PT Did the scene of Anakin killing younglings affect your perception of him?

I would’ve just had him quietly sneak the kids out with a firm warning to never again return to the Temple.

 

Yeah that would have worked for me too

 

Then he's not Darth Vader. He's just Anakin Skywalker pretending to be Darth Vader. Killing the kids shows how far he's gone to the dark side. How committed he is to it. It's not enough to try and kill his own kid, but to kill others that are kids, that's evil.

Except he is evil.

"The thing with the kids is necessary to establish how far down the road he’d come (Anakin) to do something that, this brutal and barbaric and it had to be in there but I definitely didn’t want to show it. It was really in the editorial process that the idea of inter-cutting her (Padme) with him when he’s at his very worst with her worrying about him. That juxtaposition works quite well cause it reflects as much on the slaughter of the children as it does on her concerns about him even though she doesn’t know the children have been slaughtered. There is a strong emotional connection when those sequences are pushed up against each other."

--George Lucas, ROTS DVD Commentary.

"There's always this good in you. And the good part is saying 'what am I doing?'. Then the bad part kicks in and says 'I'm doing this for Padme, I'm doing this for the galaxy and so we can have a better life'. But the good part is always saying 'WHAT AM I DOING?!"

--George Lucas to Hayden Christensen, Hyperspace webdoc.

"This is the first time he actually has a chance to think about what it is that’s happened by himself and the tear here shows that he knows what he’s done but he’s not committed himself a path that he may not agree with but he is going to go along anyway.

It’s the one moment that says he’s self aware. He's rationalizing all his behavior. He’s doing terrible things. But in the end he really knows the truth. He knows that he’s evil now and there’s nothing he can do about it and that’s the moment where the pathos of him being stuck in that suit is real because if he had to do it over he probably wouldn’t do it, but he can't stop it now.

You know where it's going to lead. He knows it will end with a fight with Obi Wan. He knows that Padme not buy into this new reality. He made a pact with the devil and now he’s become the devil.

The sad thing is Padme says there is still good in him and Luke says in ROTJ there is good in you. It's recurring. There is good in him. And that will bring balance to the force. He needs to get rid of the Sith and bring balance to the Force."

--George Lucas, ROTS DVD Commentary.

He's evil, but he's not so far gone yet. But it's getting to be more difficult to turn back.

 

I agree killing children is a good way to show he had become the absolute worst kind evil one can become. I just think the timing was wrong

I doubt any person would be able to kill THAT many children so soon after his conversion UNLESS that person had already been contemplating such an act for a long time.

A person simply can't flip a switch from that good to THAT bad, even if the devil himself has been whispering in your ear how awesome you are and your peers are *******s.

I'm not arguing the fact that Vader isn't evil enough to kill a child. He is
Just not THAT soon, and not that coldly

I would have shown a little more hesitation, because at that point he is still somewhat Anakin. Anakin died when Padme died and his body got replaced by an iron suit

 

I honestly don't think Anakin had been walking around for weeks or months thinking it'd be a swell bit of fun to kill some younglings. I am not excusing what he did but it's not what the film portrayed about him if you are accusing him of or assigning him the action of premeditation.

You don't see any of it actually taking place but I can imagine he was probably just as emotionally conflicted about it as he was when he was crying out during the killing of the Separatists on Mustafar. There are some well placed shots showcasing the agony of his conscience in his face during that entire sequence.

 

Anakin had already chopped up little kids with a lightsaber in the previous film.

 

Very true, yet the difference I think lies in that not only were these children of very animalistic, very savage minded creatures who torture just the heck of it, plus had just witnissed his own mother suffered an agonizing end because of said creatures. Plus he did it in a blind rage mode.

Whereas the Jedi kids were both harmless, innocent, were under for his protection and he did it coldly and calculated

Him having a emotional breakdown in 2 was very realisitic imo. Him going from heroic Jedi knight who placed his value on justice and rule of law to the butcher of a dozen children, in less than an hour I found very unrealistic

Like I said, I don't have a huge issue with Vader being so evil he kills kids.
I think it's sort of mandated when you're a Lord of the Sith l, just not so soon into his carreer.

