily). He wants to stop his visions from coming true. He wants, in other words, to force the universe to go in a direction of his choosing and comport with his wishes. Having a vision of Padme in distress, seemingly passing away, with Anakin apparently absent, is merely the final straw. Or one of the final ones. And visions/dreams have been the backbone of many mythic stories and tragic fables.

The love story being forced and rushed is a subjective opinion. Lucas told the story he wanted to tell. There's a good deal of drama and spice and epic symbolism to the whole thing. And, again, people often overlook the fact that Anakin is the Chosen One -- and war-weary, at that. He doesn't want to lose Padme or have some other life-altering complication foil the basic foundation of his life at the last minute. Palpatine knows this and pushes Anakin into a corner. At the same time, Anakin and Padme don't have the healthiest communication in ROTS. This was something they (ironically) foresaw in AOTC. Padme told Anakin they'd be "living a lie", and Anakin agreed it would destroy them. But in ROTS, there's a lot more at stake than just their own lives (as Padme realises all-too-well and gives voice to: "No politics, no plotting, no war"). The galaxy is suffering through war, and there is treachery and deceit and uncertainty around every corner.

There's two sides to tragedy and seeing a character give into their more basic impulses. One aspect is what he says above: i.e., identification/recognition of yourself in "The Other". But there's also a more rational aspect where a viewer/spectator realises that the character isn't making the best choices they could have; and that if one or two other things had been different, if the character had chosen better (and less selfishly), disaster could have been averted. I think Lucas nails those aspects in Anakin's story arc.


Okay, this ought to be good...


It's refreshing not to have a glaring criticism levelled at Jar Jar for once. But this suggestion gets to something that is inevitably baked into lists like these.

Quoting from the Bright Lights analysis of AOTC from 2002:


A very simple and concise reminder that some humility and a good deal of thought are required before airily drafting up changes willy-nilly.

As Subtext Mining touched on, you can't just go ripping out the circuit boards, because that not only breaks the movies but shows an ignorance of what Lucas was going for in the first place. The Jar Jar-Amidala-Gungan subplot is vital to the plot and thematic architecture of Episode I and the PT more generally. Lucas approached Episode I as a setup movie. Much of the meat-and-potatoes of the OT backstory would be tackled in the upcoming prequels. This freed him up to approach the first prequel more like a collage or an overture. In a stroke of genius, Lucas decided to construct his first episode like a parable (a microcosm-macrocosm for how all the SW movies function). 

See, with Anakin's journey, Lucas is commenting on more than Anakin himself. Lucas is transcribing a bigger tragedy in the way humans carry out their affairs, including the affairs of the state and the affairs of the heart -- holding a mirror up to human society in the hope we might build better systems and lead more well-rounded lives in the future (starting in the present). Indeed, he touched on this in 1990, when he and Steven Spielberg announced an Honorary Oscar for legendary filmmaker (and huge influence on the two of them) Akira Kurosawa, at that year's Academy Awards:




I don't get the sarcasm about Anakin living his life on Tatooine, whether under contract at Watto's shop, or leisurely fixing up his podracer, which he has built in secret from Watto, either. His issue seems to be that Anakin is too happy as a slave. This is an old and tedious criticism. A person doesn't have to be visibly suffering or struggling every moment of every day for slavery to be a degrading condition. He forgets the fact that Anakin is someone else's property (as well as his mother); and that neither of them can just up and leave. As chirpy and free-spirited as Anakin is, it's also obvious that his happy facade is hiding a lot of anger and frustration -- as when he suddenly gets angry at Padme calling him a slave and indignantly reminds her that he has a name, or in his power fantasy of becoming a Jedi: a caste of venerable warriors whom he stubbornly thinks can't be killed.

