True, it wasn't about Jacen's redemption. However, we do know the reasons why he fell to the darkside were very similar to the reason why Anakin fell. He saw certain visions that disturbed him so much that, in order to avoid really terrible things from happening, he began doing other terrible things. It is very reminiscent of Anakin's fall. There were many expanded universe stories and novels before the prequels came out, but I can't recall a single one that employed visions as the catalyst for turning a prominent character to the darkside. While I understand that there has to be a reason for characters to turn from "good" to "evil" there also should be more reason for me to read a story than just to get a rehashed retelling of such an important plot line in the story. Had they come up with an original way to turn Jacen into a sith lord, the series may have seemed interesting enough for me to read.
Yeah, it was a bit too similar. It seems to be a bit of a tired old cliche, really, about becoming evil by wanting to do good ("the end justifies the means"), in these cases by preventing bad things from happening. We have heard that story told a bit too many times by now.
Don't short-change yourself. Remember, this is their job. They get paid to come up with new ideas for Star Wars. It's what they do, day in and day out. I know there are reasons for the shortcuts they take, but after all is said and done, and I've bought their game, the only thing that really matters is their finished product, and how much their dedication and adherence to detail, or lack-thereof, has led me to either enjoy or despise their game.
You are right. I was just trying to be understanding, and I realize it is not always that easy to find ideas blend in well with the continuity that already exists. But true enough, if it is a full time job that they get paid to do (indirectly by us, the consumers), we have the right to ask them to put adequate effort into their work.
Oh. Lol. I see what you mean. I also thought Anakin was whiny in those movies, but over time he's grown on me. After the death of my own mother, I've come to sympathize with him a lot. I would go through a lot of trouble to stop something like that from happening to me again, if I could. While I don't think I would bring down an entire social structure in order to do it, I am an emotional enough person to understand why he couldn't bare to lose Padme.
Sorry about your mother. Same thing happened to my father, but that was between Episodes I and II.
I think the Jedi order may have been flawed in how they handled Anakin's mother. Why not just go and buy her out after Episode I, if they feared grave danger in Anakin's training, letting Anakin meet her and know she was all right once in a while. Yes, I know about the Jedi position on personal attachments, but it was already way too late for him to have no attachment to her. It is fairly obvious that insensitively severing his connection to him, and even more so if something were to happen to her, would do more to push him towards the dark side than letting him maintain a casual relationship to still his worst fears. The order just comes off as very rigid, not taking into account that Anakin is a very special case.
Even so, Anakin came off as whining and annoying even before Shmi died.
As you pointed out, everyone knew that Mace Windu had to die. It's possible that George Lucas decided to devolve his character to a more basic role because of this. It's possible, but not probable.
I didn't mean that he'd made that decision consciously, but I would not deem it all that unlikely that knowing certain characters had to die affected his thought process as he wrote the script.
Remember, he has relied on Original Trilogy nostalgia more than a little, putting most of his time and focus (that wasn't wasted on completely silly things) on characters we already knew (and still failing to show the good friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin that the former talked about in Episode IV very well, as redlettermedia pointed out).
I think other things just ate up all the time in the movie and we were left with a less than satisfying performance from a less than satisfying character. But there is no doubt that his role was devolved. As you pointed out, he should have been a symbol of the fall of the jedi order. And he was, but a very weak symbol, because most people weren't made to care about his character. When most people think of Mace Windu, they think of Sammuel L. Jackson, and then they think about how cold he was to Anakin all the time. That pretty much sums up his entire character. He's pretty much relegated to being the character that Anakin can point to, and say, "Look. You jedi aren't all you're cracked up to be. Here, is you leader, breaking the jedi code. Here is you leader, he'll put me on the council, but won't make me a master. It's never been done before." Windu became the character that, more than any other jedi, stood in Anakin's way, and helped his fall to the darkside progress.
