This just gets messier and messier.
They didn't understand that Anakin is simply greedy.
Now he's
greedy? I thought he was
fearful! Pick a motive and stick with it, George!
Greediness is a better motive for the guy because it matches up better with Vader. I can certainly see Vader as power-hungry and egomaniacal. I can't see him as fearful, because that's an aspect of weakness and Vader never struck me as weak.
But if Anakin falls because he gets too big for his britches, then the PT totally failed to deliver that idea through the writing, acting and directing. Instead, they delivered (possibly accidentally) a completely different idea: that Anakin is psychologically damaged due to his deprived childhood, and could never have made a decent Jedi. He was Sith material from a young age, and somehow, nobody around him noticed.
The Jedi failed to noticed this very damaged guy right under their noses, despite the fact that he was behaving like a stalker/psycho/crybaby throughout AOTC and ROTS. Obi-Wan and Padme, despite being very close to him, were similarly unobservant.
Anakin's fall came directly as a consequence of being immature, weak, whiny and very stupid. Stupidity is a big part of it. No one with half a brain could have trusted a Sith to make good on his promise to save Padme. And guess what, he didn't! Anakin didn't expect that? Geezus. What part of "Sith" do you not understand?
Now if you replay Anakin's fall while assuming that he actually doesn't give a flip whether Padme lives or dies, and all that is a smokescreen for what he really wants - power - then, yeah, that works. What still doesn't work is how everyone could have been fooled by Anakin, so then you need to revise how the character was acted to make him more crafty. Communicate to the audience that Anakin is deliberately hiding his power-lust from everyone around him, and convince us that smart people would have been fooled by it.
Just to make an even bigger mess,
TCW is depicting Anakin as neither dysfunctionally fearful (in that his fears seem like reasonably concern so far) nor particularly power-hungry (which would require egotism - so far, his ego is nothing beyond healthy self-regard). Instead, he seems to be a decent sort of guy. His faults are impatience and a bias towards action and not thought. Those aren't necessarily fatal flaws for a soldier in battle, and in some situations could be beneficial. So if those are the factors that lead to his fall, then that all needs to be written very carefully.
Or, is the real reason because of his attachments? In
TCW, he's not only attached to Padme, but Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, various clonetroopers, Artoo and the cosmos at large. He's angst-ridden about the death and carnage of the Clone Wars. That's too broad-based to be the "bad" kind of attachment the Jedi keep harping on. You can't be dysfunctionally attached to people you don't even know. That sounds like a "good" kind of attachment to me, caring even about people you'll never meet. If the Jedi are against that, then their ethical system is very alien from anything I'm familiar with and needs a lot more explanation.
There are too many contradictory ideas pingponging around. They need to pick an idea and go with it. I've always liked the notion of Anakin having the flaw of ego and power-lust but TCW can't credibly turn the character around and invest him with traits he hasn't had to date. I guess they need to go with the idea that he falls because he loves the cosmos too much. Good luck with that one.
The removal of these superfluous scenes unexpectedly began to shift emphasis towards the character's obsession for Padme, which Lucas then began to actively re-structure the film around, because, as he says, it seemed "poetic."
Whatever poetry he though was in that notion, was completely not conveyed through the movie. It was far less poetic than pathetic. The description of the chaotic and random way Lucas attempted to find the core of the main character really clarifies why it was such a godawful mess. He needed to figure all that stuff out before he even started writing the script, much less filming.
This might be the biggest problem with Anakin. HE DOESN"T THINK THINGS THROUGH!!!
The way that mish mash of a story worked out, it doesn't work unless you assume Anakin is an idiot. I've wondered ever since I saw the movie whether that could possibly be intentional. Who in their right mind sets out to deliberately write a story that isn't a comedy about a stupid weakling who creates disaster? Yet that is exactly what Lucas ended up with.
He should take the opportunity of
TCW to "set the record straight." Now he just needs to figure out what exactly the record
is. I suspect he's using
TCW to figure out who he thinks Anakin is, at long last. Since he seems to have some smart collaborators on that show who know how to write a good story, I'm a lot more hopefully this time around that the results will be adequate or better.
Worse, he knows what it's like to fall to the dark side from what he did to the Sandpeople in AOTC.
That was never depicted as an actual "fall" to the Dark Side, just a normal explosion of anger, of the sort a non-Force-user might be capable of. But
TCW does give him a close-up view of what falling to the Dark Side is like (and as far as he knows, the only way it happens): Ahoska. She was totally mind controlled. So now there is no possible excuse for Anakin dabbling in such things. How can he enact any plan while he's mind-controlled? He'll be a different person and incapable of doing anything he previously wanted to. Falling to the Dark Side is useless as a strategy for accomplishing anything.
I can't decide whether
TCW is solving problems or making an even bigger mess, but I'm happy to wait and see. Whatever they come up with will probably be entertaining, and it can't be any worse than ROTS.
