ST Should Luke be single, married, divorced, or a widower?

And I said it shouldn't be necessary, and if it is than that is a flaw in the original story.

If the story can't stand on it's own feet, that's a problem

 

Even though ROTS is my favorite SW movie, I didn't like the acting and it seemed a little rushed in certain fights. In ROTS novel I love Anakin's portrayal and Grievous gets an awesome upgrade as well.

Before I read the book, I watched the clone wars animated series. It also supports the fact that Anakin's turn to the dark side is going to be motivated by fear and extreme paranoia, along with the council abandoning him at every turn.

Maybe on some small level he was jealous that Padme was going to run away with Obi-wan (Which didn't even occur to him until Sidious pointed it out, and even then Anakin knew both of them well enough to reply that it was ridiculously out of their characters).

I think his train of thought eventually became that the Jedi were evil->Obi-wan was a Jedi-> Obi-wan would corrupt padme with evil. So in his demented dark-side brain he was protecting Padme from Obi-wan's corrupt philosophies, not trying to break up some Obidala action.

 

LOL- first it was "standard" and "requirement," and now "necessary." Funny, I didn't use or even imply ANY of those words. How many words are you going to make up to try to reinvent what I said? It doesn't take a genius to understand what I REALLY was saying there. The other guy was making an assertion about an underlying theme in the movie that he THOUGHT existed (his perception, NOT something explicit in the movie), I simply pointed out that this was not the case in the movie or the book, as evidenced by EXPLICIT wording in the book, and that furthermore books tend to be better for understanding the story since they are MORE explicit given the mere fact that they have more narrative. Anything can be misinterpreted, and the book is LESS likely to be misinterpreted. Perhaps if this is so hard to understand, you guys should actually turn off the boob tube and read and little more, it might do you some good.

 

How does it give a better understanding of the story when it is a retcon bomb? I think that would replace the original with a different version instead of enhance it.

 

Why is it a retcon? A case could be made that it was always intended, that the root of Anakin's anger at not being made a master- be inability to access any secrets the Jedi Masters keep, in order to try and save Padme from death.

 

If such a character motivation was at the root of this, then it should have been mentioned on screen. It wasn't. You can't call it the root if it's not even from the film at all

 

Remember Palpatine's "legend of Darth Plagueis The Wise". Seems pretty evident that Anakin is hoping to find out more about it when he becomes a Master.

 

That scene came after the one in question. This is the problem with mixing and matching story elements from the novel and the film. The novel is another take on the story, it's not the same story as the film.

You want an example, the scene where Vader kills the Separatist leaders. The depiction in the film and in the novel are night and day. It's two very different versions, incompatible.

The film shows us a killer who is not interested in talk. He cuts them down without word, without question, without even letting them speak.

The novel shows us a wise cracking man, taunting his victims.

Not the same story. People just don't get that

 

The scene with Anakin's nightmare about Padme dying in childbirth, however, does take place before it.

 

That he has visions of Padme is not the question

 

That he wants to learn to "prevent people from dying" crops up as early as AoTC.

And who would one expect to know about such supernatural powers if they exist? Jedi Masters.

 

And yet, not one mention of these holocrons in the film. We never see Anakin press, we never see him ask for access, we never even see him push to be a master really until he is put on the council.

That is a plot point from the book, not the film series.

And again, if that is the root of his motivation, don't you think they would spend five seconds to mention that he needs that access?

 

We do see him discuss it with Yoda- carefully, trying not to reveal who he's attached to. Yoda's advice is to let them go.

 

That's not the question, the question was about the character motivation to see these supposed records. You mentioned the Plaguies story, he didn't even know about it before he made a gripe about not being a master even though he was on the council.

There is no question that he wanted to save Padme, we all know that. The suggestion that was made was that Anakin had his own selfish goals and ambitions as well, another well established character trait. He spends half of AOTC whining about being held back. They go out of their way to establish that, holocrons not so much

 

You're basically saying that film is an ill-suited media to tell any complex story and therefore we need literature to compensate the flaws. While I am more interested in literature than film, I can't say I agree. Actions, dialogue, gestures and facial expression should be sufficient to properly convey motives. In Anakins case one of the motives conveyed is a strong hunger for power.

 

Exactly. And that is why it is perfectly reasonable to say that Anakin's anger at not being given the title of Master is more rooted in that character trait than in this quest to use holocrons that is not hinted at even once.

They established that character trait on screen, holocrons as a goal was established in a book

 

I think what Captain Tom Coughlin is talking about is the absolutely essential need for a film - any film, regardless of genre or title - to be entirely self-contained. Everything that a viewer needs to understand the film ought to be in the film itself, period. Even things like internal motives can be explored and described externally; it depends entirely on the filmmakers' approach. But it's really not fair to me for someone to say that if I didn't get something in the film itself, I can get it if I then turn to a novel, a comic, or any other ancilliary product. WHAT MATTERS IS THE MOVIE, and if the movie itself wasn't doing a good enough job getting the points raised by the story across, then it speaks to a failure of the filmmakers to get their points across, not a failure of the audience to understand them. And it's completely unfair to a general audience to cheat them out of a complete experience in the theater (which they paid hard-earned money to have) and then say if they didn't get it, they can shell out more money for the novelization or what-have-you. Any general audience would just consider that being cheated and robbed, and rightly so.

Novelizations are great, and I'm all for them, particularly for new Star Wars films, but they're just an extra, and they shouldn't do work that the film should be doing (they appear to be a dying art form in any case; there are far fewer novelizations of films nowadays then there used to be). The best any novelization or other adaptation of a story can do is provide additional nuance, but it shouldn't have to bear the responsibility of actually making the story understandable; the film should do that by itself. Alien had a novelization, but it didn't make the story understandable because the movie did that just fine on its own; Cameron is even now working on a novelization of Avatar, but that movie's been out for years now - is there really anything in the book that could make the story of the movie itself clearer than the film itself did? No indeed; I got the story just fine without a novel helping me out. It was entirely self-contained as a film and didn't require a novel to explain what wasn't properly explained in the film itself. The novel will probably set the stage for the sequels, yes, maybe provide some connective tissue between the original and the sequels - but it will never tell a story that the film itself failed to tell.

You know what film really COULD have used a novelization? Prometheus. Get Alan Dean Foster on the job quick!

 

Why? Countless characters in movie history are shown to fall to insanity and paranoia, or question their life's work or the nature of truth. Why should that be so difficult for a Star Wars film?

 

I wish I could give this post a thousand likes.

 

Thank you. I'll admit it has a dubious place in a thread discussing Luke's marital status (or lack thereof); but it's a fundamental principle of films that, quite frankly, needed to be spelled out based on the way the conversation was going.

 

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Movies are a visual medium, there are many ways to get contextual clues out there. Body language, how a character reacts physically to others and to situations, inflections in voice and delivery, lighting and mood set in a scene, lots of ways.

And let's not forget how we got on this, it was this holocron business. A plot point found absolutely nowhere in the films. If this plot point was so important to the story, should it not be somewhere in the film?