[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by Chiefspants

That's the problem in a nutshell for me.

The scene felt like it skipped an hour of scenes establishing Anakin's arc toward the dark side. He goes from buddy copping it with Obi-Wan to murdering children in what, 25 minutes?

ROTS is definitely the best of the trilogy - but I think it was severely limited by its predecessors. Lucas felt a legitimate pressure to show maturity in Anakin and establish a comraderie with Obi-Wan (making his transition to Vader harder to swallow).

If Anakin hadn't acted like a whiny little toddler who was mad at his daddy in AOTC and instead shown any of that leadership, depth and humanity he flashed for 30 minutes in ROTS (as he did in say, Clone Wars), his transition to genocidal child murderer wouldn't have felt so rushed. Lucas completely missed the mark on that - Anakin could have been together, confident, and a real understudy to Obi-Wan with hints of discontent at the controlling bureaucracies around him in AOTC. Instead, you have him literally go on a killing spree of a humanoid race and have him confess the thing to an (understanding? enabling? out of her mind?) girlfriend. Lucas just had no idea how to add any nuance to his writing, and it's what something with the intended political intrigue of the prequels so badly needed.

Anakin should have been a teenager in Phantom Menace instead of a precocious 9 year old.