PT The Romance that Tore the Republic Apart

Ok, so I am new here and about to really go out on a limb

However...

I thought the romance between Anakin and Padme was well played by both actors,

Anakin , having been taken into the Jedi order at age nine had no clue how to be in a romantic relationship. So , of course he looked a bit wooden and ill at ease when around Padme.

How could he be any other way ?

And Padme, perhaps with a bit more experience would still pick up on how awkward and unsure Anakin was making her ill at ease as well.

The first date played out over years instead of hours,

 

I think it was nicely portrayed. Formal and grand where appropriate, and elsewhere scenes like the waterfall picnic and the "are Jedi allowed to love?" transport scene added a low key, naturalistic dynamic to the relationship. Sure, overall it's a very stylized and inescapably genre take on an intimate relationship, but I think it works, especially since I prefer a courtly love tone over the more familiar brand of snarky bicker-flirting you usually see in action SF.

 

Even though ROTS is my favorite film, I did not care for it or for it being part of the reason Anakin fell to the dark side. The majority of fans criticise Hayden's performance but I didn't came away from the film thinking that Natalie Portman did a very good job. I never believed she was in love enough to die of a broken heart. When she "confessed" her love on Geonosis I was just as surprised as Anakin in that scene.

 

The forbidden romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, despite being a good idea, is irreparably damaged in its execution. Putting aside the lack of chemistry between actors Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen (they don’t seem to like one another, let alone be swept along in a torrent of passion neither can control), the dialogue is awful. Not just bad, but embarrassingly bad. George Lucas simply can’t write love scenes and that deficiency hurts Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). Imagine how much more powerful the film could have been had Anakin and Padmé spoken to each other like adults rather than hormonally challenged teenagers reading from a Harlequin romance? The most eye rolling segment of dialogue comes as the couple are about to face death. Padmé starts babbling about how desperately she loves Anakin when there’s no evidence whatsoever to support this claim. Still, the film’s end scene, with the two marrying, is touching and nicely understated…and free of speech.

 

I am in the "Palpitine killed her with Force drain to deprive Vader of any remaining connection to his old life as Anakin Skywalker " camp on this one.

 

You touch on the very heart of my point here. These are 2 people who did not see each other for 10 years and then were tossed into very stressful circumstances when they meet again. Ether of them really knew the other but allowed a first crush to become something way bigger. They had no clue how to talk to each other and I think that was the whole point of the clanky love scenes. They were supposed to be that way.

 

The fact that it was deliberately awful doesn’t magically make it good. It might make Lucas an ***hole for including such a deliberately awful plot element, but it doesn’t make the love story any good.

 

Had the potential to be a powerful and moving story. Both intimate and epic. Perhaps we’ll see that in a future remake.

 

One can only hope, and I think Natalie Portman was an excellent actress for the role of Padme. However, the lines in AOTC were cringe worthy at best.

 

I agree. However, Carrie Fisher made some pretty cringey lines work great in the OT. So I place sone blame on Portman’s inability to make the most of the script, and squeeze some fun out of it. That said, I fault George for her terribly-written role in ROTS. Almost shameful.

 

I've never minded the dialogue in AOTC at all. The odd thing is that Padme goes from a warrior-princess independent woman in TPM/AOTC to a helpless preggo damsel in distress who dies of a broken heart. It's like she completely forgot her own personality between films.

 

So, so bad.

 

She's not a Damsel, nor constantly needing saving from the "hero"(it's sorta the reverse in a way). Her passiveness was throughout the movie, till the last segment where she went out to confront Anakin.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/damsel

 

"A young woman (of noble birth).

A girl; a maiden (without sexual experience).

A young woman who is not married.

An unmarried lady-in-waiting"

The last three are what I found in the search when I looked it up But I guess I didn't look hard enough?

 

Yeah, you didn't. If you click the link I provided to Websters, the leading english dictionary source in the world; the very first definition is: a young woman.

Natalie Portman (at the time) as well as Padme the character, are both by anyone's measure young women.