PT To everyone who thinks no respectable author would have a character "die of a broken heart":

There are two main things about the scene that I view as weaknesses:

1) Padme's line saying "there's still good in him".. IMO.just eliminating that line would make the whole "losing the will to live" thing stronger. I understand why GL probably wanted to include it, but I still think the scene would be better without it.

2) (and this is the "biggie"):

I certainly agree that the scene contradicts Leia's line in that important scene between Luke & Leia in ROTJ, and when I watch that scene (ROTJ), it does bother me in that regard...

But....overall, my appreciation for the whole tragic weight of Padme dying as a direct, immediate result of Anakin's turn overrides my desire for strict consistency between the two trilogies.

I see where only one kenobi is coming from with this point, but even if it was all done for this purpose ...in my view, it was worth it, as that intercut sequence really pays off!

[and btw, Cryogenic: loved reading your posts in this thread! ]

 

It doesn't contradict anything. Dying after a baby being born thirty seconds after still qualifies as young. We don't now what type of force-like ability Leia might have.

 

How long should Padme appear on screen before the audience is entitled to feel that they know her character at least reasonably well? She's a main character in a trilogy of three two hour plus films. If we don't have a fairly good idea by the end of the third one, there would surely be something amiss.

This is not an OT/PT double standard issue. There are flaws with the characters in the OT as well, but they're not relevant here as far as I can see. The only connection this issue has with the OT is that in the OT we see two siblings who show great inner fortitude in the face of massive adversity. All I'm saying is that I would like to have seen similar from at least one of those characters' parents. I would have enjoyed that. Others not. Fair enough.

It's also not about an Anakin / Padme double standard. Anakin's turn was known of before the PT and signaled throughout it. It was always coming. Padme's demise wasn't. I think it's legitimate to respond differently in light of that fact.

 

I know what you're saying, Anakinsfan. As a matter of taste, I almost always hate it when characters bicker -- Leia, Han, and Luke in ANH; Obi and Anakin in ATOC; Uhura and Spock in Into Darkness; the Avengers in um... The Avengers. That's just me. I find it annoying. Some people may find it fun to watch. I don't know. It's certainly used a lot in character development. If passive female characters or passive character in general aren't your thing, then I certainly get where you're coming from.

Where I think I disagree with you is the idea that characters need to be examples for young people in this day and age. Characters serve the narratives that they are in. Not everyone is strong, and succumbing to a fairytale-like version of depression when your whole life is wrecked (evil husband, democracy destroyed, you helped cause your husband's death or close to it, presumably having to give up your children) isn't even necessarily a sign of weakness. Strong people succumb to depression all the time. Lincoln suffered major bouts that left him bedridden.

I agree that it was ridiculous that women for so long were only damsels in distress, but that's not how it is in cinema anymore. There are tons of strong women -- Catniss, Hermoine, the DKR's version of Catwoman, Lois Lane in "Man of Steel," Lara Croft, Scarlett Johannson in The Avengers, Buffy, Ripley, etc., etc. However, not everyone has to be strong. There are meek people in reality too. In fact, most people are probably meek, and really there's nothing wrong with being meek. And actually, I don't even think Padme's losing the will to live is a sign of weakness or that she is weak. It's a very understandable reaction to what's happened to her. I don't look down upon her. I sympathize with her. I also don't think of it as fictionalized version of post-partum depression. I think what it resembles is the kind of depression you experience when your whole life is destroyed.

And I don't think it's problematic the way Padme loses her will to live given that it takes place in the fairy tale world of Star Wars. If people want a realistic depiction of depression, I'd suggest to them to go stream "Melancholia" from Amazon. I don't think that gruesomely realistic depiction of depression would suit the ending ROTS too well. So, in this case, I think the fairytale version of depression actually works better.

 

My point is not that we don't know her reasonably well. My point is that you don't know her well enough to say, "A strong person like her would never lose the will to live as she does." I'm saying we do know her character. What I'm not saying is that we know her so well that we can perfectly predict her behavior or how she would respond to new circumstances that we haven't seen her experience yet.