I didn't quite think of him as too hard on Anakin. I always just thought he expressed the majority opinion of the council. He wielded authority and was given the unthankful job of telling Anakin what Anakin didn't want to hear, but I don't think of it as just his personal opinion (it was technically "
we do not grant you the rank of master", as I'd recall it). The way it was presented, though, I am not surprised many will see him like that.
He was also right about some things. He showed scepticism of putting Anakin with Palpatine. He did not trust Anakin, but he had pretty good reason not to. It is not like what he sensed as danger with Anakin was very far off.
And remember, Anakin himself was very frustrated even with Obi-Wan.
Still, with the rest of it, I will agree. I do understand the "too hard on Anakin" perspective, but in that case I think it goes for the entire order and its regulations.
I do not think Lucas quite knew where he wanted to go with the character, though. Many fans have thought he was just written just for Samuel L. Jackson, and yes, it might seem like it, but truth is he goes back to the earliest Star Wars drafts, and was cut out of the Original Trilogy. I am more inclined to believe he was an important, perhaps even very important role, that got just got devolved.
About the character's power in-universe, I always thought he was in top power tier of the Jedi. The authority he seemed to be wielding in the council in Episode I made me think he was in charge already back then (and indeed I read that he handed over the grandmastership of the order to Yoda in the Clone Wars, at least according to the Expanded Universe). But anyway, leadership itself does not prove physical power, so after Episode I, you could not quite be sure.
Then came Episode II, and he seemed to defeat Jango so easily, never even slowing stride as he deflected the bolts. That was bounty hunter who had proven deadly to other Jedi, and basically been tied with Obi-Wan. Since then, I was fairly sure he was quite a bit above Obi-Wan's level.
Yes, some would argue that he had a better opportunity, with Jango's jetpack broken and one blaster gone, but that would apply only if it were real fights. As it was, we were speculating about the intention of an author, whose work is not the most advanced logically, and so it always smelled like grasping at straws to diminish Windu's power. I spoke to a friend over phone yesterday, and he said that the reasoning that got me to the conclusion that Windu was stronger than Kenobi after Episode II was a twelve year old's logic, but he still very much agreed that that very twelve year old's logic works in Star Wars prequels.
No, it did not come as a surprise to me that by Episode III that Lucas and Gillard quotes indicated Windu was above Obi-Wan in power. That had always been how had likely been, ever since Episode II. His combat statistics in card and miniature games after Episode II were notably above Obi-Wan's, too, and while that is G-canon or even C-canon, it does indicate that (probably grown-up) people responsible for producing a product and given permission to do so had believed the same.
For reasons I have already mentioned, we can't use hard logic on Star Wars. The whole saga would just collapse in an instant.
You could just bring up the Geonosians wanting to build a
Death Star. Well, if they had that kind of production capacity, it would be way cheaper to just build a droid army that is a thousand times the strength of the slightly over one million clone army, guaranteeing them victory.
Yes, you read me right. The cost of a Death Star would be ENORMOUS by comparison to the diminitive Clone Army. To quote the Wikipedia article I linked to...
"In February 2012, students from
Lehigh University of Pennsylvania published a blog post that priced the Death Star based on the cost of steel to produce it. The students believed that in today's economy, it would cost $852,000,000,000,000,000 assuming that the diameter of the Death Star was 140 kilometres but that it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work."
While I can't say I have done the math myself, I can say they are not far off in order of magnitude. The main reason for that is the volume of a
sphere, which is 4/3 * pi * r^3 ('*' means "times" and '^' means "to the power of"). We can just ignore the 4/3 and pi parts, as they are constants, and focus on the cubed radius part (r^3). That means that the growth of a sphere in volume in proportional to the growth of a sphere in radius (and diameter). As a sidenote, the same goes for any three-dimensional shape, really. If proportions are maintained, in order to maintain the shape, it would grow in all three dimensions by the same proportion. If radius doubles, volume increases eight times. If radius increases a thousand times, volume increases a billion (1000^3) times.
