I reakon this clone wars thing will turn out good because what i've read about it is the screenplay is written by by a couple of geeks who's other works include
-The Tick
-Justice League Unlimited
-Angel
-90's X-men
and one of the directors Dave fioli (King of the hill, Lilo and stich and Avatar: The last airbender)
Originally posted by queeq
Not really. It got more depth to the characters, but not to a level of grey areas in being good or bad.
Chik4lit hits a point there actually Queeq. Attack of the Clones does challenge the audiences relationship with Anakin Skywalker intentionally (that's not my intepretation, it's there.) Your protagonist killing innocent women and children is pretty dark stuff by SW standards, and at the end you're still supposed to be rooting for him. That is certainly a grey area there, with a transition between pantomine good and bad. Fair enough, the execution of this transition isn't that effective and it isn't half as well concieved as it could have been, but the attempted use of a Tragic Greek hero in SW is a significant change in the key of the saga. There is just no getting away from that small point.
As for Alliance talking about moral conscience of the Clones, I call bollocks.
Originally posted by exanda kane
Chik4lit hits a point there actually Queeq. Attack of the Clones does challenge the audiences relationship with Anakin Skywalker [b]intentionally (that's not my intepretation, it's there.) Your protagonist killing innocent women and children is pretty dark stuff by SW standards, and at the end you're still supposed to be rooting for him. That is certainly a grey area there, with a transition between pantomine good and bad. Fair enough, the execution of this transition isn't that effective and it isn't half as well concieved as it could have been, but the attempted use of a Tragic Greek hero in SW is a significant change in the key of the saga. There is just no getting away from that small point. [/B]
There is though. Anakin is good until he turns. Being good doesn't mean you only do good things, it showed Anakin had potential for bad. Lucas always said SW is about choices people make. Anakin didn't make a choice to be bad then, he did choose to DO something bad.
Han acts like a mercenary in ANH, yet he is still good. He just has to come to grips with that. Anakin has a similar feat in AOTC. Whether you like it or not, Anakin is still good in AOTC. OB1 said it himself in ROTJ about the moment Anakin turned to the Dark Side: "The good man that was your father ceased to exist."
So it's not about good or bad acts, but about being good or evil. Luke screws up many times, he's disobedient to Yoda, he goes off in ESB to risk everything the Alliance has fought for for years. He ignores it... does that make him bad? No. Does that make him a poor chooser? Yes. So is Anakin.
Anakin showed potential for bad? I appreciate your point to the extent where I can see where you're coming from when you say there isn't much of a translation between the good and bad, but really slaughtering families of Sand People goes beyond Han being a mercenary, or Lando betraying Han or even Luke disobeying Yoda. That's the reason why I didn't use them as valid examples. I'm still a little dullen around the ears about whether we can mention the EU in here too, but there are some pretty twisted things Anakin ends up doing in the EU as a Jedi. Let's also not forget that in the PT the Jedi are fighting a war that is against their very code, both dogmatic and moral! That is a little bit of a grey area in itself.
You say "It's not about good or bad acts, but about being good or evil," but then you also say that Anakin, like Luke, is a poor "chooser." But Anakin didn't make the concious choice to be evil, he made a few pretty icky decisions that got him in a lot of shite. To this end, you mentioned what Lucas said about the power of choice in SW, but I really don't see how his comment works in your analogy, or vice versa. If Lucas says it is all about choices and you're saying the effect of these choices is nil to the character in the end, then what went wrong?
But that said, Anakin is a hard character to discuss because he suffers from the audience already knowing his final fate, an attempt to cast him as a Tragic Greek Hero (which failed) and Hayden Christiensen's performance (which failed). There is a transition involved in there (he isn't good when he knows he is being a evil prick as an example) somewhere along the lines, it's just not that effective.
As you said, he doesn't handle his choices too well, but then that is quite common for nearly every SW protag, from Luke, to Han to Leia.
Originally posted by exanda kane
But Anakin didn't make the concious choice to be evil, he made a few pretty icky decisions that got him in a lot of shite. To this end, you mentioned what Lucas said about the power of choice in SW, but I really don't see how his comment works in your analogy, or vice versa. If Lucas says it is all about choices and you're saying the effect of these choices is nil to the character in the end, then what went wrong?
Well, Luke is analogous to Anakin. And Lucas always wanted to show one is not born evil, one gets there by choice. True, the execution is poor, but this is still what it's about. Storywise Anakin was still good when he slaughtered the Tuskens, getting Padme is proof that he was still considered "good" at that time.
So now you're an expert on the acts of a good person? Good people do a lot of weird shit when placed in uncomfortable sutuations. I wonder how you would act when someone tortures and kills your parent. What is does show is that Anakin cannot control himself but has great powers. It's the beginning of his downfall, especially since Palpy made him feel his actions were justified. So I'm sure Palpy made Anakin feel good about himself.