I would also say that Vader switching from evil to good and Padme switching from strong to hopeless seem pretty parallel to me. They are both big character shifts, but the first is praised and the second is criticized.

(BTW, Cryogenic, I love your posts too. I'd love to get high and read your old posts about Jar Jar sometime. They were a trip! They were like post-modern stream-of-consciousness poetry.)

 

, but the first is praised and the second is criticized.
--------------------------

and so it should, going from strong to weak shouldn't be praised.

Especially from a very strong female lead, it's not the right message to get across, regardless if it's borrowing mythological themes or not.

 

I hear what you're saying ladnar and fair enough, but Anakin is portrayed as having good within him throughout. He's a good kid, a good friend, there's good in him etc. So returning to some kind of good, while an extreme character turn I agree, isn't completely unexpected. I'm not sure the same can be said of Padme's transformation.

 

I certainly get where anakinfan is coming from (I'm also an "original generation" SW fan who saw the original release of ANH in theaters at age 7). Leia was certainly a great departure from the centuries-old "damsel in distress" female character. But I think there's still things girls today can admire about Padme's character--there's more to her than just what ended up destroying her (though it could certainly be argued that the more "traditional" type of female character she was in ROTS overshadowed the other parts of her character presented in the other two films). As a woman, of course I would love to see a broader range of female characters depicted in all sorts of films (not just SW), and I do think Padme's character is greatly reduced in scope in ROTS with the emphasis mainly on her vulnerability and ultimately her destruction. (And of course the deletion of the ROTS scenes related to the Delegation of 2000 etc, obviously only further contributed to the reduction of Padme's role.) However, I think it can get tricky if filmmakers approached every female character from the stance of thinking "what would be the best role model for young girls?" What would make for the best role model might not necessarily best serve the overall story being told.

It's actually sort of weird, because even though I have always completely LOVED the fact that Leia was most decidely NOT the "damsel in distress" figure (I loved her character in all three OT films), I am really only interested in and compelled by Padme's character in her last few scenes of ROTS. I love the _idea_ of Padme as a strong political leader in TPM and AOTC, but the execution of her character was (to me) so weak in those films (bad dialogue/wooden acting) that I never find myself really drawn to her as a character. It's only in her closing ROTS scenes that Padme's character moves me at all. The fact that she is reduced to crying and pleading with Anakin on Mustafar may not make her a good "role model" in the way anakinfan means, but in that scene in particular, Portman's performance really sold that moment to me. To feel despair is one part of the larger human experience, and I always find Padme's complete despair in that scene to be quite moving and to fit in quite well with the strongly tragic tone of ROTS as a whole. So, even though her storyline in ROTS does fall into the "damsel in distress" category, for me it was one of the strongest elements in ROTS.

Edit:

Ditto!

 

We are talking about a character who falls for him after she learns of his rampage on a village. Nothing these characters do is logical.

 

I've never heard of a force super memory ability enabling an infant to remember her own birth. Why doesn't Luke remember Padme through the force? I really dislike when the force is used as a catch-all excuse to fill plot-holes. It is just the epitome of laziness.

 

And in fairness, I do agree that she had already begun falling for him at that point.

 

I get what you mean...it's interesting...there are as many different reactions to SW as there are SW fans!

I have to admit, that would be interesting to see...

 

I'm actually taking a pretty strong position on this only because many people here seem to be saying it is simply unbelievable that Padme could give in to hopeless as she does, and I simply don't think that interpretation is correct. My view of the scene overall, however, is actually a little more nuanced. I don't think the scene is done perfectly, but I was simply making the argument that what happened is possible, not that the scene is perfect.

The biggest fault I find with the scene is that it happens too fast. I do think depression can hit the strongest of people, so I don't think it's out of character, and there are tons of reasons for Padme for giving up hope: her husband is evil; the democracy has fallen into tyranny; her husband is either dead or severely wounded and it's partially her fault because Obi followed her there; she won't be able to live with her children b/c Anakin would hunt her down if she survived.