The Lord Vader trapped into his torture suit, who had lost litteraly everything he fought and cared for.. that's the kind of Vader I can see just not giving a **** when his emperor orders him such.

But Vader who had just been Anakin 5 minutes ago just doesn't entirely sit well with me.
It's kind of hard to imagine he still had 'some good in him' if the single promise of an obviously evil person makes him flip a switch THAT calously.

So yeah, I would have shown some hesitation in his earliest crimes as Darth Vader, where his goals were just to save his wife and child, either ordering his underlings to do the things he couldn't yet do himself or in great disgust and self-loathing.

Because all I saw on his face when he turned his lightsaber was anger and detiremination, not 'What the heck am I going to do now?'

 

I have to agree. If you’re able to murder a whole bunch of kids despite being a Jedi half an hour ago, that doesn’t speak well to your character at all. Indeed, it suggests that if given the option, you’d gladly slaughter anyone, even kids.

 

The Tuskens are a tribal culture of an intelligent species in both Legends and canon. Just because Anakin - an outsider with a personal grudge - calls them animals while he's screaming about why he just had to cut up their children doesn't mean he's to be taken as an authority on Tuskens.

Some Native American tribes used to engage in acts of torture that make the Tuskens look incredibly tame, and it's still not appropriate to describe those cultures as "animalistic" or "savage minded" either, or for the settlers to have massacred them.

Cultures of intelligent beings are not "animalistic" and it's not more understandable or acceptable to kill their kids just because they do things - even very terrible things - that others don't like.

I agree. In fact it seems to be a pretty consistent part of Anakin's character even pre-"fall" that he'll actually do all kinds of awful stuff even in the time when he's supposedly some great person - he just shies away from actually owning up to the crap he does and accepting the consequences, so people don't know what he's really like. And then he has the nerve to throw a tantrum when the Council doesn't promote him to Master rank, despite knowing full well he's only even in the room because of nepotism and that he deserves the title even less than they think.

I can see why some people in-universe who didn't know any better thought Anakin was some good-hearted hero during this time period, but honestly, I can't buy it as something we're supposed to accept as objective fact when he's shown as committing atrocities from the time he's a padawan, and then during TCW happily Force chokes prisoners, etc. He just lies about it, and makes sure no one's looking, or at least no one who might tell. (And honestly it's not a great look for Padme either, who knew what he was and still didn't speak up even when the Jedi gave him a padawan. I've never been able to enjoy any sort of friendship scenes between him and Ahsoka, really; I just feel vague horror.)

I said very early on in this thread that prequel era Anakin is a solid (if not always solidly-written) character, but also one who is so incredibly ugly in uncomfortably real-world-evil ways that it almost doesn't fit with the "safe"/unreal/fun cartoon villainy of OT-era Vader, whose redemption is easier to buy precisely because he's a fun walking cartoon villain - and not a child-butchering space wizard equivalent of a violent, entitled mass shooter who thinks everyone is denying him what he deserves because they're jealous, and then chokes out his wife when he thinks she might leave him. And that's pretty much how I still feel about the character.

Really at this point the only way I can really reconcile Anakin Skywalker with the redemption of Vader is not "oh he used to be such a good person" but "he knew right from wrong and chose to do wrong anyway, because it was easier and he wanted to, until he finally hit the absolute rock bottom and decided to get his act together which was a decision no one else could make for him." Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's ghost in From a Certain Point of View end up agreeing on pretty much the same idea, so I'm hopeful canon's going to continue going in that direction. "Anakin used to be such a pure and good and heroic person" may have worked when all we had was the OT but it just doesn't work now except as something Obi-Wan really wanted to believe.

 

"I have what I call two sharp "right turns" in the movie and they are very hard to deal with. For the audience, it's a real jerk, because you're going along and then somebody yanks you in a different direction. Anakin turning to the dark side and killing Mace is a very hard right, because we're dealing with things that aren't so obvious. The audience knows Anakin is going to turn to the dark side, but the things that he's struggling with are so subtle that it may be hard for people to understand why his obsession to hold onto Padme is so strong.

Showing how much Anakin and Padme care for each other is one of my weak points. Expressing that is hard to do. It's really hard in the end to express the idea, I'm so in love with you that I would do anything to save you; I'd give up everything -friends, my whole life- for you, and make that real-make that stick-and say it in two minutes. When I created it I knew I wanted two hard right turns-it's designed to be that way-and I knew I was taking a real chance that it wasn't going to work. But you have to see if you can make it work. If it doesn't work, well then I'm going to get skewered for it. But if I can make it work, it'll be neat. It'll be good."

--George Lucas, The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith.

"This is obviously a very pivotal scene for Anakin because this is reuniting with his mother and his youth and at the same time dealing with his inability to let go of his emotions and allow himself to accept the inevitable. The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that he can't hold onto things which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn't willing to accept emotionally and the reason that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he'd have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn't have this particular connection as strong as it is and he'd have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them. But he has become attached to his mother and he will become attached to Padme and these things are, for a Jedi, who needs to have a clear mind and not be influenced by threats to their attachments, a dangerous situation. And it feeds into fear of losing things, which feeds into greed, wanting to keep things, wanting to keep his possessions and things that he should be letting go of. His fear of losing her turns to anger at losing her, which ultimately turns to revenge in wiping out the village. The scene with the Tusken Raiders is the first scene that ultimately takes him on the road to the dark side. I mean he's been prepping for this, but that's the one where he's sort of doing something that is completely inappropriate."

--George Lucas, AOTC DVD Commentary.

He gladly slaughters the Jedi, including the Younglings, because he has made a choice. It's either them, or her and in the end, he will choose Padme because he believes that his whole existence is dependent on her being there. It doesn't mean that Anakin was a monster in the strictest sense that he was waiting for permission, but rather a messed up kid who had all this power and didn't know how to properly wield it. That's why Ben falls so easily as well. What holds people back like Luke, was realizing the line was becoming blurred and was too easy to cross. That doesn't mean that Anakin couldn't stop himself, but that he didn't want to stop. Luke did.

That's why it was saved for before the suit. So that you could see that he is becoming the cold and calculated person that he is when in the suit. The suit was just a reflection of what had become. The man underneath was what was there. He's not in conflict in the Temple, or in the conference room on Mustafar. His conflict is afterwards with the single tear.



That's the part that Lucas was referring to in the commentary and to Hayden on set. The part of him that knows that he is evil, but also he hates what he has become.

 

Great point. I'm always impressed by Lucas during those interviews, he often says the things I think could have better handled in his movies. You know the guy has a vision for his story.

In the end I see the creative merrit in Anakin transitioning into the cold Cyborg. To me it's just all about the timing and the uncertainty of Palpatine's promise.
I mean even if were to forget Sidious basically alluded to him very very strongly to have been the apprentice who killed Plagueis and "got taught everything he knew" and even outright yells he " has the power to save the one he loved " he went on to reveal it has yet to be discovered BEFORE Anakin went on a killing spree

So not only did Palps reveal he had been lying to him ( not a shock to us, but should have been to Anakin ) he also is unable to guarentee him holding up his side of the bargain

So yeah Anakin went on to kill friends, his masters, all the little children because then 'maybe' he'll get immortal Sith powers from the guy he lies, cheats and deceits. It either shows how little he valued the lives of actual human beings over the promise of some vague obscured power, or was just incredibly naive to point of childish stupidity. Me as an 8 year old figured out Palpatine was not to be trusted on his word. Anakin was a bleepin' adult.

It's mostly the child killing part that bothers me about pre-Suit Vader. I can see how he felt justified in rage killing the monsters who tortured his helpless mother to death.
I can see how he felt justified in killing the Seperatist as they were litteraly war criminals. I'm sure many if not most soldiers IRL would feel justified to kill all the leaders of a terrorist organisation when they're stuck in one room

I can even see how he went after Obi Wan in blind rage when he helped Padme to see what kind of monster Anakin was

Because this was Pre-Suited Darth Vader, hot tempered, reckless and had no hold on his anger.
Killing 10 children in a wild rage is horrible enough act as it would be, but in cold blood? That's just a straight up mental evil, and because he hadn't even gone through the drama of his operation and the loss of everything he loved and fought for I see no justifible reason for Anakin to become THAT evil just yet.

