Reply #46: Anakin's arc was phony and perfunctory to you. Not to me. [View All]

I sympathized with Anakin, as I fancy him to be more a victim than transgressor. The kid didn't have a prayer. Created by the Devil's hand. Languishing in indentured servitude. Torn from his mother. Robbed of his surrogate (the only man who could have saved him from his real father). Apprenticed under an incompetent. Nurtured by a band of arrogant, unprincipled ascetics.

Darth Vader...of course.

"Ridiculously unbelievable love story?" What on earth led you to think AOTC chronicled a love story? It was about possession (Anakin) and folly (Padme). Recall little Ani's first words to Padme: "Are you an angel?" It's all crystal worlds with this boy. Padme's not a woman, she's an ideal, harkening back to the pall cast by his beloved mother (they did look awfully alike in Episode I, didn't they?) He reenters her world, and consumes. And Padme? Anakin's her last prospect for meaning. She's spent half her life upholding a crumbling, thoroughly corrupt Republic, only to find herself impotent in preventing a war that would kill tens of billions. She's failed. So here comes this emotional wreck--so disturbingly different from the cherub who helped save her planet ten years prior. Perhaps this she can salvage. Like her son, she sees something in this budding, feeble tyrant worth saving, which allows her to turn a blind eye to all his atrocities, all the innocents he's killed. Until finally, she too dies on the receiving end. Not a love story, not in the least.


And no, I'm not blaming the viewers--many of whom have expressed varying degrees of satisfaction with how this new trilogy turned out. My eyes are on the fanboys, who clamored for more Manichean wars, charming rogues and gallant knights...and spewed their venom when Lucas offered up something more provocative.