The main theme in the Republic Trilogy is corruption. Promises are made and broken, or they are twisted against their original meaning. Let's look at each episode.
Episode I is mostly about innocence. Everyone thinks one-dimensionally, with the exception of Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Sidious.
- The Trade Federation Viceroy, as the movie proceeds, begin to regret their bargain with Sidious.
- Queen Amidala believes if she goes to the Senate, the rightness of her side will be enough win their support.
- Qui-Gonn is caught off guard when Watto is immune to Jedi mind tricks.
- Padme is shocked that Watto has slaves.
- Anakin is described as knowing "nothing of greed," and when he accepts that he must leave his mother behind, he promises to return and free her, too.
- When Darth Maul attacks Qui-Gon, it is unexpected because "the Sith have been extinct for a millennium".
- During the battle of Naboo, the Flagship is destroyed by Anakin basically by accident.
- Qui-Gon makes Obi-Wan promise to train Anakin, even after explicit instruction from the Council not to.
If the whole of Episode I seems a lot like the main characters bumbling around and making stupid choices, that's the point. This is what peace can do - it causes complacency and leaves us vulnerable to treachery. People take security for granted, and work to secure their own hand. In a small way, the arrival at Coruscation is an important Game of Thrones moment, where Padme's naivete is laid bare.
(The "..." are not bits of the dialogue being skipped. Instead, they indicate brief pauses in the dialogue.)
PALPATINE : ...the Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates who are only looking out for themselves and their home sytems. There is no interest in the common good...no civility, only politics...its disgusting. I must be frank, Your Majesty, there is little chance the Senate will act on the invasion. AMIDALA : Chancellor Valorum seems to think there is hope. PALPATINE : If I may say so, Your Majesty, the Chancellor has little real power...he is mired down by baseless accusations of corruption. A manufactured scandal surrounds him. The bureaucrats are in charge now.
While certainly not nearly as well done as in Game of Thrones, the political situation in the Senate prevents "the right" from prevailing. This is why slavery persists in the galaxy. The movie ends with a celebration over the liberation of Naboo but, in my absolutely favorite Star Wars fun fact, the music that plays is a version of the Emperor's Theme, a foreshadowing of what is to come. The board is set. Importantly, Qui-Gon, the only character on our side who seemed to be able to think multiple moves ahead, is gone.
Episode II is where some of the earlier promises start to get corrupted and broken. Naboo is safe, but Padme is being targeted by assassins. The Jedi spring into action. Obi-Wan follows the clues left by the assassins, and Anakin is tasked with protecting Padme. Obi-Wan's search quickly hits a dead end, and he's consistently told that if the Jedi Records can't identify it, then it cannot be identified, The Jedi are here proud and bureaucratic. It's cooler to think of them as they were in the Rebellion, but I think the Jedi Order is to Exiled Jedi as Police Departments are to Rogue Agents. The latter is cooler, but you need the former for a functioning society, even if it is just a lot of paperwork. Obi-Wan eventually stumbles upon the clone army, and the Jedi allow circumstances to evolve that the army is recruited by the Republic (Instead of remaining aloof and trying to view things more objectively). The Jedi, sworn to protect the Republic, plays a huge role in it's destruction.
Meanwhile, as Obi-Wan wrecks the Republic, Anakin is given a task he's entirely unable to handle. He's too attached to Padme, and not trained enough to resist his urges. He struggles throughout the movie with these feelings. While the way it's portrayed on screen is frankly sometimes awful (Sand, guys. Sand!), I think the story is still powerful. Anakin is placed in a situation he cannot win.
When Anakin's visions of his mother begin to overwhelm him, Padme offers to follow him to Tatooine, so he can visit her and also still protect her. This is in stark contrast to what Yoda tells Luke in Episode V, when he sees a vision of his friends in trouble.
LUKE: And sacrifice Han and Leia? YODA: If you honor what they fight for ... yes!
Luke doesn't listen, but that's besides the point. Anakin is being enabled to follow his emotions. And while this deepens the bond between Anakin and Padme, it has terrible consequences for Anakin.
Anakin's quest to save his mother fails. It's underplayed in the movies, but it's important to realize his mother is his only family, and that Anakin leaves Tatooine only when he promises to come back and rescue her. For him, freeing all the slaves is a big reason he became a Jedi. From the first movie:
ANAKIN: I had a dream I was a Jedi. I came back here and freed all the slaves...have you come to free us? QUI-GON: No, I'm afraid not... ANAKIN: I think you have...why else would you be here?
And later, when Anakin is leaving Tatooine
ANAKIN: I.. will become a Jedi and I will come back and free you, Mom...I
promise.
Anakin wants to become powerful and save everyone. But here he can't even save the one person he promised to rescue. And while Shmi (his mother) gets peace seeing her son again, watching her die gives Anakin no comfort at all. He retaliates by slaughtering the Tusken Raiders. He confides this in Padme, and acknowledges it was wrong, but
ANAKIN: I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!
Obi-Wan then sends a distress call that he has found a huge Battle Droid factory, and that he's been captured. Anakin wants to go help Obi-Wan but, when he forwards the message to the Jedi, they instruct him to protect Padme at all costs. He relents. Anakin oscillates between being headstrong and reckless and knowing his place. He could be a powerful Jedi with the right training.
