TransatlanticFoe wrote:Opus131 wrote:The Han Solo thing ruins the character completely and was a terrible idea, but the Hayden Christensen one is just plain nonsensical. Luke recognizing that he had saved his father at end was the whole point of that scene. Neither he (nor the audience) would have known what Vader looked like as a young a man. It is just one of those things that shows the brain of George Lucas is just outright defective.
It ruins Han? What about poor Greedo?! He's one of Jabba's top henchmen amd he can't hit a guy from point blank range!
While that change is an awful hackjob, I refuse to place it at the top of any worst list for a simple reason; in concept it's dumb, but when watching the movie it's over so quickly the only thing that's really bad is that the punchline is gone.
Instead of a one-liner preceding a swift, sudden explosive, now there's some messy fire exchange that doesn't fit the scene at all. It should be noted that this kind of thing is not at all alien to the genre: the opening shootout in Once Upon a Time in the West is also a "messy exchange of shots", but the context and rhythm there is entirely different.
Or I guess this only applies to the post-2004 revisions since the 1997 one was way slower
Well it pains me to say something to support a post-prequel SE change but the Anakin thing makes sense in light of the prequels. Old Anakin would not have worn Jedi robes - from the prequels we know he became Vader as a young man, so the Jedi "projection" of himself as a force ghost would be of that man. He remembered who he was when he was good, rather than applied an unmutilated Jedi template to his older self. Sebastian Shaw in Jedi robes works only when the original trilogy stood alone, as we never know when Anakin became Vader and Shaw's face at the end of ROTJ is the only human connection we have to the character.
1) While that scene is the first to imply that Ben's attire from IV was a Jedi uniform, or at least to facilitate that "reveal" in EpI, Anakin grew up with Owen in that continuity, so that's what the robe can be attributed to.
2) His age prior to his turn is never specified - it probably happened more than 20 years ago, but at the same time he still could've been significantly older.
3) In one scenario, the soul had been buried beneath the evil and now emerges in its original form; in the other scenario, the soul has grown and withered with the rest, and now has been freed from the cancer. Both make sense and are equally "archetypal".
And if you accept the robes as Jedi uniform, so what? His sould aged, but he got to put on his honorary armor again - even in that context, it doesn't make "more sense".
But ultimately it that change fails because you think back to the whiny dickbag prequel Anakin and it makes you hate the prequels all over again because of how dreadful his characterisation was.
He was only a whiny dickbag in Episode II, and this is his Episode III persona (in fact, it's stock footage from Episode III :p).
who turns (properly) evil because he has a dream that his girlfriend dies? Riiiiight.
You might wanna specify what exactly is "riiiiiiight" about this - epic stories are filled with men doing all kinds of things to save their hot love interest, it's one of the most basic, primal tropes in existence.
So is the notion of merciless, unstoppable fate... about to take that love interest away.
When I see someone laugh at this plot premise from Episode III, that's how I usually know not much thought has been put into the criticism in question.
Mischief Maker wrote:So he was still good after the genocide of the Sand People tribe?
Those were orcs weren't they.
Also, why does Uncle Owen wear Jedi robes?
Line's blurred from the beginning as monks tend to wear humble / robey attires of that sort. Which is why audiences had no trouble accepting it as a "Jedi uniform" on a visceral level, after seeing Ben sport it so many times as a ghost.