However, the problem with the scene lies with the old adage: "Show me, don't tell me." Of these 4 reasons, only 2 of them are explicitly given to us onscreen as something Padme has experienced: Anakin turning evil & the fall of democracy. The 2nd two aren't explored in the films. We simply have to figure those out ourselves, and having your kids taken away from you is pretty major. So, while I think Padme's losing all hope (the will to live) makes sense, we have to fill in some of the blanks ourselves. Explaining this may have taken too much screen time or it may not have fit the mostly montage style of the end of ROTS or it may have made intercutting with Anakin's rebirth of Vader (which works well) impossible, so I don't know if it is fixable, but I do think fault can be found with the scene's execution.

On the other hand, I think the way Vader's turn to good is executed is exceptional. While I don't think awful guys like Saddam or Stalin would ever turn "good" in the end, I do think some of these guys might risk their lives for their kids. So, that part is very believable, and then, it's sort of snuck in that Vader has completely turned good. Luke says, "There's still good in him." And after Vader has sacrificed himself, he tells his son, "You were right, Luke. Tell your sister, you were right." At this point, Vader's turn to good is more about a father's regaining his love for his children, and the stuff about him totally rejecting evil is left in the background and kind of just implied. In this way, the film sort of just slips in the idea that he's rejected evil behind the drama of him showing love for his children. The two are implied to go hand in hand, but really, they aren't. There are people who really love their children who still do awful even "evil" things. "The Godfather" and other gangster films are filled with people like this. So, I think ROTJ really does a great job of executing this extreme character shift in Vader which might not be completely believable in real life. On the other hand, the execution of Padme's shift in character is not done as well, even though after all she's lost might really merit her losing all hope.

I also think the idea of a crappy father finally showing love to his kid is very powerful too. Lots of people have bad or distant relationships with their dads. I know I did, so there's something very deep in us that wants Vader, the father, to show Luke, the son, that he really loves him. I don't think that's how it usually turns out in real life, but I think we have a deep-seated desire to believe that it can happen. I think that's why so many people love "Field of Dreams." On the other hand, people don't have any deep-seated hope that people can die by losing the will to live.

 

I have to admit I would have laughed and cheered if Padme struck a kung fu stance and Force pushed Anakin into the lava to some techno dance theme.

My thoughts after the credits roll? That was a good movie. A good movie with a good ending.

 

See, anakinfan, I like the way things play out in ROTS precisely because it's a wonderful subversion of a lot of common narrative tropes while also making some pretty good points. Padmé dies precisely because Anakin treats her as a damsel in distress -- one that he has to save at all costs. And it is the fact that he persists in this mindset that eventually destroys her. The film also address the problem of coupling love with obsession and the fact that Padmé and especially Anakin had a ton of issues going into the relationship that were never addressed or resolved. If anything, it perfectly illustrates the problem with the "good girls love bad boys" idea in that, yeah, Anakin does have a lot of the qualities of the typical bad boy: being troubled but cute, a sad past, and being protective while being vulnerable enough to redeem. And yet, Padmé is unable to "save him from himself" because his issues go deeper than that and she can't help him on her own.

Padmé's biggest problem has always been that she's so entirely devoted to institutions (the Republic), to people (Anakin), and to her plans that she is unable to adapt when everything she has invested in falls apart. Nor do I think that Padmé is really meant to be a role model, necessarily. She's a good person but she indadvertedly contributed to the destruction of the Republic. I would say that by the end of the film, we're not really meant to look up to her, but to lament that things turned out as they did.

In large part, I think Luke and Leia are more representative of the ideals we should strive towards while Anakin and Padmé are more reflective of human frailty.