But Padme, with good intentions, enables him again. She insists on going to help, and when Anakin says he's supposed to protect her, she says she's going to help him, and if he wants to protect her, then he should come with her. So they go.
The Jedi, meanwhile, are stuck between sacrificing one Jedi and allowing the separatists to continue to build their army unopposed, or sending the Jedi out to rescue Obi-Wan. Incredibly, they decide to attack. This is actually one part of the prequels that baffles me. It's a truly idiotic move that I can't possibly explain. It corners the Republic into either authorizing the Republic to use the Clone army (The source of which is still unknown) *or* risk their "keepers of the peace" being exterminated. Still, they do it. The Jedi, who are supposed to protect peace, are twisted to enable war.
Episode III is the simplest to pick apart. Everything comes crashing down. Anakin, with Palpatine's encouragement, essentially murders Count Dooku (Which, according to Sith principles, means he is Palpatine's new apprentice). While Yoda tries to get Anakin to accept death as a natural part of life, Palpatine exploits Anakin's fear of losing Padme like he lost his mother to lead him toward the Dark Side. He uses Anakin's frustration at the Jedi Council to recruit him to spy on the Jedi. When Mace Windu moves to kill Palpatine, Palpatine feigns weakness to force Anakin to act to save him. He does, Mace is killed, and Anakin must accept Palpatine as his master (Because the Jedi will never accept him again). All he asks for is the ability to save Padme.
Palpatine executes order 66, wiping out most of the Jedi. Obi-Wan discovers Anakin has turned and confronts Padme, who denies it, and flees to him. She finds he is alive, and when he tells her what he's done:
ANAKIN: I won't lose you the way I lost my mother! I've become more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of and I've done it for you. To protect you.
PADME: Come away with me. Help me raise our child. Leave everything else behind while we still can.
ANAKIN: Don't you see, we don't have to run away anymore. I have brought peace to the Republic. I am more powerful than the Chancellor. I can overthrow him, and together you and I can rule the galaxy. Make things the way we want them to be.
PADME: I don't believe what I'm hearing . . . Obi-Wan was right. You've changed.
ANAKIN: I don't want to hear any more about Obi-Wan. The Jedi turned against me. Don't you turn against me.
Anakin's plan is short-sighted, but it isn't evil. He wants to protect his family. Everything else is disposable. When Padme renounces him, he becomes angry again, and Force chokes her until Obi-Wan challenges him. Anakin, like many short-sighted men, reacts violently against his wife when she wrongs him - even though she is right.
The Republic is replaced by an Empire, and the Sith take over. The Jedi are vilified and security is vaulted above all other values. Luke and Leia are born, but the Republic is no more, and Anakin is now in the service of the Emperor. In short: Every glimmer of hope from Episode I has turned to shit. In many cases, steps the characters took to secure the Republic in fact led to it's demise.
So what about real life correlations. Unlike the Rebellion Trilogy, which was written specifically to protest the Vietnam War, the Republic Trilogy actually was not written as a direct criticism of any contemporary political events. While the comparisons to the War on Terrorism are startlingly clear, Phantom Menace came out in 1999. And while Attack of the Clones came out in 2002, most of the filming was completed in 2000, with reshoots in March 2001. As for Revenge of the Sith:
Before the movie was even released [to the public], people began making the connection between the War on Terror and Vader's declaration near the end of Revenge of the Sith, "You are either with me – or you are my enemy." Lucas, however, when asked if this was a reference to the War on Terror, said at the Cannes film festival, "When I wrote it, [the current war in] Iraq didn't exist. We were just funding Saddam Hussein, giving him weapons of mass destruction; we didn't think of him as an enemy at that point. We were going after Iran, using [Saddam] as our surrogate – just as we were doing in Vietnam. This really came out of the Vietnam era – and the parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable."
(Source)
For Lucas, this is the same kind of protest from the Vietnam era, just reassigned to modern day. But I think the movies still manage to make specific criticisms of the early years of the War on Terror.
Episode I and II can be seen as an allegory between how we were September 10th, 2001 and how we were at end of that year. There was peace. We were careless. We took security for granted. Suddenly there was an attack and we responded in the usual ways, unaware of the deeper consequences. Our army meant to protect peace proceeded to act more aggressively. We tried to determine where the attacks came from, but were grossly misled, and what results turns a bad situation so, so much worse.
If Obi-Wan and the Jedi represents out military and intelligence agencies, Anakin represents our commitment to our core values. The Patriot Act, the NSA, PRISM, Guantanamo were all actions taken to allay emotional feelings, but have since been shown to have had incredibly negative consequences. If 9/11 and Al Qaeda are the Emperor (Slowly manipulating things, edging both sides towards conflict), then these agencies represent how we played into their hand, instead of staying true to ourselves. Such is the downfall of Anakin, who allows a short-sighted desire to stop death to blind him to the long game of THE GALAXY. Similarly, can we stop every attack? No. We can either accept that some risk has to exist, or we can sacrifice everything in a vain effort. Of course, Padme still dies. All for naught.
If The Rebellion Trilogy represents smallness overcoming bigness - an inspirational story meant to uplift us, the Republic Trilogy is a cautionary tale about corruption and naively seeking absolutes in a complicated world (galaxy?). When we let our guard down, we risk everything. Thinking from 2005 to 2015, the world does not feel safer, and the terrorists do not feel less dangerous. Despite our best efforts, it feels we've only made things worse.
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