QUOTE (Vwing @ Feb 3 2004, 02:54 PM)
Again, even if you hated the Ewoks and everything else in JEDI, how could you not like what they did the Vader, Luke, and Emperor characters?
I didn't like what Lucas did with the Vader/Emperor/Luke scene because it is terrible, repetitive and boring. Between the two of them, Vader and the Emperor tell Luke something like six times that he underestimates "the power of the Dark Side" and that turning to the Dark Side is his "destiny." The Emperor repeatedly invites Luke to give in to anger and hate, because apparently if you are ever angry, even if the anger is justified, or if you ever hate, even if the thing you hate is evil, then the Dark Side will forever get you and you will turn into a mass murderer in the service of the Emperor. It apparently worked just this way with Anikin/Vader, and the Emperor has no worry that it ought to work just fine with Luke as well. There's some yammering on this topic, and then Luke and Vader fight for a while, with the Emperor stupidly cackling in the background about swelling hatred and flowing anger. At one point he says "Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon! Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey toward the Dark Side will be complete." It's all like a bad pitch for a time share, but with more swordplay and no buffet.
The film spends a lot of time here, cross-cutting with the forest moon raid and the space battle, and this of course is where the complaint comes in about repetitiveness. Every time they come back to the trio, they're labouring over the exact same question. Luke says "No; I think if I'm going to pay that kind of money, I need at least four weekends, and better pool access." The Emperor mentions the spa. Vader threatens to walk out, since he's meeting a couple from Kennelworth at noon. Luke waffles for a bit, but won't commit.
All of this timekilling draws attention to just how ridiculous the conflict really is. Luke should be dead here. He has surrendered himself to the Emperor, and is alive and talking only to indulge Vader. We are sold -agressively- the idea that the Dark Side is a quagmire out of which Luke could never return. If we don't believe this, then it is entirely stupid that Luke can't just get angry, kill the Emperor, and then recant and be good again. It's equally ridiculous that the Emperor believes this plan of getting the kid mad will work. It's only if this is the sort of thing that *can* work that I will believe it's worth the risk for the Emperor. Otherwise, this is a classic case of the big bad guy putting the hero near the kill switch that turns all of his robots off, or or talking for too long with a gun in his hand, unaware that the rescue is on its way. So giving in to anger and embracing the Dark *should* be a one-way street. Naturally it's a bit of a curve ball that Vader turns into a nice white guy at the end, all apologetic and totally capable of killing the Emperor by tossing him from a height, something that didn't even kill Luke when he was a novice. After this act of anger, Vader takes off his mask (the true source of all his evil) and dies all happy and proud of his son. He escaped the Dark Side long enough to kill a man with his bare hands, and now he's cured. Apparently, if you give in to anger once, you become evil, but if you give in while you're already evil, you become good again. It's like STAR WARS suddenly started to borrow plot ideas from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.
That's what I didn't like about the interaction between those characters.
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But as a general observation, I think the worst idea Lucas ever had was to make the big villain and the big hero the same guy. This isn't GORMENGHAST, ELRIC, or even INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. Lucas just wasn't up to the task of making a tragic hero/villain, and in case anyone out there ever wants to do it, the way you do it is to make the hero/villain the main character of the story and you stay with him, thick and thin. Lucas established Vader as the bad guy in all three OT films, even the third one, where he converts back to good. We never got any idea of his motive, or what kept him on the road of evil. Trying to make him a tragic figure after the fact without ever once characterizing him was like making Maul the big villain of TPM and giving him no more than a throw-away line. It's just not something you can buy without meeting him far more than halfway.
The fact is that Lucas wrote himself into a corner with the big reveal in EMPIRE. Once he had Vader = Luke's dad, he didn't know where to go. And he went somewhere I wouldn't have expected of a high school kid in a creative writing class.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).