 

I have to respectfully disagree as there is proof that Lucas didn't write it that way back in 1983. If you read 'Star Wars The Annotated Screenplays.' Lucas and Kasdan talked about this plot point when writing ROTJ (paraphrasing): After Anakin turns to the dark side, Obiwan and Yoda decides its best to split up the twins to avoid 2 force sensitive children being tracked down by Vader/Emperor. So Obiwan takes Luke to Owen on Tatooine and he will keep an eye on him at a distance. Padme takes Leia to a remote planet and live together until Padme dies a few years later from some disease. Obiwan then takes Leia to his friend Bail Organa on Alderran, who then adopts her.

That is my point of why ROTS contradicts ROTJ, because there is proof it was written that Padme dies when Leia was probably 3-4 years old, and like most people that age you don't have many memories, just images. I know I can honestly say I can't remember anything specific in my life until I was 5-6 years old, but do have some vague visions of being a very small child. That is why it's a shame that Lucas had to contradict Luke/Leia's conversation on Endor about their mom, just so he could show her death in ROTS. Whatever way you want to spin it with the 'force' theory about images, the bottom line is there is a paper trail to how Lucas wrote this plot point in 1983.

 

I'll agree with you on this, but not in this case. I'm OK with Leia remembering Padme, although Lucas could have given her more screentime with Padme at the end of ROTS.
But I do dislike the concept of the Force to fill some plot-holes. Like Use the Force, Luke, and then he blows up the DS. Or taking for granted I'm your father line just on searching your feelings.

 

Somehow Leia knew, and that's always been good enough for me. And not just good enough, but potent, poignant, mysterious. And then Luke's even more mysterious "I have no memory of my mother". Somehow clouded purposely in the Force. Add to that the amazing twins' theme and I'm a mush of geek emotions.

 

I recognize that Padmé's death was originally conceived differently back in 1983 but, well, this argument has always felt a bit...not disingenuous, but kind of fallacious (to me at least). What I mean is, there are tons of things in the OT that a retconned and changed from the original idea. And yet, no one argues that it is contradictory. For example, in ROTJ, when Leia was made "the Other" it directly contradicted what Yoda said in ESB -- when Luke left to rescue Han and Leia, Yoda said there was another hope, but obviously it can't be Leia since she's already in Vader's clutches. Or take the revelation that Vader is Luke's father which brings up a whole host of problems.

Point being, just because Lucas wrote something in a draft and then subsequently altered it in the final product doesn't make the original scenario more legitimate. Writers revise their stories all the time. And sure, you might like some revisions more than others -- but that doesn't make them more legitimate.

Plus, it's not uncommon in fantasy settings to have children remember things they couldn't possibly. One of the most popular examples is of Harry Potter. Even though he was only one year old (well, one year and three months), he still remembers the green flash of light, a burning pain in his forehead, and Voldemort's high, cold cruel laugh from the night his parents died. And that's equally as impossible in our world as Leia's memories of her mother.

 

But alot of OT fans like do call out the contradictions in the OT story. I always hated that Leia said after learning she and Luke were siblings, "Somehow....I always knew." You kissed your brother on Hoth, yet you didn't know then???? Or Obiwan's 'POV' speech to Luke on Dagobah.

The difference is OT fans (or most OT fans I know) don't defend the contradictions like many PT fans do, or come up with these outrageous theories to connect point A & point B. I enjoy all 6 movies, but I have always said that the movies started to contradict each other in ESB, and it has just grown with each successive movie. Now who knows how we will see the movies once the ST is here and I'm sure there willl be a bunch of contradictions too.

That is just the way Lucas has written the movies, as he has forgone what was on screen in the previous movie to make work for the current movie he is writing. I agree that having Padme die on screen makes ROTS better, but that was at the expense of contradicting ROTJ. I agree that having Leia being the motivation that set off Luke to the darkside makes ROTJ better, but its at the expense of ESB & ANH. It is what it is, and I wish people would stop trying to justify it with this crazy theories and just accept that there are alot of contradictions when you look at the 6 movies through a big lens.

 

It would of made a lot more sense if she died giving birth to Leia and Luke just like Anakin had visioned in ROTS.