As I wrote under an article on Naboo News in February 2019:

Anakin clearly perceives that he has limited utility as a slave; and that he "wouldn’t have lasted this long if [he] wasn’t so good at building things". Then there is the perpetual threat of being killed for escaping: "Any attempt to escape and they blow you up -- BOOM!" Not to mention the threat of being broken up and sold off and separated from your parents/siblings forever (as many slaves in history really were). Hence Anakin’s casual line to Threepio when saying goodbye: "I’ll make sure mom doesn’t sell you or anything." Given that Anakin is going away, he can only really express a desire/wish to his mother that she doesn’t sell his incomplete protocol droid; there are no practical steps he can take to ensure they remain together indefinitely. So the line is also a subliminal expression of his deep-seated fear that it’s his mother who could be sold in his absence.

As mentioned, Anakin is also hiding his podracer from Watto, and he even enters into a bet with Qui-Gon against Watto, silently assenting to Qui-Gon's deceit ("Well, I have acquired a pod in a game of chance"). So Anakin is already well-practiced at concealing things from "superiors" (and colluding with other superiors). He also thinks little of challenging Qui-Gon at the dinner table to come clean that he's a Jedi Knight (well, technically, he's a Jedi Master), or later telling Yoda to shove it, in only slightly politer terms as his irritation pokes through on the galactic capital: "What has that got to do with anything?" Even on Naboo, under Qui-Gon's tutelage, he can only muster a half-hearted reassurance to Qui-Gon when his mentor tells him to "Find a safe place and stay there -- stay there."

That strong streak of individuality Anakin has about him (for a potential Jedi) is also alarming. Gazing up at the stars with Qui-Gon, Anakin affirms that he wants to be "The first one to see them all". This may just be a childish fantasy, but it suggests a whit of naivete in Anakin, paired with unquenchable desire. Qui-Gon smiles it off, but the austere members of the Jedi Council may be less amused -- especially Yoda, who tells Luke in Episode V that a Jedi doesn't crave adventure or excitement, but must have "the most serious mind". Later, when Qui-Gon explains the midi-chlorians to Anakin, he crinkles up in confusion, clearly confounded at the notion he is a construct of microscopic organisms that might communicate to him ideas and notions contrary to his own impulses and goals.  

One other revealing detail is Anakin's fairly indifferent attitude toward Jar Jar. While Padme is amused with Jar Jar's antics and warm, innocent presence, Anakin seems to find him an oddity at best, an attention-grabbing nuisance at worst (look how Jar Jar makes a mess in Watto's shop or slightly steals the limelight from Anakin in his home: "How wude!" -- and the curious look Anakin shoots him). There is plenty for much more morally relaxed characters like Palpatine to work with.

All that said, Lucas has stated he wanted a Tom Sawyer persona for Anakin in TPM. Anakin's darkness was intended to be a relatively subtle thing in Episode I, allowing Lucas to keep the film relatively light (and deceptively naive) on the surface. In this regard, Anakin's later embrace of evil may come as a shock, or seem relatively sudden, but that's all by design. It is meant to feel faintly ridiculous and a touch esoteric that the Jedi are so weary of this Anakin. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan even fall out over it. The subtle, hidden darkness of Anakin encourages one to root for Qui-Gon's maverick outlook; while perhaps still allowing a viewer to agree abstractly with the Jedi that, at best, he is going to prove a difficult student without sublime encouragement.


Lucas himself has stated that he started off with Anakin at "about 12 years old", but that he pushed Anakin down to "10 years old" because he felt it worked better for the film -- primarily around the issue of him leaving his mother, which Lucas intended to be a core issue in his backstory. Some people may have preferred a slightly older Anakin, but the film is more dramatic and devastating because Anakin must separate from his mother so suddenly, and so young. Moreover, a child protagonist is a bold choice, given what Anakin becomes. Although it's also the case that Anakin isn't really the "star" of Episode I in quite the same way that Qui-Gon, Amidala, or even Jar Jar are. Indeed, while the discovery of Anakin and his separation from his mother are major events in the film, their true meaning and impact on the wider story are not really unpacked until the subsequent prequels.

So you could say, in one sense, I agree with the writer of the article. Anakin isn't really the focus of Episode I. The film is more of an ensemble piece. This is, of course, a typical George Lucas decision. Why be obvious and conventional when you don't need to be? On one level, it merely reflects the fact that "It takes a village to raise a child". It also heightens the theme of symbiosis in kind. It also helps frame Anakin as an innocent creature who, much like Jar Jar, gets swept up in a complex situation he never fully understands or takes the time to piece together. When Lucas makes a decision, there's usually a multitude of good reasons for it.

