OK then, we’ve looked at ‘little Ani’ in the Phantom Menace, but what about ‘slightly older Ani’ from the other two prequels, in particular the second movie, Attack of the Clones. Does he get a bad deal too?

Let’s look at the actor first. As always, the choice of who played Anakin was in George Lucas’s hands, and he obviously spotted something in Hayden Christensen’s performance that appealed to him. It is true that in Episode II, Christensen’s Anakin comes across as slightly petulant and whiny, but isn’t that what the character’s supposed to be like? In the third movie he plays Anakin as a much darker character who’s been altered by the effects of war and his ever increasing progress to the dark side. 19 year-old Anakin is going to be a different character. He started his training later than most padawans and he feels held back by the Jedi and Obi Wan as he begins to realise just how powerful he can be. It’s clear that his devotion to the Jedi order is true, so is his love for Padme, and clearly the two forces will come into conflict. His character is impatient, angry, and impulsive, so not dissimilar to Darth Vader, who wouldn’t accept any excuses for not getting what he wanted immediately. Looking at his character as a progression from the child of Episode I to the crippled half-droid of Episode VI, there’s a clear picture drawn, into which 19 year-old Anakin fits neatly. Obviously, a petulant teenager isn’t exactly how we imagined a young Darth Vader, but if he’d gone around choking people at that age the Jedi might have noticed something was wrong a lot sooner.

Something that almost everyone who’s ever seen Episode II has pointed out: there’s some pretty bad lines. Much of the criticism is aimed at the exchanges between Anakin and Padme in particular, and I’ll deal with the subject of shaky dialogue in a later post. But let’s look now at Attack of the Clones.

Is the dialogue bad? In places, yes, though not all of it. And really, this is the main point that has to be given consideration: if you give someone a bad line, you can’t expect them to say it well, no matter how good an actor they are. George Lucas has a problem with making believable dialogue, and in the scenes between the young Jedi and Senator there are some moments that will grate, but even the worst is there for a purpose. Taking the infamous ‘I don’t like sand’ line, it’s clear that this is meant to illustrate the different ways of thinking between Padme and Anakin, and the difference in their lives. For Padme, brought up in the beautiful surroundings of Naboo, she sees sand as something soft and associated with long, warm summers. For Anakin, it can only be associated with the coarse, hard surroundings of his childhood as a slave on Tatooine. Really it’s quite a good metaphor for their differences, just wrapped up in some clumsy dialogue.

It’s clear, also, that George Lucas was looking for a way to mirror Luke from the original trilogy. They’re both great pilots, both come from Tatooine, they’re both impatient and arrogant, and both have trouble controlling their abilities as Jedi. They also start their training too late, though Luke is much later, but this can’t have helped Anakin.

While it wouldn’t be fair to blame Obi Wan for Anakin’s fall to the dark side, he probably wasn’t the best person to be his Jedi Master. He’d only just become a Jedi Knight himself before he was tasked with training one of the most difficult students the Jedi ever had. Mix that in with Obi Wan’s slightly rebellious teacher Qui Gon Jinn, and it’s clear that Anakin probably didn’t start out with the best role models for following the rules.

Whenever a great character who is not only well-loved, but also a true icon, is portrayed by someone else, there’s going to be some contention between fans as to how good they are. When he first stepped onto the Tantive IV, Darth Vader became a legend of pop culture. His power, his menacing height, his appearance, and just his general cool set him up as perhaps the biggest villain in cinema history. No one could hope for an easy job when they’re given the task of showing a much younger version of the character, before the mask and cape, before the fondness for choking anyone who annoyed him. To try and show that he was once a different person who was more vulnerable, more insecure, and also weave in just enough of Vader’s traits to make them a believable version of the character could be no easy job. Anakin didn’t end his life as an evil Sith lord, so there’s no reason to imagine he started it that way.