PT The reaction to the Rogue One Vader scene is exactly what Lucas wanted to avoid in ROTS

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader.. helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi."

That was the backstory of Star Wars, we were told for years by Lucas.

So when he declares he's making a trilogy to depict the backstory, people reasonably assumed that he would be showing what he always told us was the backstory.

Nothing about eight year old boys meeting two monks and a teenage queen who take him from his mother and so he winds up growing to be a credulous murderer of children.

So the prequels did not show what Obi Wan claimed. And the prequels ended at the moment Vader got stuck in his suit, and seemingly stuck as the mindless killer he had already become in the Jedi temple and with the Separatists begging for peace on Mustafar.

George Lucas has always responded to other people's impressions of what is desirable with logic that makes his desires the only reasonable option and the alternative somehow inappropriate. He famously told Francis Coppola, when his friend advised that audience's might have responded to his ideas in his earl work if he tried more to emotionally engage the audience, "Anybody can do that. All you have to do is take a puppy and snap it's neck." Cut to almost twenty years later, in the final part of his trilogy, and an anonymous Ewoks gets its touching requiem moment in the midst of battle.

So clearly emotionally engaging the audience is not a wrong ideas. It's just that when George Lucas doesn't do something he likes to make it sound like it's out of the question so that what he does do is enhanced. It's like when a parent tells a child they can't have something by making up some story that explains why it's bad for them, when the truth is that they just want them to accept what they give to them because that's all they are prepared to do at that moment.

Telling us Vader is not meant to be seen as a killing machine and then showing us that Vader was a killing machine before he even got in the suit is another example of this. He just wasn't interested in taking the story beyond his objectives and he felt he needed to nip the obvious disappointment that some people had because he didn't deliver the backstory that the OT promised, by making another quite illogical statement

He should have said "It's the story I want to tell and no more." Vader the mindless child killer and war crime commiter, atrocities far worse than anything the "not a mindless killer" had been shown doing before, existed before the suit. He winds up in the suit. The end.

Skip twelve years and someone else is making a star wars movie in the time frame after the prequels and just before the original trilogy. It depicts Vader in similar killing form to the one we last saw him in on Mustafar while in pursuit of rebels threatening the security of his Master's empire. And Lucas declares he loves the film.

Free of having to manage expectations of the audience and tell them, unnecessarily, that they shouldn't see anything but what he wanted to show at a particular the time, Lucas reportedly appreciates the film including the character Vader appearing faithfully to his character at that period of time.

Nothing in Rogue One makes Vader any more of a one dimensional robot than Lucas did when he created him to thrill and chill audiences, including children, in 1977. Firstly by showing him choke a man to death while lifting him off the ground one handed. There is no logical argument for saying Vader is out of character in Rogue One. If Rogue One was set one year after Mustafar, it still wouldn't have been out of character according to what Lucas has said about Vader.

 

But we as the audience know that Vader doesn't win. Yes, he catches the Tantive IV and kills Captain Antilles, but he never gets the plans.

 

Having met homophobic people in real life, I have to agree with this sentiment.

With regards to Gareth Edwards, I do get the impression that he isn't overly fond of the PT, but considering he doesn't seem to have let this impact on his film (Coruscant and Mustafar were both present and correct), I'm really not sure how dragging up the guy's personal favorite movie list is supposed to act as a critique of his handling of Vader in Rogue One.

As Darth Downunder has pointed out many times, the only thing we know about Lucas thoughts on the movie, was that he liked it enough that it kept him (and John Knoll) on the phone for half an hour.

Also pointed out many times, is that in the light of Vader's actions on Mustafar in the second half on ROTS (and his actions in the OT), is that while the PT certainly added depth to the character, Lucas fully intended "Darth Vader" to be a killing machine as well.

 

The cherry picking and false dilemma is strong with this one. That's part of the backstory not the backstory.

He never declared he was making a trilogy to depict your selective view of his backstory.

 

WOW! Just WOW!

I still haven't seen Rogue One and have no intention of doing so (especially now I've read this thread and found out the climax of the movie is bad-ass Vader running around with a lightsaber slaughtering everyone...)

You really couldn't make it up!

 

Actually he does get them and then let's them go to try to get to the hidden Rebel base and that miscalculation of his and Tarkin ends in disaster for everyone but him. In the end it works out great because he gets total control of the Empire outside of the Emperor (which he didn't have before) and it sets him up to overtake the Emperor if he can just get Luke to join him.

 

B-but Lucas loved it so much he called up someone and gushed about the movie for 30 minutes! 30 minutes! I totally changed my opinion about the movie after hearing this anecdote. Vader mowing down those cannon fodder rebels now stands as one of the greats for me, alongside that one scene from Terminator Salvation, when the terminator found salvation.