I don't see what's creepy about the connection between Anakin and Padme in Episode I. They are really just friends with a faint hint of romantic affection for one another. Anakin has a little boy crush on Padme, while Padme cares for Anakin as a quirky friend whose world is suddenly thrown out from under him (overlooking the fact that the same has pretty much just happened to her -- refocused energies 'n' all that). They're more like cousins. Maybe I'm just biased because I had a crush on a girl called Natalie at the same age. She was in the top year of Junior School and I was in the first year. I also have an attractive and rather graceful cousin with the same name. And I can, of course, grasp the appeal of a young Natalie Portman. 

Their sweet bond also exemplifies Qui-Gon's epigram at the start of the film: "Be mindful of the Living Force." These characters are very much alive and share almost the same heartbeat. It is something Obi-Wan later misses or chooses to downplay in the other installments. Life kinda does its own thing. Or in the iconic words of Jurassic Park's Ian Malcolm: "Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is."

Some of this, I think, in addition to modern anxieties about male predation and pedophilia more generally, comes down to the limitations of the English language. We don't have nearly as many words to describe certain emotional states as other languages -- like, say, Portuguese or Japanese. Eskimos famously have 100 words for snow. Hang up! In reality, they don't -- but the myth itself says something about our anxiety toward language (or the few we sometimes think we are boxed in by). There really are lots of subtle emotional states and happenings in the universe for which we have no words; or which are difficult to adequately convey in written or spoken form. Sheeite. That's why Lucas made the PT and works in the visual realm. 

I guess it's true that Lucas could have created a narrative where Anakin is more obviously pulled in different directions. But why? And more to the point: How? This guy's first point was ragging on Anakin's light-hearted existence on Tatooine (which is hardly that). He implies that Anakin should have been shown to struggle (and suffer?) more. But in "Step 2", he suggests Lucas should have created an even platter of choices for Anakin to pick from. The contradiction obviously being: If he doesn't want Anakin to have had a rosy existence on Tatooine (even moreso than what Lucas showed), wouldn't Anakin's mind already be made up to reach for something better? Or is he imagining that Anakin might still win his freedom on Tatooine and then go through a drawn-out decision-making process? So at least he is "no longer a slave"? Okay. But I suspect Anakin would still want to free himself from Tatooine -- a place that prequel Anakin, at the least, seems to mainly associate with sand and a lack of control (sand as metaphor: "And it gets everywhere"). 

As for leaving with a young queen: What's he gonna do? Convince her with some Jedi Mind Trick not to be royal anymore? Ask to become some honorary duke or something? Hide out in the palace basement and set Home Alone traps for all the retainers and servants, and have water fights with Padme in the courtyard, then sneak off into the woods with her for some nookie like a juvenile Heathcliff? He talks about Lucas rushing the story, but then casually posits that Anakin, only just out of slavery and not yet in his teens, can elope with the monarch from another planet and make that choice with limited resources and no consequences. Yeah, they've got a seat at the table just waiting for you in their swankiest dining room, Anakin. And golden slippers placed at the foot of the bed in your 200-feet-by-200-feet bedroom. What's that? You'd like a whole fleet of N-1 starfighters to yourself for a game of Pilotwings in the afternoon (just try not to shoot the birds)? No problem, sir. Anything else? You'd like a waterfall of strawberry milkshake and a gondola made of fudge? Coming right up. 

"Not a slaver or a Jedi." Oh, so they don't want him to ever have been a slave? Where's the fun in that? Seriously, though: Lucas obviously felt it incredibly important that Vader begin his early human life in chains. Maybe not chains you can physically see, but in some low, shackled state: subservient to a "master", contingent on their good graces and their ability to afford to keep owning you (and their willingness to treat you well). This obviously creates a lot of anguish in Anakin. But as I said earlier: Not all of this is instantly apparent. And yes, there is a tremendously wonderful and poignant rhyme here. As J.W. Rinzler states at the close of his "The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith":


Let's move on...


