Maybe it's just me, but I read Owen as older than Anakin. Maybe not by much in the grand scheme of things, but old enough to have a different perspective on life than Anakin does. The original trilogy, like I said, seems to suggest young Anakin was the type of person liable to go off on a "damn idealistic crusade" Maybe the difference is merely temperamental, but if I were casting it, I would make Owen and Beru older than Anakin. If Anakin's ten, Owen's fourteen. If Anakin is sixteen, Owen is twenty, and possibly already married to Beru.
Maybe aging him up works after all. Like I said, I like the loss leads to insecurity leads to fascism idea the prequels have going on. But perhaps that could be replaced with a tale of idealism tainted by insecurity and fear. I think the eventual fall should at least partially stem from Anakin's belief that the Jedi have betrayed their own ideals, or that the order is fostering "injustice" rather than "Justice", this combined with a personal sense of betrayal on the part of the Jedi, and a gradual seduction on the part of the Dark Side, might make for an interesting series of movies. That is, what if Anakin's fall is a consequence of his early idealism, not a refutation of it? I like the idea of a teenager for this version of the future Darth Vader.
If we were to make the prequels more original trilogy friendly, I would change Naboo to Aldeeraan to demonstrate how "General Kenobi" defended that planet years before the original trilogy. At the very least one of the prequels should involve a "Battle for Aldeeraan".
That would make the prequels much more in line with what was foreshadowed, with one remaining exception. The Qui Gong Jinn problem. The original trilogy seems to strongly imply Yoda was Obi-Wan mentor. Since Jinn hadn't been thought of yet, he isn't mentioned or implied in the original trilogy. I know the official explanation is that Yoda trained Kenobi when the later was a child, handing him off to Qui Gong at a certain point. But Kenobi's lines in the original trilogy imply that Yoda was still training him when he was around Luke's age.
So, how do we reconcile the original trilogy's "Yoda trained Obi-Wan Kenobi" intent, with a meaningful death of Qui Gong Jinn at the close of the first movie? Perhaps, when the film opens Kenobi has just become a Jedi Knight. While Qui Gong didn't originally train Kenobi, he's a far more experienced Jedi than the new Jedi Knight. He still serves the function of an older mentor figure, since the film implies Obi-Wan has never "gone out in the field", so to speak, before. Qui Gong continually mentions that while, "Yoda has trained you well" Kenobi still has his faults as a Jedi. Another thing I would add is that when the pair return to Coruscant, perhaps there should be a quick line of dialogue referencing Kenobi's youthful recklessness, indicating that Obi-Wan accompanied Jinn against the better judgement of Yoda and the Council, and that Kenobi essentially insisted on tagging along. I'm bad with dialogue, I might be as bad a Lucas himself, but maybe the exchange could go like this.
"Join Qui Gong's mission, you should not have. Too dangerous for you it was. Experienced enough, you were not."
"With all due respect Master Yoda, I survived, didn't I?"
Last edited:
