It's not about whether one can turn back successfully from the dark side and live, or not ... and by the way, while we are at it, I don't think that what Yoda about the dark side dominating destiny forever, means that you have no chance of redeeming yourself from the dark side, but that is another point of debate ... to get back to this point, all I meant to say was, that it will not be possible to categorize Count Dooku as a completely black evil sith lord, as we could do with Darth Maul ... it will be more complex than that ...gray is neither completely black nor completely white, its neither and its both ... and I feel that it is a strong possibility that that is the way it will be with the character of Count Dooku.l
ush, then how do you explain han solo? he isn't exactly the model example of the white hero. he is a scoundrel/smuggler who becomes a hero although he tries to fight it. i think he falls a little into the gray. i think there is room in star wars for a little more complexity than everyone and everything being either pure good or pure evil. i think that blurring the lines is cool, but agree this a childrens movie at heart and will retain a more simplistic view. but one character with more complex motiviations wouldn't be a problem or unrealistic to expect.
GL has himself described how the whole Star Wars morality structure is based on the old westerns where you could tell whether a man is good or evil by the colour of the hat he wore- white or black.
Everyone is so divided in Star Wars. Han Solo may have seemed a little dodgy, but he wasn't REALLY, was he? He DID always do the right thing, he DID come back for Luke and in no time at all he had become a bone fide hero. GL even made him fire second in the Special Edition because he looked too grey beforehand.
This is how GL wants it, guys., No shades.
ush is right guys.
first han solo is totally white. he always did honorable and hero-like stuff. without his coming back the death star would´nt have been destroyed, and remember who rescued luke from hoth? he always looked for and proctected leia. he is a hero.
secondly he is right about saying that in starwars there is only white or black, there is no gray, and the only one who made it and went from darkside to lightside again was the skywalker.
but then again ush, why cant dooku too? maybe he is just tempting the darkside and he never really turned to the darkside, and he believes he is using darth sidious? could he cheat sidious? maybe.
im glad people are starting to think about dooku kinda same as me.
i said that han was a hero, no doubt about it. i just don't think that is the 100% "white" hero. yes he ended up doing the right thing, but he always thought of himself first. which means, at least to me, he ended ROTJ in one of ush's white hats, but he started off ANH with a gray one. that is one of the reasons why i've always prefered han as a character. he was imperfect and it took him time to realize what the right thing was. also, i want to add that this gray talk to me doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the force, its just character motivation. if everything is always black and white it will be boring as all hell. i loved that han abandoned the rebels then came back and saved the day and that his first comment was that he couldn't let luke have all the rewards. qui-gon just popped into my head. he took liberties with the jedi code, so he was a little gray too. he wasn't the pure hero who followed orders and did the right thing. he seemed to do whatever he wanted by his own code, which is more or less still quite good.
Those were just colours in LOTR, they didn't mean a thing. Besides, it is Saruman of Many Colours who is a bad guy.
Meanwhile...
Dooku can't fit on the grey scale, Fernando, because he is not a Skywalker and they are the exceptionbs. The point is that the Skywalkers are the ones who have to make this moral choice. All around them are moral absolutes- good people and bad people, and no in-betweens. But they can't seem to side one way or another. That is the whole Skyalker dilemma.
As for Han... no, he was NEVER grey. He liked to THINK he was, he even looked like it for a bit, but the whole point was that he was whiter than white, even if he hated to be so.
It IS a movie about good and evil ... and white vs. black, yes. You are also right in stating that the characters in Star Wars, are essentially good or bad .... and that there isn't too much in the way of complexities, I agree to all that, however ... as Sarlacc said, a bit of complexity introduced into the nature of one of the characters would not affect the essential simplicity of Star Wars .... and I feel that this will be the case with Count Dooku, who will be a character who cannot be categorized in terms of pure white or black. And I don't think this will affect it from still being a movie aimed at children ( or the child in all of us ).
Also you say, that with the exception of the Skywalkers, in Star Wars, all the other characters are either good OR bad; but, even amongst the Skywalker clan, only Anakin can be described as a character with shades of gray ... essentially good, but with certain negative tendencies lying dormant within. Apart from him, Luke and Leia were the good guys .... so maybe you meant SKYWALKER in singular, and not "Skywalkers" ?
And one last thing ... has Lucas or someone else definitely stated, that ONLY the Skywalker/s are allowed to have the gray areas, and no one else ?
He hasn't explictly stated, no, but that is the mood of Star Wars, so ti would be a big thing to change that.
And I meant Skywalkers plural. I am surprised you didn't notice that Luke had an extreme Dark Side, the same as his father, only his motivation was revenge, not fear.
I don't count Leia; the film certainly didn't; she was nicer than nice.