Prequels Pet Peeve

It really bothers me that things went down like this. REALLY bothers me.

As much as I love the darth maul-obi wan-qui-gon fight in the first movie, I did not like the prequels as a whole. CGI, jar jar, little Anakin, big Anakin, emo Anakin, but more than anything Padme’s death. Here’s how I would fix it.

Step 1: Fix Anakin

You can sum up my issues with the prequels with Anakin; so this is how I like to think about what really happened:

1. Anakin grew up as a slave, then was released. But his mother remained in slavery, as did his friends (see meme). He obviously had a lot of resentment against the Jedi just for this, as well as humanity in general thanks to his harsh upbringing. Why did the jedi never end slavery in the galaxy? Why didn’t they help him save his mother?
   Spoiler

   
2. Anakin watched his mother die. His anger was released for the moment on the sand people. But his true rage was against the system, of which the sand people were outsiders. The corruption of the galaxy, the passiveness of the jedi, would have caused him to seek other means
3. Anakin hates the jedi, and therefore his master. Regardless of the training Obi Wan gave him, the resentment would never go away. He could not forget the jedi didn’t believe in him and wanted to shun him. Nor could he escape the resentment growing inside him against his master:
   1. Obi Wan agreed to train him when no one else would do so
   2. Obi Wan also held Anakin back; he was not as strong, always counseled caution. It made Anakin feel like he was being restrained, not trained to his full potential. Anakin realized the jedi feared him
   3. Obi Wan never helped Anakin go back to free his mother, nor did he ever try to fix the problems of the galaxy. Obi Wan, like the rest of the Jedi, just wanted to maintain the status quo, not actually help people. Because it was “not the jedi way”
4. Anakin has dreams of Padme dying. We will get more about Padme in a second, but after his mother died, the only person he truly would have cared about is Padme. He saw her die in his dreams, and sought a way to prevent it. This happened WAAAY too fast in the movies.
   
5. Anakin coveted power. Power over death (to help his mother and his wife) and power in general. He came from nothing, and did not want to go back. The jedi did not help him in this regard, if anything they forced him to hold back
   
6. All of this made it easy for Palpatine to slowly corrupt him over time. SLOWLY, not like in the movies themselves. It never really makes sense why Anakin fell in the movies in my opinion, nor why he supported the chancellor when the rest of the jedi thought he could become a problem.
   
7. At the end of the day however, Anakin’s decision to go over to the dark side was exactly that, a decision. It was a CHOICE. Anakin, not anyone else, decided to go over, this was built on a foundation of experiences that led him that direction, but at the end of the day, he saw the dark side as a way to fulfill his most basic desires: to have power. Even though this power was supposed to help people, it wound up hurting his wife.

Step 2: Fix Padme (a bit, she started out ok)

1. Padme started as a queen after all, then became a senator (ignore how politics and governments work for a moment it doesn’t matter). She was a lady who knew how politics worked, how to run and administer things. She was good at it. She genuinely wanted to make the world a better place
   1. She could have any guy she wanted. Any guy with power, money, looks, whatever. She was definately rich and well connected to the highest echelons of Galactic Republic society. Why did she fall for Anakin? (See bullet 3)
   2. Instead of her focus as a senator being anti-war, she should have been anti-corruption. And she should have been a Palpatine partisan (at first of course) because she thought he could, thanks to his powers as chancellor, end the corruption of the senate.
2. Padme meets Anakin on Tatooine as a slave (in reality the age gap is too much, Anakin should probably be her age, or maybe only a year or so younger at the MOST). She is appalled by what she sees, but feels for the poor kid who never had anything. Not feelings of love at this time
3. Padme is older, and meets Anakin and Obi Wan again who are assigned to protect her. Anakin saves her life from numerous assassination attempts, not just the one in the movie
   1. Then they fall in love, but not in the all-expenses-paid vacation seen in the movie
   2. They go into hiding, and Anakin and Padme fight for their survival on numerous occasions. Life and death experiences bring them together, to the point they begin to love each other.
   3. Padme goes with Anakin when he goes to save his mother. He fails, and she is there to help him through the grief, even though she is unable to stop him when he kills the sand people. I don’t think he should tell her about it just yet, because at this point it may have undone most of the good progress on their relationship so far
   4. This is now at the expense of Anakin’s vows, but the traumatic experiences they have gone through together, plus the death of his mother, and his latent anger at the jedi code makes it easy to do (at some point she also gets pregnant with the twins because they are two young, beautiful people alone together).
   5. For Anakin this is selfish love, a desperate outlet for his frustration, a need for solace, a comfort for his despair.
   6. So then why did Padme fall for Anakin? He represented the HOPE for a better future, and had the drive to change it. Like her, he was dissatisfied with the corruption of the senate and the jedi order, they bonded over this as equal visionaries. BOTH supported the chancellor, because they thought he could make a difference and change the system. I don’t think Padme should have been so anti-war; she after all mounted a mini-war against the Trade Federation to liberate her planet. And she had a standing army-security force on Naboo. Also she probably thought he was hawt for saving her or something, but she was probably attracted to his ideas first if nothing else.

Step 3: Palpatine is revealed to be a Sith- character decisions

1. Padme learns Palpatine is a Sith, using his power only for his own gain, more corrupt than the corruption around him. She turns on him. Padme CHOOSES the light.
   1. Padme recognizes that while the ENDS Palpatine said he was searching for were noble (even though that was a lie), she now understands that his MEANS are bad, deplorable, evil.
   2. Padme realizes Anakin is now too far gone. He has massacred many people in the name of the Chancellor, and has become worse than the system that corrupted him in the first place.
   3. Padme goes to Anakin with Obi Wan to try to convince him not to go on with his destructive path
2. Anakin learns Palpatine is a sith. Instead of turning on him, he supports him. Anakin is far gone enough to realize the only way to fix the system is by bringing it crashing down and make a new system himself. Anakin CHOOSES the dark.
   1. Anakin recognizes that the ENDS Palpatine are searching for are noble (even though it was a lie) due to Anakin’s anger at the jedi and the rest of the galaxy, Anakin is OK with the MEANS to achieve the noble ends. Even if these MEANS are killing millions of innocent people.
   2. Anakin is confronted by Padme and Obi Wan. Obi Wan represents the past, and everything Anakin hates, so obviously he doesn’t listen to his old master
   3. Anakin is confronted by Padme. Padme represents Anakin’s hopes and desires for a better future. Anakin truly believes he can still “make the galaxy a better place,” but Padme still tries to convince him that now his methods are wrong. Anakin disagrees. Padme continues to fight him, verbally or even physically to get him to stop. Anakin CHOOSES to now reject her as well, and casts her aside, giving her wounds that nearly kill her.
   4. Obi Wan and Anakin fight (sorry, I don’t really like this lightsaber battle much), and Anakin is also wounded to the point of death

Step 4: Cyborg Afterlife

1. Padme wants to live. But she sacrifices herself to save her children
   1. The technology obviously exists to turn a human at the point of death into a cyborg. Padme could have been given an awesome Lady Vader suit.
   2. Padme again makes a choice. This time she CHOOSES to sacrifice her own life at the expense of her two unborn children. With her dying breath, she names them, and makes Obi Wan swear to protect them from their father (why the hell Obi Wan would take them back to his families home on Tatooine is beyond me, but again I digress)
   3. This makes Padme a STRONG CHARACTER who doesn’t “loose the will to live,” but instead embraces the SACRIFICE of her life to save her children. Pretty noble sacrifice if you ask me.
   4. Padme dies at the wounds suffered at the hands of her ex-lover. Her children are hidden away from the Emperor and Anakin, now Darth Vader.
2. Anakin wants to live. Palpatine turns him into a cyborg
   1. Anakin is now selfish to the point he doesn’t care about anything but self-preservation. He desperately undertakes the painful surgeries to keep himself alive, at Palpatine’s leisure.
   2. Palpatine TRUTHFULLY tells Anakin that Padme is death, and it was at his own hand. Palpatine does not know about the son and daughter of Skywalker.
   3. Anakin does not mourn. The new Darth Vader does not give off a Frankenstein NO of epic proportions, because he knows that Padme now means nothing too him. She was in his way, and he CHOSE to go a different way.
   4. Darth Vader becomes the enforcer of the Emperor, making the galaxy a better place by ending corruption and slaughtering the enemies of the central galactic order.

Ultimately what this does for me is it tweaks a story with most of the elements already in place, and centers the drama on two characters who want to do good, are drawn together due to the conflict of the story, but CHOOSE completely different paths to take. I would have loved this movie (or all three movies) a whole lot better.

 

Those are some good ideas! What I will say is that a lot of later media does help flesh out the characters and choices and make it seem less odd - Anakin and Padmé are both explored a fair bit in Star Wars The Clone Wars (and Anakin is even turned into a genuinely likeable character!) and while I haven’t read all of it, the comic Darth Vader: Lord of the Sith does a fantastic job from what I’ve heard of turning the fairly weird stuff around Vader killing Padmé and the whole “No!!!” thing into something genuinely emotional and powerful. That being said though, none of that is from the film itself and it doesn’t necessarily reflect well on the film to have to have other media turn it into something quality rather than it doing it itself.