PT Did Lucas go too far in Revenge of the Sith?

Yep, fair enough.

And I definitely take your point about the disparity between the expectations set up by Obi-Wan's memories of Anakin in the OT and what PT Anakin comes across as to the audience. Personally though, with the passage of almost a decade since the PT was completed, I've found myself feeling more and more sympathetic towards Anakin. I think it's because I'm a little older now and I don't see him as a "peer" any more (in the sense of a person I morally judge from "the same level" in life experience), but I'm looking at him sort of more through AotC Obi-Wan's eyes, if that makes any sense. So while I still see the petty ugliness of certain traits he has (the pettiness/childishness is what makes them dislikeable, IMO --- Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon have serious flaws as well, but they're not so dislikeable because they still come across as acting age-appropriately), I'm gradually developing some affection for him, in a "he's a good kid and I wish he wouldn't be stupid" way, rather than "that's someone I'd be proud to call a friend" way.

Certainly, the rather uneven way that George chose to tell Anakin's story means it's difficult to take it straight-on. I find it hard to feel for him without Obi-Wan's perspective as an intermediary. The tragedy shifts slightly from Obi-Wan's (as opposed to the "authorial"/"third-person") point of view, but it definitely becomes more compelling.

 

That was kind of the whole point of episode 3 imo.

 

Did Anakin go too fart?

 

I actually think the darkest element in any of the films isn't in ROTS or in ESB.

In AOTC when Anakin finds his mother still barely alive, it begs the question why the Tuskens kept her alive for several weeks, and considering the way she was tied up, the implications are deeply disturbing.

 

The novel says they'd been beating her - because that's the way they test their captured enemies:

AoTC novel pages 264 to 265:
It was more than a desire to inflict pain, Shmi realised, though she didn't speak their croaking language. This was the Tusken way of measuring their enemies, and from the nods and the tone of their voices, she realized that her resilience had impressed them.

They didn't know that her resilience was wrought of a mother's love. Without the memories of Annie and the hope that he would feel her love for him, she would surely have given up long ago and allowed herself to die.

 

Regardless of what canon says, I think there are even darker allusions there.

 

Sometimes I like to parody the thread titles. Mainly due to the fact that EHT won't let me make parody threads anymore.

 

So everyone is fine with Anakin killing Tusken kids but when it's Jedi kids, somehow it's 'too far'?

 

To play Devil's Advocate a little, it's easier to kill when 'they' are just this obscure face of the enemy. If a Tusken child came up to the camera trembling and sniffling, clutching a little Bantha doll in his/her arms, we'd probably wouldn't be so quick to say 'yeah, it's OK that he murdered Tusken women and children.'

That said, maybe Lucas should do that in the re-release of the Prequels to further drive home how really wrong this was supposed to be.

 

A Sith killing Jedi younglings went to far? I don't think so. He Force killed them without spilling any blood. The idea was that he was now completely evil. But we know he actually wasn't. lol

Meanwhile, the Tusken kids and women wasn't good, but there is the eye for an eye thing - and they killed his mother who was a woman - so okay, an eye for many eyes, but yeah, he was crazed over that.

All in all, the movie did it okay with no blood spilled for the Jedi kids and no sight of the Tuskens.

 

I was going to post a rant about about how that's just a failure of imagination on the part of the audience, and how that's symptom of a storytelling paradigm where we need every moral judgment spoon-fed to us. But then the post above me exemplified it better than I could ever say

 

This means that the actor who played Anakin was so good, that some really despise him as the character.

 

Anakin killing younglings was just dumb. I wasn't offended but it just seems totally random that not only does anakin just switch to the Sith but the first thing he inks to do with his new dark side powers is go kill some kids. Like how about finding a cure for your wife or keeling with actual threats?

 

"Leave no living thing behind. Only then, will you be strong enough with the Dark Side of the Force to save Padme."

 

Indeed. This was a final test to see if Anakin had what it took to be a Sith Lord. If he kills without mercy, without remorse and without hesitation, then he will be able to be Palpatine's Apprentice. Once he has killed the kids, Anakin feels stronger by his actions as we see in the holo security footage. It also has to do with eliminating all threats to both the Sith and to the Empire.