Unless off course he was always that way and now he could finnaly act up on it. Which doesn't do favors of the 'good man that was Anakin Skywalker' who 'still had good in him'

 

Palpatine never indicated that he was the student of Plagueis. He just said that Plagueis taught his student and then his student killed him. Palpatine only claims that his master, who is unnamed, taught him everything about the Force and the dark side. Palpatine was careful to not implicate himself and Anakin believes that Palpatine wasn't taught this knowledge, but his overall knowledge of the Force and of the dark side, gives him a leg up. When he tells Anakin to use his knowledge, he's talking about the dark side. Not the power to cheat death. He is making it clear that he is the only one who can teach him to use the dark side, since Dooku is dead and Maul is missing and the Jedi will never teach him something that they consider to be forbidden. He is his only hope. That's why we hear Palpatine's voice in the Council chambers saying that if he dies, she dies.

It just means that like everyone else who falls to the dark side, Anakin makes a straightforward choice to do evil. That's why it was important for Palpatine to send Anakin out to kill his enemies. It is a test to see if he truly has the guts to do this. If he backs down one iota, he will be a failure. This is part of Vader who causally chokes people without a second thought and will do so with controlled anger. The only time Anakin felt as if he was given permission was when he cut loose on Dooku and then finished him off.

 

Oh I agree that killing children is bad no matter how you look at it, because while a child isn't necesarily 'good' by default, they're unable to fully understand the consequences of good and evil, and they learn that as they mature and with proper treatment can be course-corrected.

But atleast with Anakin killing the Tusken children I understood his reasoning behind it, messed up as it is. It made sense to me that a 17 year old hot tempered teen with magic powers completly lost it after witnissing his mother like that. And to be honest, if I had found my mother in similar state I can easily say the one responsible.. well, we'll leave that ambigious

I do think I can call Tusken Raiders savages though and with respect to you I do not care what any Legends/Canon book has to say about that. Like that saying 'if it quacks like a duck..'

Litteraly all we see them do in ANH, TPM and AOTC is trying to kill and plunder while screaming like wild animals. I have not seen a single thing about their culture that tells me they're an intelligent species, not from how they act, how they dress or how they live or communicate ect. but mostly because the only thing we learn is that they like to turture people to death.

There are people doing this still today, in countries were speak fluid languages and are able to work with technology and I have absolutely no problem calling those savage and animalistic as well.

But Anakin going a merciless killing spree on a dozen children, who are being learned the ways of peace and justice, affraid and looking for protection

I do not get that reasoning unless Anakin has SEVERE mental issues. And I mean severe.

 

I dunno, if I ever find myself falling to the Dark Side, I’m pretty sure even the most vindictive, spiteful, mean-spirited, passive-aggressive version of myself would be absolutely horrified at the idea of murdering children. Sure, crush their hopes and dreams. Ruin their Christmas, but kill them?

How can we take a man who just turned to the Dark Side just five minutes earlier, have him kill children, and say that there still some good in him. This isn’t Vader 20 years later. This is Vader when he literally just turned less than an hour ago.

It would be akin to someone joining a gang and when they say, “Take this gun and slaughter this entire family for their money” you go on ahead and do it... How does one justify that by anything other than ‘the person wanted to do it all along, but now they’re being given permission to do it.’

 

I just have to say, im not sure why this bothers people so much. Please keep in mind, him being redeemed didn't mean he magically got Padme back, regained his limbs, lost his burn scars, had his lungs restored to full functionality, or got to live with his son and daughter happily ever after. Keep in mind, he DIED minutes later, and Im sure he wasn't even forgiven or eulogized by the rebels. If he had some how been able to live I really don't think Luke could have stopped him from being at least jailed for the rest of his life, and Im really not even sure he could have prevented him from being executed. All he got was about a minute to speak to the son he never knew face to face, and granted, that moment gave him the catharsis he was looking for ever since he left his mother on Tatooine, but other than that, he got nothing else for being redeemed.

 

Bloodline spends time in Leia's head regarding Anakin. She has not forgiven him but understands that Luke did. The book also is very clear that the galaxy at large has not "redeemed" or "forgiven" him because as soon as Leia is outed as his biological daughter, the Senate is pushing her to leave. They rescind a nomination to make her their head because they fear she will try to take power. They didn't care that she and Luke had spent 30 something years fighting for the end of the Empire.

 

Because he literally goes from being a Jedi to a kid-killer in five minutes. We’re told how great Anakin once was, how noble and just he was and the film shows us a man coldly deciding to slaughter Younglings. What’s worse is that he’s doing all this despite knowing Palpatine flat out lied to him.

I get that he’s evil and all but he’s literally just been a Jedi five minutes ago. You just don’t go from being a good person to suddenly murdering kids in less than an hour unless you were really messed up mentally. It’d be like me writing a story where I spent most of it telling the readers what a great person this character is and suddenly he/she is stabbing an old lady to death without any warning or buildup to that moment.

 

Well, yes, what Lucas is suggesting through these films is that even the best and most noble of us contain the capacity within us for the greatest of evils--even up to the mass slaughter of children. The conditions only need to be exactly right to drive us to it.

You may say you would never, ever do it, but unless you're literally a saint I bet there's something in this world which you, in your heart of hearts, value more than the souls of innocent children who aren't yours. What if it was the life of your wife, or your child, up against the lives of a bunch of other innocent children with much less connection to you, and the choice was yours to make? Would the choice not at least give you pause? I think most people would feel a conflict within them, at the very least. And the existence of that conflict is indisputable evidence of capacity. And this is supposing you are in a relatively balanced emotional state at the time the choice is presented to you, a luxury Anakin does not have.

And now suppose that these innocent children will die as, essentially, collateral damage in a drone strike against an ISIS stronghold. So it's not even cold-blooded murder, but simply a regrettable by-product of a morally righteous act. In return, your beloved is spared. In ethical terms, that's more or less how the situation is presented to Anakin. Killing these children now is in fact in service to a greater good. It is a necessary evil. It will prevent even more pain and death down the road. It would have had to be done anyway. It just requires someone with the strength of will to do what must be done, no matter the toll it may take on the soul. It's a heroic act of self-sacrifice, in that way. And Padme's life is the reward for such heroism.

All of this extremely faulty and pernicous moral reasoning, of course. But it's dangerously persuasive. The only surefire way to argue against it is to declare it simply isn't so. The cold logic of utilitarianism can only be soundly refuted through a leap of faith in the opposite direction. It's something you can't necessarily think your way out of, but instead must feel your way out of.

 

Well, we come back to what Lucas said.

"It will be about how young Anakin Skywalker became evil and then was redeemed by his son. But it's also about the transformation of how his son came to find the call and then ultimately realize what it was. Because Luke works intuitively through most of the original trilogy until he gets to the very end. And it’s only in the last act—when he throws his sword down and says, “I’m not going to fight this”—that he makes a more conscious, rational decision. And he does it at the risk of his life because the Emperor is going to kill him. It’s only that way that he is able to redeem his father. It’s not as apparent in the earlier movies, but when you see the next trilogy, then you see the issue is, How do we get Darth Vader back? How do we get him back to that little boy that he was in the first movie, that good person who loved and was generous and kind? Who had a good heart."

--George Lucas, Star Wars Trilogy VHS box set 2000.

It was never that he was perfectly pure. It was, prior to the PT, that he was a good man who did good things. But along the way he became twisted and seduced by the dark side. It's easy to not think about it, not because of how Vader was on screen, but because the nature of good and evil was very stark when the OT was made. So with the PT, Lucas knew that he had to paint a strong shade of gray to show us why someone would choose to do evil, if he was supposed to be good. That's why he always refers to Anakin as a good kid at heart, but he had problems and those problems were his downfall.

"It's about a good boy who was loving and had exceptional powers, but how that eventually corrupted him and how he confused possessive love with compassionate love. That happens in Episode II: Regardless of how his mother died, Jedis are not supposed to take vengeance. And that's why they say he was too old to be a Jedi, because he made his emotional connections. His undoing is that he loveth too much."

--George Lucas, Rolling Stone Magazine Interview; June 2005.


"What drove me to make these movies is that this is a really interesting story about how people go bad. In this particular case, the premise is: Nobody thinks they're bad. They simply have different points of view. This is about a kid that's really wonderful. He has some flaws - and those flaws ultimately do him in."

--George Lucas, The Making Of ROTS; Page 53.

Lucas was deconstructing the hero archetype with Anakin, which when you watch Luke, you think that there's no way that he could do this. Why would Luke forsake everything for the dark side? Well, we see how Anakin could forsake everything for the dark side and thus we understand the danger in Luke.

There is still good in him because he was at odds with himself. We see it when he's crying after the slaughter and we saw it in the shocked expression after he let Padme go, from the Force choke. Padme believes that there is good in there, because she is speaking from a place of love and from faith. She doesn't know for certain because she is not a Jedi. What she does know is that if he was as evil as it seems, he wouldn't have let go of the Force choke. He wouldn't have tried to trick her into thinking things were fine. Vader, twenty years later, still has good in him. It's not the time and distance between the two, but the overall sensation of feeling his emotions. Obi-wan cannot feel the good in him, because all he feels is Anakin's rage and hostility towards him. He is very focused towards Obi-wan. Luke can feel it because there is nothing negative towards him and as such, Luke can feel the good once he is able to articulate what he felt at Bespin. He can feel conflict in him and because Luke is an outsider compared to Obi-wan and Padme, he has an advantage.

 

Good point — I’m speaking from a place of comfort in my own room and not in a position where I’m about to decide the fate of innocents, children included. I’d like to think I’d save as many as I can but I’m mainly hoping to God I’ll never be in that situation where I prove myself wholly wrong.

 

I have always viewed the killing of younglings as anakin accepting who he has become. At this point anakin is dead and only darth vadee exists. When he kills the tusken raiders he is still anakin. As savage and heartless as killing the tuskens was, he did it out of love. When he killed the younglings it was out of preservation of what he has chosen to be. Not only that but the dark side requires sacrifice in order to become more powerful with it. Would anakin liked to have spared and recruited the younglings? Maybe. Anakin was fulfilling the orders of his master and this was a means to an end, which is to use the dark side to save padme. Of course by the time he gets to mustafar the dark side has all but consumed that ambition in him and he is going off more the high of the slaughter than anything else.

 

He was not Anakin at the time. He was Darth Vader. The dark side is supposed to be ... evil. So no. Like all of the dark acts of Vader, it just expounded upon the depths of his evilness. There was still good in him, but he was fighting that. What we were supposed to see after the turn was a diabolical and menacing dark lord that put fear into the hearts of everyone in the GFFA.

 

It didn't really. I knida figured he had done stuff like that during his Vader days.

 

Anakin's killing of younglings was the first act of viciousness he'd performed in the prequels, sandpeople not withstanding. It seems that after he freaked and got Mace zapped and flung out a window, he obeyed the Emperor as more of an "in for a penny, in for a pound" kind of an attitude. His conversion to the dark side never seemed real to me, because he always seemed reluctant to do any of what he was assigned to. Even when he killed Nute Gunray & friends, despite their many attempts on Padmé's life, we see him after with his lip quivering as a single tear rolls down his cheek. Killing kids made "Vader" seem even more evil, really, because it didn't seem borne of evil. It was because he had to play along with Palpatine, or it would've been Anakin's getting zapped and chucked out the window, next time. If he'd just killed the kids because he was like, "alright ... let's get this over with, so I can start my day" it might've been more Vader-like to me, but it wasn't.