To put it in normal English, the volume skyrockets as you increase the radius. Therefore, it would take nearly unfathomable amounts of metal to build a station that is 140 km in diameter (70 km in radius).
Yes, we do not know how expensive metal is in Star Wars, nor building droids, growing and training clones, etc. We do not know how compact the Death Star is (if there is a lot of empty volume instead of it being solid). Those factors are not relevant when we talk about a difference of several orders of magnitude, and would merely determine whether the (first, and smaller) Death Star costed tens or hundreds of thousands of clone armies.
And I don't even have to use university math to figure that this cost proportion is way off.
Then again, ironically, the cost of a Death Star is probably way more accurate than the cost of the clone army for an economy of the size of that galaxy.
So here again, we come back to my earlier point about things not having to follow logic as we know it. For the costs of the Death Star and the clone army to fall anywhere close to each other in order of magnitude (as implied) would require the volume of a three dimensional shape would grow at a rate no higher than the square of the radius (perhaps even less), but that is clearly, mathematically not the case.
That is my point of Star Wars logic. I have been accused of not understanding logic when it came to arguing story issues, more than once. Yeah, I know, heated discussions. My reply to that is that I have stopped caring what that type of overzealous fans think of me, because if that were the case I could not handle university studies in the subjects I have done. The point is that if you throw a higher level of real logic on Star Wars than it was written for, it will come down collapsing on you. Then again, it is almost the same as the point I made before.
I use the level of logic the story seems to have been written for, and on that level (fallacious in real life but valid in the scope of the saga), Mace Windu's handling of Jango more or less proved him to be a better fighter than Obi-Wan Kenobi. In a purely speculative situation, that was as valid as any way to deduce the author's intention.
However, there is still a narrative issue about us being told by the author (in an offscreen comment) that a character is (at least almost) on Yoda's level, after him having fighted only droids and a bounty hunter before. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a well-established character that we have been shown dueling Sith (even if unsuccessfully a lot of the time), and are told this guy coming almost out of nowhere, having been given almost no development, is stronger than him. No wonder some will reject that, and no wonder Windu's power will be a subject of (sometimes intense) argument between people who look at things from different angles. These arguments would be fine if they came from brilliant writing, but I fear the opposite is the case here.
Now, I might seem obsessed with character power ratings. Some would say the saga has deeper meaning. I find it hard to see how character power would be irrelevant to this very saga, though, and any kind of depth the Prequels might have wanted to portray gets lost in the way they are told.
As a side note, the idea seemingly coming from some fans that power is proportional to screen time always irked me. That is fallacious, even in fiction. It seems like people are
equivocating on "strength of character" there. These two things are almost completely unrelated.
A character can have immense strength in terms of in-story combat power, but still be very weak in terms of character development (
Tulkas in
Tolkien's myth is a perfect example of this, as I could easily describe all there is to know about him in a few sentences, although I am not going to compare Mace Windu to him in any other way). On the other hand, a cripple might have great character development. In-story power does not make the character concept great, nor does a great character concept neccessarily mean the character has power in-story.
So when I said Windu was stronger than Kenobi (by maybe one tier), I referred only to in-story combat power only. As a narrative character concept, he is clearly much weaker. Heck, he is much weaker than Han Solo as a character concept, too, but I would still say he would win very easily.
The point is, many people link their favourite characters (which is not always due to strong character concept, either, as many like for example Boba Fett because he looks cool, but he is not really very complex, either) too strongly to combat power. More than once have I had to explain (usually to no avail) that they are separate.
But even so, with me thinking many fans are reasoning incorrectly (often even more some than the Prequel's own logical flaws, to be honest), I still think that Windu, to the extent he was meant as a symbol of the Jedi days of power followed by their downfall, needed a lot more attention if he was going to be there at all.
So briefly, even though the character concept was very weak, the same could not be said of the character's power in-story, and no, that is not a contradiction at all.
Woops
my post was so long I was bound to have an oversight or two. Lol. Sorry about that.
No worries. And sorry about my long wall of text.