 

Lucas could make a new fortune with minimal effort.

For $29.99 a month, you can log in to a website where you can find out if you like something. RLM and Lucas. Letting you know what you like.

 

Yep, people disliking Vader's cameo in Rogue One, I can understand. But using TFA-centric interviews to prove that Lucas disliked Rogue One...

 

This thread.... oy vey.

Honestly, Vader killing several of his officers in TESB was way more evil than killing Rebels in Rogue One. I mean killing soldiers on the other side in a military conflict is one thing..... killing your sub-ordinates/co-workers because they have displeased you is quite another.

 

There's a difference though, the Jedi fighting the Battle Droids is different because the Jedi are going to be victorious most of the time. We're not supposed to think that the Jedi are going to lose in battle to them. The Rebel troopers are facing a foe that they know that they cannot defeat, because the Jedi are gone and the only ones who could help are not around. The sequences are meant to be different because of who is involved. That doesn't make Lucas a bad director, but that he had a different approach to the Jedi and overwhelming odds versus a Sith and overwhelming odds.

Your argument falls apart a bit. First, no one knew the exact details of how it happened. Just a few hints here and there. Second, what you are attempting to argue is that Lucas didn't live up to his end of the bargain, when we didn't know what the details were. The conclusion was that Vader went around fighting and killing Jedi for almost the entire film, before being stopped by Obi-wan. When Lucas wrote that Vader helped destroy the Jedi, he left it wide open as to what happened and how it happened. It was the fanboys who mistakenly assumed that it would be one thing, when it never occurred to them that it would be something else entirely. Anakin kills Jedi inside the Temple. That's helping to eliminate them. Anything else was assumptions based on active imaginations and almost masturbatory fantasies.

Lucas said that he was never interested in spending an entire film or two showing Vader killing Jedi. That is not the same as showing Vader killing the Separatist Council and going through the Jedi Temple, which is confined to a few minutes of screen time versus almost four hours worth of screen time. Context is everything.

And Lucas never promised that we'd see Vader going from world to world, killing Jedi. He never said that in 1981 when talking to Kasdan, Kazanjian and Marquand. Nor in any interview that he conducted between August of 1977 through April of 2005. All he ever said was that Anakin/Vader was killing Jedi on behalf of Palpatine and Obi-wan found out and attempted to stop him.

He did.

"I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it."

--George Lucas, 2002.

"The thing about science-fiction fans and "Star Wars" fans is they're very independent-thinking people. They all think outside the box, but they all have very strong ideas about what should happen, and they think it should be their way, which is fine, except I'm making the movies, so I should have it my way."

--George Lucas, Associated Press Interview 2004.

"...some of the people had a hard time with the reason that Anakin goes bad. Somebody asked whether somebody could kill Anakin's best friend, so that he really gets angry. They wanted a real betrayal, such as, "You tried to kill me so now I'm going to try and kill you." They didn't seem to understand the fact that Anakin is simply greedy. There is no revenge. The revenge of the Sith is Palpatine. It doesn't have much to do with Darth Vader; he's a pawn in the whole scheme....

So I had to ask myself, what was I trying to say and didn't I say it? Did it just get missed or it is it not there? I had to look at it very hard. I had to ask myself, Is this how the audience is going to react? Fortunately, Steven confirmed that most of everything was working. So I may lose a certain demographic - maybe, maybe not. But I had to make a decision, and I decided that I'm not going to alter the film to make it more commercial or marketable. I have to be true to my vision, which is 30 years old, but I have to be true to it."

--George Lucas, The Making of ROTS, page 188.

"Oh, it always hurts. It hurts a great deal. But part of making movies is you get attacked, and sometimes in very personal ways," says Lucas. "The point is, like if you paint your house white and somebody comes over, 'Well that should be a green house.' Well, fine, but I wanted to paint it white. I don’t think there was anything wrong with painting it white. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me for painting it white. Maybe it should be a green house, but I didn’t want it to be a green house. I wanted it to be a white house.”

--George Lucas, 60 Minutes Interview 2005.

Which is in the next film, not this film. This film, Vader didn't get the plans, but he did cause some damage that put him in a victorious moment.

 

schwartz is the running theme of the thread

Exactly. The R1 scene of Vader taking out rebels doesn't even make it to the 40 second mark. The biggest strawman of this thread is that people are asking for 6 hours of Vader killing people.

Which is in the next film, not this film. This film, Vader didn't get the plans, but he did cause some damage that put him in a victorious moment.[/quote]

I don't think that was viewed as a victorious moment. The rebels achieved their mission. A mission that was thought to be impossible. Basically the whole point of the Cassian/Jyn death scene. Cassian and Jyn achieved meaning to their lives. They were at peace with their impending end.