Yet Lucas peppers TPM with hints and warnings -- especially once we arrive on Coruscant -- that Anakin may bring problems to the universe if the Jedi let him into their fold. There is an angelic yet dark and uncertain mood to the Jedi Council scenes on Coruscant, which parallels a similar temperament in Anakin. In the final Council scene, Mace flatly tells Qui-Gon that Anakin won't be trained, which prompts a scowl from Anakin (setting up their antagonism in ROTS). Qui-Gon, on the other hand, is prepared to train Anakin himself, despite already having an apprentice. But the Jedi don't immediately allow this, citing the Jedi Code as a limitation that must be respected and obeyed. Thus, Anakin's dreams of becoming a Jedi seem to be foiled for the time being, and the film suddenly becomes more ambiguous about his fate (a word even uttered by Yoda in the same scene). If the film is later engaged in an act of forgetting, a reminder is generated at Qui-Gon's funeral: a dark and uncertain mood returns and Anakin mournfully asks a distracted Obi-Wan, "What will happen to me now?" Clearly, nobody had even told the poor bastard. Anakin feels like he is both included and excluded from the Jedi, because this is the direct state of things communicated to the viewer in touches like these.

Also, this person is focusing on Episode I Anakin to the exclusion of Episode II and Episode III Anakin -- and quite a caricatured one, at that. Anakin is never quite a Boy Scout. Or if he is, all Boy Scouts must equally have the capacity to go wrong. The point of the story is that Anakin is corrupted by greed. It is the thing that ultimately destroys him. There is therefore some irony to the fact that Anakin, even at his most innocent, is immersed in a world of greed and practically its plaything. Even Qui-Gon reassuringly tells him: "Greed can be a powerful ally." And it emerges that Anakin has some greed of his own, whether the greed around him has seeped in and imprinted itself on his psyche, or he has developed a measure of greed as a coping mechanism. One must remember that the first "father" Anakin appears to have isn't Palpatine, Obi-Wan, or even Qui-Gon, but Watto: a small creature who revels in greed and avarice, seemingly for their own sake. 

The edge that Anakin develops is exactly what the writer describes, but it is in relation to Obi-Wan, not Owen Lars; and it is shown in Episode II, not Episode I. Yes, this writer qualifies by saying, "Anakin should have had an edge to him from the beginning". But he does. This writer is choosing to pretend Anakin is a font of goodness with not a hint of anger or pathos about him. Episode I plainly shows a different reality if watched with sufficient care and attentiveness. Even the relatively innocent Jar Jar, constantly getting trampled or pushed around, has an air of dignity and pride about him, and isn't above lying (in the marketplace on Tatooine) or disparaging someone even lower on the food chain than himself ("Dumb droid"), or expressing an almost vanitous love for his fellow Gungans to Amidala ("Gungans no dyin without a fight. Wesa warriors. Wesa got a grand army."). Hell, Jar Jar is even angry when Panaka suggests the Gungans have been wiped out. All creatures feel these things. And that is Lucas' point. Everyone is a little bit vulnerable to the Dark Side -- but circumstances dictate, in large part, whether we maintain balance or lose it (and whether we can admit the difference or not).

Implying that Anakin lacks an enigmatic air is interesting. Anakin is a pretty enigmatic character to me. I think they all are -- prequels more than the originals, too. Hayden certainly plays Anakin with an enigmatic swagger. Even Jake shows hints of an internal Anakin that is curiously soaking up the many things Qui-Gon and Amidala say and do. One has the sense that the young Anakin is trying to understand the "higher" world -- a world he seems desperate to one day master and be taken seriously within.