 

"If you drink all of Obi-Wan's beer, then you will be complete in training for the dark side."

 

Well, IMHO you just cannot compare Anakin k. the younglings in ROTS to his eliminating the Tusken camp in AOTC:

- In AOTC, though you were supposed to feel that he went overboard, you could kind of see this because of his state of mind (i.e., the Tuskens had captured, tortured & k. his mother); IMHO it was somewhat understandable, considering the circumstances & who the Tuskens were. Note that the Tuskens have always been depicted as violent & unpredictable in the Saga; in ANH, they attacked Luke for no reason; they also took pot-shots at the pod-racers in TPM. And, in AOTC they captured Schmi for no reason other than that they wanted to torture her. In other words, they're depicted as being purely evil in the films. In AOTC, Owen referred to them as "animals", and I don't think anyone was shedding a tear over them. I get the strong impression that most of those who lived on Tattoine wouldn't have minded if all of the Tuskens had been eliminated from the planet.

-Conversely, in ROTS the younglings were pure & innocent. Anakin taking them out was truly evil, immoral, and unconsionable. IMHO Lucas put this in the films to show how far gone Anakin was at that point...

 

I agree with your final point, Blur but disagree with everything else. Just because a people is percieved in one light doesn't excuse an individual particularly one presented as supposedly trained in morality to strip them of their basic rights as fellow sapients. Just because one has wronged Anakin does not justify his slaughter of the Tuskens. Neither slaughter is sound.

 

Well, we can agree to disagree then. Unlike the scene in ROTS, I didn't feel a sense of deep moral outrage when Anakin attacked the Tuskens in AOTC, especially since he did it right after his mother died in his arms (because of what they did to her) . Obviously a lot of what happened was because Anakin felt guilty for leaving his mother in the first place; I'm sure he felt that if he had been there, he could have saved her. Note that I don't think Padme disagreed too much with Anakin's actions at that point; after all, she married him not long after...

That being said, I do agree that this event in AOTC was Anakin's first step towards the dark side, though I also believe he could have stopped himself from going further - if he hadn't listened to Palpatine in ROTS, that is...

 

I don't expect many do, Blur. However, personally, I see both acts as equally wrong. Justifications aren't sound to me.

Perhaps so but it was his decision to listen and cupitulate. Anakin bears a lot of responsibilities for his own poor actions. It isn't all on Sidious. The same for Tarkin. They both could've objected to their over seer/master's direction and did not. A great shame.

 

Personally, I don't think there's a moral difference between his killing of the Tusken children and his killing of the Jedi children. Both are equally wrong.

But. There is a difference, even if it isn't an ethical one. There's a difference in Anakin's state of mind, so the two events say different things about his character. Anakin's murder of the Tuskens wasn't more okay because they killed his mother, but you could see that he was crazed with grief when he did it. It wasn't premeditated. And afterward, he seemed horrified/ashamed by his own actions even as he tried to justify them to Padme ("I'm a Jedi. I know I I'm better than this"). To me, that scene says that Anakin is unstable.

His killing of the Jedi children is a completely different story. Not because the Tuskens deserved it and the Jedi younglings didn't, but because Anakin killed them in cold blood. He made a calculated decision to do so rather than being overcome by his rage and grief as in AotC. So he did go a lot farther in RotS than AotC.

That said, I still don't think that scene was too far. Lucas needed to show how much of a corrupting influence the dark side had on him. After all, given what he did in AotC while merely unstable, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a viewer to wonder what specifically about the dark side was so terrible, why Yoda just automatically pronounced him lost. Killing the younglings in cold blood shows that Anakin isn't just making bad decisions anymore - he's changed in a fundamental way. The killing-younglings scene, along with his somewhat gleeful attitude on Mustafar as he tries to convince Padme to rule the galaxy with him and his subsequent attacking of her, fulfill that purpose.

 

The Tuskens kidnapped a woman and tortured her to death, while it's certainly not the Jedi way, their deaths were more than warranted. In a situation like that any state with the death penalty would dish it out for such a crime.

He "Force killed them"? Wasn't Yoda's first clue that it was Anakin a lightsaber wound in one of hte padawans?

 

Doesn't mean everyone agrees with such stances is all I'm saying TSC. That's all I'm saying.