As far as all the Lucas quotes, it applies to the people that made Rogue One as well. If you didn't like the green house at the end ....

 

Here’s the core issue. Do you see Darth Vader as a villain or as a tragic hero? Those who were introduced to him in 1977 tend to see Vader as a villain…and there is no doubt that he succeeds brilliantly as a villain. He’s intimidating, he’s memorable, and he oozes intelligence, menace and presence. The cultural impact the character has had is proof of how effective a villain he is.

Whether he succeeds as a tragic hero is much more dubious. The potential was certainly there, and I'd argue that RETURN OF THE JEDI effectively laid the groundwork for a great tragic story. The problem is that, in my opinion, George Lucas completely and totally botched the execution. In the prequels, he comes across less like Michael Corleone or Charles Foster Kane and more like Donald Trump or Joffrey from GAME OF THRONES.

In addition, most villains are more intimidating the more mysterious you leave their backstory. Think of some of the great villains- Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myers, Darth Vader, Heath Ledger’s Joker. Aside from Ledger’s Joker, they all eventually had their backstories revealed, but if we’re being honest, when were they at their most intimidating? Lecter was most intimidating in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, when we knew next to nothing about his past (all we knew is that he’d once been a respected psychologist before it was discovered that he was a cannibalistic serial killer). Myers was at his most intimidating in the original John Carpenter film, when all we knew is that he’d been a relentless killer since childhood. Vader was at his most intimidating in STAR WARS and THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, when all we knew is that he’d been a former student of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s who’d been seduced by the dark side and helped the Galactic Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi. Finding out the backstories of Lecter, Myers, and Vader helped take away their mystique.

 

Oh, you can see Vader as a tragic figure and still enjoy the hallway massacre scene, by this point its been 19 years since ROTS, the good person who was Anakin Skywalker is well and truly gone.
IMO the real issue here seems to be that some posters are claiming that the two are mutually exclusive. i.e. portraying Vader in a manner that is deemed 'cool' or 'badass' in any way is incompatible with his also being a complex character.
Yet, as others have pointed out coolness, or at least the veneer of it, have always been an integral part of that character. even in the PT.

 

I don't think anyone was asking for it. Lucas said that if he had been a typical filmmaker, the studio marketing would have wanted to focus more on Vader than on Anakin and having him kill more Jedi across two films. That may or may not be a strawman argument, but Lucas had a strong inkling that there was a significant portion of the fandom that wanted that. So seeing the reaction of people who all say that's what they wanted in the PT, that forty second scene, you can understand why some feel as they do.

 

One thing that often gets forgotten is Vader is a pretty pathetic person, or persona, much more so than Anakin in the PT ever was. Many times, being a badass is a facade to hide a person's true pathetic nature. One of Vader's first scenes is strangling a rebel prisoner, somebody who has surrendered which is pretty damn pathetic. Then killing his own men when they disappoint him is even worse, guess he took Obi's advice a little too far about the mission coming before your comrades. Plus Vader's tantrums in the OT were far worse than any of Anakin's in the PT before he turned.

 

True. First impressions which were then heightened by TESB tend to dominate so that was 6 years of seeing Vader in one particular way.

There is of course a massive problem in that ROTJ then basically was about destroying that. Vader is not the evil but the servant of evil. He doesn't have the power. In fact he is quite powerless. Being Vader is not a triumph but a total failure. After 6 years of it being the one way which turns out to be false. It can also be largely ignored as it was and seen as a failure to the character. So the failure isn't the character but the way he was handled.

For those who never really accepted it in the first place whether it was 1983 or before the prequels even existed.

It certainly did but again as we know many didn't want it to be that way.

In my opinion he completely and totally triumphed with the execution.

I appreciate The Godfather films but to compare him to Anakin doesn't work for me at all. The son of a gangster family becoming a gangster? GASP! How could that happen?

Well I don't know what the point for Lecter and Myers was since I don't follow them but the entire point for Lucas with Vader was to do exactly that.

So the point is that for some people they think that Lucas doing exactly what he wanted to which started in ROTJ and then continued in the prequels was the wrong thing to do.

Whatever he did it was never going to be good. The execution was never going to be done right because the entire concept was fundamentally wrong for them.

They didn't want a tragic figure. They wanted the mysterious facade of an at best 2 dimensional villainous character. A fully rounded tragic character that made the story deeper and stronger was not what they wanted.

 

Vader isn’t the head honcho, but he certainly has power and influence. He’s a moral failure more than anything else.

Ok, and that has nothing to do with what I said.

The difference is that Michael was a good person. Anakin was merely presidential…and by that, I mean that the only difference between Anakin Skywalker and Donald Trump is that Anakin is better-looking. Seriously, he has the exact same temperament and personality of Trump! We actually now have a real-life equivalent to Anakin. I guess if you think Trump is a good man and a hero, I can see you’d find Anakin to be a heroic, good person…but otherwise, I don’t understand how anyone can like Anakin.

A fully-rounded tragic character WOULD have made the story deeper and stronger. Instead, we got Space Trump. If you wanna know what Anakin would be like in real life, just turn on the news, because a guy just like him currently lives in the White House.

(Seriously, the similarities between Anakin and Trump are just mind-boggling.)

 

Now we have one dimensional political talk. Joy.

 

So guys remember...

 

It is reasonable that George never intended to make the prequel trilogy all about Vader in action. I see nothing wrong with including the hallway scene in RO. The scene goes by quickly and is just one part of Vader's life.

 

Vader is hardly pathetic in ANH or TESB... in ROTJ he's definitely somewhat more reserved. I don't think calling him a failure is entirely fair.

In ANH Vader's plan to let our heroes escape from the Death Star worked perfectly. It's not his fault Tarkin was overconfident.... Vader and his personal squadron were the only Imperials who treated the threat of the rebel fighters seriously. ... even more - Vader clearly never cared much for the Death Star and at the end of ANH the DS was gone and his main rival (Tarkin) with it... so it kind of worked out for him. As we see in TESB Vader has become pretty much the man in imperial circles.

His plans in TESB went perfectly and he forced Luke to choose between joining him or death. Luke chose suicide and freakishly survived... I can hardly blame Vader for that.

In ROTJ he was left with few options........ but he did succeed in getting Luke to come to him. In the end (assuming his goal was to overthrow the Emperor with Luke's help) he is able to kill the Emperor even though his plan to team up with Luke had failed.

If you look at the Saga as a whole... Vader finally gave Palpatine what he deserved for duping him in the end

Truth often depends on your point of view

 

You're joking aren't you? The examples you point to are a bit pathetic, but they surely don't come close to his antics in the PT. In the OT he's at least intelligent & competent. In the PT he's outrageously dumb & gullible. Then there's the petulance & the small matter of killing women &/or children on multiple occasions. Some of that while he was supposedly still a "good person". In the OT he was a broken man who'd lost everything, yet he still didn't stoop to those pathetic levels.

That's not the point I was making. It wasn't meant as a criticism of Lucas as a director either. I'm saying that by using droids as minion soldiers he was able to include wall to wall dismemberments & beheadings. Imagine the PT with human soldiers instead of robots but the action scenes were otherwise the same. They'd be among the most violent movies ever made. Would be rated R for sure. Of course when you're hacking hundreds of robots to pieces nobody cares. That was also a weakness though IMO. Over 6 hours we see countless disposable expendable robots getting sliced up, but did it matter? Did the scenes contain any real stakes or tension? You also had the scenario of expendable clones grown in a lab facing off against the even more expendable robots. What's more they were fighting in a phony war that was being manipulated on both sides by the same person! You couldn't get more pointless battle scenes if you tried. It's all very clever from the point of view of Palpatine & his machinations, but IMO it took away a lot of the weight & meaning from the action scenes in the PT.

 

I agree completely about how different the movies would be if the Jedi were not fighting droids, both for how it changes the tension of the films and how it changes the ratings. Even in Return of the Jedi Luke's lightsaber acts more like a killing club against Jabba's goons, knocking them whole into the sarlacc instead of dropping them to the skiff deck in pieces.

In universe, the use of droids could be rather ingenious of Palpatine's plan. The Jedi have to think twice about killing a life form, not so with droids. The battle droids as a huge overwhelming force are effective against other armies and planetary defenses. Yet the droids are almost no threat to the Jedi, who cut them them down like grass. But the act of destroying so many droids may have slowly desensitized the Jedi to actual killing. And helped push the Jedi further out of balance with the force. Also the battle droids were meant to draw out the war and wear down the Jedi. So what might be the by product of keeping a movie PG, has other implications for the downfall of Jedi Order.

 

Yeah, I don't have an issue with it in terms of making sense in-universe. Like I said, Palpatine's machinations & all. Just makes for quite dull & repetitive action scenes IMO. How many different ways can the Jedi slice through & dismember robots? Lucas seemed determined to answer that question. Yet replace those robots with soldiers, as with the Vader scene in R1 & people lose their minds because of the "violence". Someone called it "cheap thrills" here recently. Well at least it provided thrills. Nothing thrilling about monotonous repetitive robot dismemberment.