So I’ve been listening to School of Movies’ We Need to Talk About Anakin episode, and it reminded me that, while I’ve discussed this with friends and acquaintances in DMs, I’ve never actually written out this idea I had a while back for how you could fix the Star Wars Prequels.
Because in the wake of all the sturm und drang over TLJ, I feel like it’s worth noting that the failures of the Prequels were largely ones of execution rather than intent or conception and I think a very few changes could have made it a worthy addition to the larger universe.
Change #1: Make Anakin Older
No offense at all to Jake Lloyd, because why torture someone their entire life because they weren’t good at acting when they were nine years old (almost no one is any good at that age), but I think one of the major problems with the series was that Anakin starts out too young, which causes all kinds of character and world-building problems in all three movies. Instead of being 8-9 years old, Anakin should show up in Episode I as a teenager.
This one change does a lot:
- To start out with, it creates a better thematic parallel with the original trilogy (and now the new trilogy too) – we meet Anakin when he’s around the same age as Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, and around the same age as Rey in The Force Awakens. They’re all teenagers who dream of the stars but are held in place until something arrives to change their world forever.
- Next, it gives the audience a way into how the character is similar to and different from our other protagonists: like Luke, Anakin is a teenager scraping out a life on a backwater desert planet, and because he’s a teenager, and like Luke all Anakin cares about is space street racing (because American Graffiti). But whereas Luke is a good if slightly whiny kid with a decent home life, Anakin is a bit of a wild kid. He hates being a slave, hates that his master makes money off his talents but won’t ever let him win his freedom, throws fists when people say he’s a cheat, etc. You can already get the sense that he’s got a bit of the Dark Side in him already – this will help later on in the Trilogy, as I’ll explain in due course.
- After that, it makes his other relationships make more sense: instead of the creepy age gap which means that we start with Amidala as a teenager caring for a child which makes their relationship in Episode II harder to accept, the two meet as peers in a shared period of struggle, which promotes an instant bond and explains why both of them would be interested in rekindling the relationship a short few years later. Likewise, instead of Obi-Wan pretty much raising Anakin, they’ve got more of an older/younger brother dynamic which helps to explain why Obi-Wan would decide to and struggle with mentoring someone not that much younger than himself.
- Finally, it makes the Jedi Order no longer insane or evil. If an eight or nine-year old is too old to be trained, than the Jedi are basically stealing babies and raising them to be ascetic warrior-monks with no experience of the world. However, if Jedi are supposed to be trained from late childhood, so that they have control over their powers when the intense emotions of adolescence hit so as to not fall to the Dark Side or hurt people around them inadvertently, that seems like a sensible precaution.
Change #2: Bring the Sith in Earlier
I strongly believe that having the fall of the Republic political narrative be a central part of the Prequels was a good idea, since part of what you need to explain is why the Republic fell and the Empire took over. The execution, however, was less good. And part of that is that there’s a pretty hard swerve from local conflicts over tariffs and blockades and trade federations to the rise of the Emperor, so the initial reason for the Jedi to get involved in Naboo never makes much sense and the stakes of the conflict with the droid armies is too low to carry us through the trilogy.
So instead of going to Naboo to negotiate over trade, have Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan investigate whether the Sith are behind the rising Separatist movement. I would jettison the whole Rule of Two thing, because it doesn’t make sense that an entire Jedi Order of thousands of Jedi would think two Force-users are a galaxy-wide threat, and replace it with the idea that the Sith operate in independent cells of a master and two pupils (because Rule of Three) who go on to found their own cells, in a combination of pyramid scheme and underground organization, this hidden, omnipresent threat operating everywhere and nowhere at once.
This does a couple things:
- it better explains why the Jedi are so concerned with the Sith, and provides a longer-term explanation for the downfall of the Republic: rather than promoting the health of the Republic, the Jedi became obsessed with hunting down signs of Sith activity, which made different groups in the galaxy see their supposed defenders as violent religious fanatics, and allowed more subtle Sith like Palpatine to corrupt the Republic from the shadows. (And rising fear and hatred strengthens the Dark Side of the Force…)
- It gives a clear through-line from the trade conflict at Naboo to the Separatist/Clone War to the fall of the Republic: in each movie, the Jedi are looking to see whether the SIth are secretly behind some threat to the Republic. In Episode 1, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan encounter Darth Maul, who seems to prove that the Sith were involved, but they don’t find out who his master was; in Episode 2, Obi-Wan and Anakin are fighting the separatist movement, which Count Dooku’s involvement “proves” to be Sith-inspired, and the Clone War kicks off with Sith groups popping up all over the galaxy; in Episode 3, the Republic falls to a military coup that could only succeed because of the military build-up.
- It provides better context for Anakin’s fraught relationship with the Jedi Order: Qui-Gon is convinced that the self-taught Anakin is the Chosen One because the threat of the Sith makes the prophecy that much more important, the Jedi Order don’t trust Anakin because they’re afraid that he’s a Sith infiltrator, and it gives a better reason for Anakin to turn against the Jedi if he comes to see them as paranoid and oppressive.
- And this also fits in with what a big part of Anakin’s arc should be about, without everything having to be about his romance with Amidala. If Anakin was already a teenage prodigy when the Jedi found him, he’s already started using the Force (although he doesn’t intiially know what he’s doing) and using his emotions to give him strength, and Anakin should be especially good at the very physical stuff that the Dark Side is strong in: using the Force to speed up his reaction time, shoving boulders out of the way during Pod Races, etc.
- And so when Anakin becomes a Jedi in his own right, he should start making the argument that “balance” means using both the Light and the Dark Sides of the Force (which is also a nice thematic parallel to both Luke and Rey). This should gain him some acolytes, especially during the Clone War when fighting Sith makes some Jedi fight fire with fire, which helps explain how Darth Vader is later able to hunt down almost the entire order, but it also gives the Jedi a reason to fear him and even Obi-Wan a reason to doubt him, and a central tension: will Anakin maintain his precarious balance or fall? (It also sets up a nice parallel once again: Anakin chooses the dark over the light, Luke the light over the dark, Rey is the synthesis.) It’s a hell of a lot better than him being a fledgling fascist or fridging his mother to give him a reason to go bad.
Change #3: Give Amidala More To Do
Speaking of the political plot, one of the things that would give the political plot more meaning for the viewer is to give a lot more of it to Amidala and have her be more active in it. While Amidala gets to do some stuff – in Episode 1 she calls for a vote of no confidence in the previous Chancellor, bringing Palpatine to power, and works out an alliance with the Gungans; in Episode 2 she’s attacked and doesn’t actually get to act against the rising militarization of the Republic, although she does get to fight on Geonosis (which is a bit of a thematic contradiction), and then everything else is the romance; and then in Episode 3, she’s not allowed to do much.
Rather than this mish-mash, I’d have Amidala’s main arc in the Prequels be the foundation of the Rebel Alliance: have her be actively whipping votes against the creation of a standing army and the granting of emergency powers in Episode 2 (good time to bring in Bail Organa and Mon Mothma earlier and have them do more) and doing more to uncover the behind-the-scenes machinations that are driving the conflict; have her try to uncover Palpatine’s crimes and bring him to justice in Episode 3, only to be too late, and decide instead to create the Rebel Alliance, etc.
This also gives a better explanation for why the romance between her and Anakin falls apart without the need for Tuskan ethnic cleansing or wanton child murder: as Anakin gradually falls to the Dark Side through a combination of “ends justify the means” and fear/resentment for the Jedi, Amidala moves in the opposite direction as she fights against this same mentality in the increasingly militarized Republic and begins to see Palpatine as the true threat.
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