As Natalie pointed out in her response on the page, the Jedi were already extremely reluctant to train Anakin at nine years old, so expecting them to embrace an older Anakin with open arms is asking a bit much and basically ignoring every piece of thematic paving Lucas laid down in the PT. Even in TESB, Yoda scolds Luke and is resistant to training him (despite knowing he has precious few options available), because he sees how impatient Luke is, calling him "reckless" and berating him for not paying attention to his surroundings ("Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing"). I suppose you could argue he could have been more accepting of Anakin to start with and this is why he has such a pessimistic view of Luke. But "thrilled"? Yoda? Unless a youngling is getting something right and seeing something an adult cannot, that is never Yoda's emotional response to anything. Jedi like Yoda don't really embrace thrills -- why would other members of the Jedi Council be any different? So straight away, the terminology grates and his view of the Jedi seems all wrong.

"It should be years of deep cuts and betrayal, not just fear of the inevitable, that turns Anakin."

It feels a bit inelegant having to repeat a George Lucas quote so quickly, but here's Lucas' response to that again from J.W. Rinzler's "The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith":


Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, George Lucas and many fans seem to be at odds. Fans were ready to accept the basic lessons of the Original Trilogy -- perhaps because, in one pithy summary (albeit within a negative review of TPM), the basic exhortation to "believe in yourself" in the OT is the "psychosocial equivalent of a breath mint". But the PT is a more challenging package where Lucas reframes his grand saga and finally lays out a metaphysical system -- and people, it seems, don't like being told something might be better for themselves and others to practice, even if it involves restrictions (e.g., look at all the idiots who think COVID is made up or exaggerated and who refuse to get vaccinated or wear a mask). And I say this as a critic of Jedi orthodoxy, even within the same thread.

Lucas also does better than this overt idea that Anakin should suffer a grievous loss and then avenge that loss, rather than bring it about himself. Mace, in fact, almost "kills" Padme in ROTS when he goes to strike down Palpatine. As Lucas tells Hayden when the scene is being re-filmed in "The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith":


On the very next day, Lucas makes what he means even clearer during the filming of the "ruminations" sequence:


Furthermore, in ROTJ, Vader is shown to be a pitiable figure, full of self-blame. Between bouts of cold bravado and incessant taunting, the conversation between Vader and Luke on the gantry on Endor offers a deeper insight into Vader's psyche. Luke urges his father to come with him, and Vader responds not with some mocking putdown but with grief and sadness: "Obi-Wan once thought as you do." In ROTS, we see that Obi-Wan is using Padme as bait to find Anakin, and also as his proxy. Padme tries to reason with Anakin on the landing platform and attempts to sway him to give up his dark desires and return to the light. It is of little avail (but not helped by Obi-Wan's sudden interruption, provoking Anakin into a fury) and Padme ends up caught in the crossfire of the two men. Ergo, when one watches the scene in ROTJ after the prequels, it takes on a much more tragic hue. Anakin partially lives out his broken life as Vader as a form of penance: a strange purgation.

Would he really be quite so sad or feeble-looking, at the end, when he is unmasked, if he had instead been wholly betrayed by the Jedi and set about avenging his wife's death? No -- in a way, he would have been justified; and while he may have regretted his actions later, it wouldn't have the same gravity or meaning that it does when Luke, son of the mother he choked and drained the life from, forgives him and restores his original name (the very name he proudly declared was his to Padme when they first met). 

Anakin's downfall has to be wrought by his own hand. It is the inevitable outcome of his inability to accept change, putting his faith in Palpatine and the Dark Side instead. The moral lesson here is much more profound than a simple tale of revenge. As Lucas says in the quote above: "There is no revenge." The subtitle of Episode III is a giant red herring. Look around you right now and you'll see people struggling to accept change all the while. "Anakin" is a valid state of the human animal, but our task is to make sure it isn't the only one. We must learn to live with change and to overcome. We must refine our thinking and learn to live, as much as possible, with an open heart and mind. Be a little better the next day than we were the day before. As the trailer to Episode I says: "Every journey begins with a first step."


Darth Maul was always intended to be a one-shot villain: A deadly assassin who haunts the Jedi with the prospect the Sith have returned and is dispensed with after he has served his purpose (capture the queen and keep the Trade Federation under the gun). His exotic appearance is a good (or "evil") embodiment of the remote threat of the Sith and those who have pledged themselves to the Dark Side in the timeframe of Episode I. One might also say that, in an amoral sense, he embodies the divine fire of creation, or the strange flame of life itself -- a sort of weirdly monastic, diabolical version of Jar Jar. His basic complexion and height also make him a dark clone of Obi-Wan.

