Spoiler Alert - Sith Review

I totally meant to take a pen and paper with me into the movie and write down my thoughts…  I apologize for all misspellings of names; I’m not a Star Wars reader, just a viewer.

 Annakin proves himself to be a little boy who never got over losing his mother’s love when she was killed.  He now is so terrified of losing love that he will literally destroy the world to ensure that he feels good about himself.  This correlates perfectly to the fact that as soon as he perceives critique from someone, it’s proof that this person has stopped loving him.  And in Annakin’s childlike stupid head, this marks the person as his enemy.  Following are a couple of examples:

       Padme, the woman he loves.  The woman he risks it all for.  The woman he can not live without.  Padme gets scared when she sees final proof that Annakin has turned to the dark side, and begs him to turn back.  He says that he can’t, obviously, because if he does he might lose her.  She says if he stays he will lose her because she can’t follow him down that path.  He says he wants to run the empire.  Um, OK…  So when he sees Obi Wan standing there, his first instinct is to try to kill the woman he gave everything up for.  He sees Obi Wan’s presence as a betrayal and betrayal means lack of love, and therefore he has no problem trying to destroy her.  It’s literally 5 seconds after he declares tat he gave the world up to save her.  Asshole.

       Obi Wan, his tutor, his master, his brother.  Annikin aligns his fate with Obi Wan, refusing to leave him behind when he’s trapped under a wall, even at the risk of his own death and the death of the chancellor.  He carries Obi Wan out, saving his life.  Obi Wan, in return, blindly adores him (gross).  But the minute that pouty Annakin gets a critique from Obi Wan (to the extent of “you’re not ready to be a Jedi Master yet, but you will be soon”) he starts to doubt him.  When Obi Wan asks him to spy on the Chancellor, all it takes is about a minute of the Chancellor buttering him up before Annakin spills the secret.  Moron.

 Annakin repeats over and over that he will not lose Padme the way he lost his mother.  Which, you see, he doesn’t – in the end, he kills Padme.  So it’s not like his mother at all.  And I think that that is the point.  If Annakin is going to cur disfavor and ‘lose love’, he’s going to make sure that there are no reminders of it.  He will be loved, and that will be the final chapter of that person’s interaction with him.

 I find it amazingly ironic that when Annakin finds out that Padme is dead, and that he killed her, he doesn’t realize 1. that the Dark Side is destructive and 2. that the Emperor is the one who constructed this situation.  Of course, with Annakin’s psychological profile as I understand it, he may have already adopted the Emperor in his mind as his family, and therefore can’t turn against him until given reason to (Jedi, when he has to choose between his natural son, and the man who brought about Padme’s death).  I still expected him to at least say “YOU DID THIS!”

 What I really hate about this is that Darth Vader of my childhood now is much much weaker than I thought.  If you had asked me yesterday how I would react if Darth Vader showed up at my door, I’d tell you that I would pass out or totally pee myself from fright.  Today?  I’d say “Darth Vader!  You are so powerful and so brave!  The Empire owes it freedom to you!”  And then I’d skip away, knowing that I’m safe cause, hey, I just complimented the guy.  Because in Lucas’ quest to make Annakin a complex character, he actually made him simplistic – think ‘me want love, me kill for it’.

 Off of Annakin for a moment – Yoda could sense when each Jedi was attacked/killed.  He could sense the attackers behind him.  Now Avraham makes the point that the force has a lot to do with how open you are and how much you already have pre-judged something (excellent observation).  But I still find it strange that Yoda of all people (can I call him a person?) didn’t sense that the Chancellor was the Sith Lord.  I get that the Chancellor probably had some block-y powers that kept them from sensing him, but come on!  Also weird that the Jedi ‘spidey-sense’ wasn’t there when the Empire’s army turned on them.  One Jedi was shot in the back.  Again, you can make the point that they were involved in what was happening and had assumed the people behind them to be on their side, but that seems a really silly flaw for this class of people to have.  Or were they all just so far behind Yoda in their training?

 I also wonder at Annakin, who needed family so badly, needed love so badly, not looking up his aunt and uncle.  Yes, he’s Darth Vader, and they may not like that, but wouldn’t he in his very strange mind expect to find love and thanks there?  Also, I question the decision to hand over baby Luke to the family that raised Annakin – they’re not so good at it, people!  And why split them up?  It’s not like Annakin knew to look for twins.  Again, he didn’t even know to look for one baby.

 As Avraham quoted on his blog (www.thebronsteins.com), it is the suckage that they’ve now created a construct in which Annakin’s appearance at the end of Jedi was possible not due to his salvation, but instead to the abilities he learned from the Emperor.  Also, if the Emperor is able to come back, who’s to say they’re ever safe?  Just a thought.  Considering that in the new DVD release Annakin’s ghost is back to his young self, it would totally make sense that Annakin was there just to see his children who now adore him (cause he DID have some good in him!  Har har).  Although I still say Luke would have no reason to recognize young Annakin.  But young Annakin’s appearance makes a stronger case for the idea that Annakin never achieved salvation, and that instead everything we saw him do was self-serving because it negates (Annakin’s favorite!) all the evil, and therefore make impossible the very achievement of salvation.  Doesn’t it suck to have an English major watch a movie with you?

 But the final proof of Annakin’s blindness is the fake out when Samuel L. Jackson was killed.  If Annakin had been at all honest with himself, he would have run the Chancellor through right then.  Instead he (and the Dark Side he readily accepted) twisted what he himself saw, and made it all about the Jedis turning against him and his buddy the Chancellor.

 I would have much more interested to see Annakin fall into this some other way.  Or maybe take longer to make the choice.  Or even to see a truly evil side of him emerge before the Chancellor starts in on him.  But instead, he is a weak, malleable man-child who never grows up, never accepts responsibility for his actions, and even in death can be said to have made the choice to be loved over the chance of living.

 I prefer to think that these first three episodes are not really the back story of the first trilogy, but instead a fan fic of sorts.  And one I don’t have to take as gospel truth.