The Glade 4.0

Let me rephrase.

Yes, everything Obi-Wan said in the original trilogy can be interpreted in such a fashion that Anakin could have been a child when they met and everything still makes sense. That is definitely true. That does not mean that the decision to go with a nine year-old Anakin wasn't stupid, and that it wasn't a root cause of suck for the prequel trilogy.

It's art and life mirroring one another with the casting choice being a different point of view on what Obi-Wan said, just like Obi-Wan talking about different points of view with Luke. That's all very clever, and everyone who picked up on that should pat themselves on the back for noticing. It's a stupid idea.

Now to go further, Obi-Wan's explanation isn't a break in continuity, nor is it some contrivance to justify a plot-twist that Lucas came up with on the fly. Right before the reveal, Luke says, "He told me enough. He told me you killed him." Then, later on when he's saddened by the loss of Yoda and overwhelmed by the enormity of the task in front of him, in the depths of his despair he confronts Obi-Wan's ghost about it. "Why didn't you tell me Darth Vader was my father?" Obi-Wan gives a pedantic explanation that rings sort of hollow, and then later in the conversation delivers lines that convey years of pain, sorrow, and regret. "I once believed as you do," and "He's more machine now than man."

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Frankly, other than the first move I have found the suck of the prequel to be wildly exaggerated, focusing entirely on the acting oh Christensen and his interaction with Amidala - and rather unfairly, focusing entirely on the final product we see. Actors do not just act however the **** they feel like; they do so under the director.

The background of Palpatine plotting this entire thing to overthrow the Jedi and the Senate and set himself up as Emperor is actually pretty interesting, as is the discovery of the short-sightedness and myopia of the Jedi in general and Yoda in particular.

Finally, while making Anakin onlder in TPM might have been better, I find the complaint about his age to be at least a little overblown. Obviously he had to be a 9-year-old kid at some point. In ANH, Vader has been Vader for 20+ years. He's very experienced at being Vader. The captain of Leia's corvette is not the first or the hundredth windpipe he's crushed. In TPM-RotS, no matter how old he is, he's going to be a young man without as much experience and definitely without any experience at being a brutal Sith Lord. That's a huge difference because when you crush your first windpipe, it's a big thing of accepting that you're a brutal Sith Lord and a lot of emotion is involved. When you're just chasing some droids 20 years later and doing it because you're stuck chasing droids over some backwater planet because your boss insists on building an oversize space station since Mace Windu melted his dick off 20 years ago and he needs to compensate.. it's pretty easy to do it all over again because while to the audience and the corvette captain it's a big **** deal, for the Sith Lord in question it's just **** Tuesday.



I'm not sure what's particularly stupid about it beyond "poorly executed in some respects" and "not what the fan base exactly had in mind between 1983 and 1999". Incidently, it occurs to me that it's now 16 years since TPM came out.. and it was 16 years from ROTJ to TPM. How time flies; I was in 3rd grade for ROTJ; I was a platoon leader shaking sand out of my *** at Fort Irwin for the last one. Now I have 4 kids and my right shoulder hurts all the time.



If, back in 1983 we had the internet and the accompanying fan debates over continuity someone at the time would have been utterly losing their **** over how weak Obi-wan's explanation was and that it was a "break in continuity". your explanation of Obi Wan's answer is well-taken and accurate, but from the viewpoint of the fandom it's far more reason for nerd rage than any discontinuity between the 2 trilogies. The difference is that ANH-RotJ were pre-internet and people grew up accepting that this was How It Was. Much of the fandom wasn't even born for those movies.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, I was saying that yesterday. It's not that Hayden Christensen was ever good, I don't feel its entirely fair to him or the other actors to lay that blame at his feet. Of the actors in the prequel trilogy, only Ewan MacGregor was able to overcome the horrid scripts he was given and provide an emotionally compelling performance. This despite there being some rather accomplished actors - Natalie Portman has been outstanding since getting out of Star Wars. Keira Knightly has shown herself to be competent with time. Samuel Jackson, Frank Oz...these weren't nobodies.

The Prequel Trilogy had promise - it was a decent "rough draft" of a story. Had Lucas handed it over to a good script-doctor prior to release, and hired on a competent director, they could have been outstanding. Christensen was poorly cast, and not a great actor, but he did not turn those movies into the often painful experiences they were: Lucas did that himself.

His inattention to his own canon, as well as liberties taken with character coincidences he pulled out of his ***, they were all just the proverbial icing on the cake.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Christensen wasn't a complete loss. Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith both work fantastically as bromance buddy-Jedi movies. If the chemistry between Hayden and Natalie had been half as good as between MacGregor and Christensen, we'd only be complaining about Jar Jar and the kid.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

At least Lucas realized how astoundingly shitty Jar-Jar was after just one movie and kept him to 2 or 3 lines in the 2nd and none in the third. Jar-Jar makes the Ewoks look like Vin Diesel.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The Ewoks weren't horrible. They were merely a warning sign.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No, they weren't horrible, just adorable and sort of unrealistically effective - but Jar Jar makes them look like total badasses.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Lucas worked best when he had someone to challenge his ideas and tell him they were bad. Lucas is fantastic when he goes back to the drawing board. The first 1977 Star Wars movie was going to be originally titled (and this is no joke): "Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars." C3-PO was going to act and sound like a "used car salesman." Storm troopers were all going to have lightsabers. The list goes on and on.

Lucas had a wife. A wife that was not afraid to tell him his ideas were **** and they needed to be rewritten. And so he did. Lucas and his wife got a divorce sometime between Empire and Return of the Jedi, hence the glimpses of things to come... like Ewoks.

If you watch the documentary of The Phantom Menace, you will see Lucas has completely and utterly surrounded himself with yes-men. Any idea that spews out of his mouth is treated as if it's perfectly formed and untouchable. Lucas is even shown looking at at Jar Jar statue and saying (paraphrasing, I have not watched it willingly in 15 years), "This is the key to the whole movie. If this works, then the movie works."

I fully blame the prequels being (partly) terrible simply because Lucas had no one to challenge his ideas and force him to go back and rethink them. That, and he was not willing to allow another director to direct his movies (Irvin Kershner is another huge reason for some of the best and memorable parts of Empire).

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!