But there is one other purpose Maul serves -- and that is to be a preview of what Anakin will become. In the words of Bob Clark in his 2012 essay examining TPM's climactic action sequence:


In other words, it's lightness and darkness at work: innocence and experience. Taking a look at those shots, you can see the visual narrative Clark is talking about:







Note the double-bladed laser blast here:



Anakin's "rescue" of Padme takes him into space, and eventually, he winds up in the hangar bay of the Droid Control Ship orbiting the planet. 

There is a moment where Anakin presses his thumb against a button marked with a red circle:



The film then immediately cuts back to Maul menacing Qui-Gon (Anakin's "father"):



At this point in the story, the Sith are so remote and abstract to Anakin that they might as well be buttons or toys.

Yet Anakin will grow up to be far worse and more fearsome a threat than the tiger-like Sith warrior that takes his "father" Jedi's life. 

A certain degree of innocence protects Anakin like a cockpit bubble/shield membrane -- for the time being.

This, of course, is part of Lucas' genius. He likes bringing opposites together and dramatically playing them off against one another.

As for this sense of betrayal that the writer is hung up on: Isn't it enough that Anakin and Obi-Wan go on many missions together and literally have each other's backs countless times? With Anakin and his "impressive skills" saving Obi-Wan more times than even Obi-Wan remembers? Yes, critics can complain and rant and rave about "Show, don't tell", but Lucas actually does both. The Prequel Trilogy is not an emotional machine designed to regurgitate an endless set of similar experiences until you are swimming -- or drowning -- in examples of one character's love and affection for another. That's not how Lucas works. He conveys the point and moves on. The prequels are a dense work of cinema, not a television mini-series.

Darth Maul, in this reading, is as much of a hologram as a real person. He first appears that way, too. And the Prequel Trilogy -- Episode I, in particular -- tends to give snapshots of lofty and bizarre things without fully sketching them out. Some things happen with little in the way of direct explanation, like all the guns Amidala keeps in the armrest of her throne. Or the laser gates that same scene is juxtaposed with. Sights! Sounds! Marvels! Things happening! That's kind of the way of Star Wars. There's plenty of bulging world detail that one is never to make complete sense of. If there's something a bit "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" about the Sith, so be it. They don't all need to be made into familiar foes. When you think about it, most of the Star Wars episodes begin with a pan down. Given that, retreating backwards from Episode VI to Episode I, TPM must be taking place in a "higher" plane. TPM is a wonderful piece of kabuki: Star Wars as performance art. 

This all serves to illustrate that trying to make Star Wars normal, least of all an early Star Wars prequel, doesn't work. Don't like there being exoplanets, and pulsars, and strange nebulae, and possibly advanced alien life? Sorry, these things exist (or, in the case of the last category, it's reasonable conjecture) -- in as much as we think we understand the concept that word points to, anyway. Every Star Wars movie is a little on the hallucinogenic side. Some are more hallucinogenic than others. But the universe is a pretty baffling place. And Lucas is trying to echo that in some relatively non-timid way. "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." The nerve of the man to conceive of an entire galaxy when we haven't even strayed beyond our own backyard yet.

So we finally arrive at the writer's conclusion:


But monkeying with the PT's genetic makeup changes what it is in a fundamental way. There's a reason, perhaps, those other characters he cites belong to supplementary material. It's not that Anakin is the be-all, end-all of Star Wars. Nevertheless, Lucas accomplished a lot with his character arc and the prequels as a whole. 

And you shouldn't always give people what you think they're clamouring for. As Padme tells Anakin in the extended arrival scene in AOTC: "Popular rule is not democracy, Ani. It gives the people what they want, not what they need."

Star Wars may be "for the masses", but it's not "by the masses". That's a critical difference. Before assuming Lucas got it wrong or fell short, be sure you've at least thought about his choices and taken the man seriously. Then you may finally notice the abundant riches that are there to be endlessly enjoyed.