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[bryant]

In my Episode III, Palpatine's temptation of Anakin is mirrored by Count Dooku's struggle with his own desire for redemption. As Palpatine is to young Anakin, so Yoda is to his best student, Count Dooku. Count Dooku is the man he pretended to be in Episode II.

The movie has a tighter focus: Obi-Wan and Anakin pursuing Dooku against the backdrop of the Clone Wars. (None of this nigh-instantaneous transport between star systems.) This, too, is a mirror: this time we're reflecting the pursuit of Luke and Leia. Dooku moves from system to system, just ahead of the Jedi, directing his grand strategy from behind the scenes. He is still Palpatine's creature; the Clone Wars are still orchestrated. But he has potential.

Somewhere along the line, and it's part of Palpatine's temptation, Anakin dons the armor. It's not because he's horribly scarred, although he knows that use of the armor will scar him as it draws upon his life force. It's because he can't catch Dooku without it. He needs this crutch before he can fulfill the orders of the Jedi Council. Obi-Wan is outraged. Palpatine is smiling.

In the third act, Obi-Wan and Anakin catch up with the Count. He disarms Obi-Wan with ludicrous ease. Dooku is the best Jedi duellist of his generation, and he has a real claim to the title of the single best lightsaber duellist ever to pass through this galaxy. Obi-Wan watches, pinned, while Dooku and Anakin duel. Anakin is almost up to the task. But not quite. Anakin reaches to the Dark Side, finally, his final surrender in the face of certain death. Dooku cannot allow this: he cannot allow another Jedi to go down the path he foolishly chose. It's the moment of Anakin's failure and the moment of Dooku's redemption and there is no turning back. Dooku slays Anakin rather than allow him to become a monster.

But what now? Dooku could perhaps win the Clone Wars. If he does that, he shatters the Republic. He could allow himself to be defeated, but then Palpatine wins. He cannot return to the Jedi Council, because there is no turning away from the Dark Side.

He makes the only choice. He dons the armor; he seals himself into it, knowing that he cannot be released short of death. He turns back to Palpatine, with another name. He's the only person who could carry out such a deception; had he not already turned to the Dark Side, living such a lie would surely bring him there.

Decades later, he will gently tease Luke, the son he never had, into reaching his potential. He will, in the end, see the Emperor killed. Nobody will ever know who he was, and he can't admit it even at the end: to do so would be to shatter Luke, after all. Yoda will die thinking that Dooku was never redeemed.

The real Episode III was pretty good. There's one scene made up completely of cut shots, back and forth between two principles, that works amazingly well. (Then Lucas reuses the technique and drains the life of it, but oh well.) The lightsaber duels are very good. The dialogue is laughably bad, worse than anything in any other Star Wars movie. Best of the prequel trilogy by a long shot and possibly better than Return of the Jedi.

Comments

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I think your story is much, much better. Granted, I have yet to see the movie — and probably never will — but I was caught off guard by the Dooku-becomes-Darth-Vader thing, and this is mere writing. I'm sure in a movie I would have been absolutely, and thrillingly, shocked.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Why is there so much bile for RotJ lately? Is it just the Ewoks? Is it, "It's a trap!"?

[bryant]

I'm not entirely sure that it doesn't undercut the narrative thrust of the first trilogy. But since I find Christopher Lee a more compelling actor than Hayden Christensen, I'm also not sure I care.

[kodi]

I can't in good faith have bile for RotJ - I have fallen asleep in the exact same spot each of the three times I've tried to watch it. For me, the sequence of events in RotJ is (uh, spoiler warning):

Luke rescues Han.
Yoda dies.
Ewoks plan to eat everyone.
[I fall asleep, and wake up as:]
Ewoks cheer, credits roll.

It's actually a pretty satisfying movie.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Excellent. wordwolf posted a great synopsis of his own boss alternate prequel trilogy a while back (maybe even when Episode II was in theaters?). And of course I had my singing cowboy version. :)

I decree that everybody must write their own version of how they would have written Star Wars!

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

I want to see Wes Anderson's Star Wars. That was actually pretty much the first concious thought I had this morning. Think about it! The love scenes would be even more awkward, but in a good way!

[bryant]

Who's biling? I thought RotS was pretty good -- I didn't mean to imply I thought RotJ was bad per se.

I do think that looking back on it you can see where the Jar Jar rot started to set in, so that kind of colors my thoughts, but it wasn't too awfully bad.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

That's the version where Darth Vader's helmet has an antenna so he can get a little music piped in while he's busy going about force choking!

That would be AWESOME.

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine pointed out that Luke knew Vader was his father because he looked into his heart and knew it to be true. Why would the Force lie to him?

...so yeah. I think it would undercut it.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I would have put Terry Gilliam in charge.

I have no idea what the results would have looked like, except that stuff like Jar Jar Binks would suddenly make sense.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've done a little of this myself in the past and agree it's a tad overdone. I think it's a couple of things.

While Return of the Jedi is fine popcorn, Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back were both better (for different reasons), and it obviously rehashes a lot of the plot elements of Star Wars in bigger but weaker form. In a sense, it was Star Wars: The Special Edition before there was a Special Edition. In 1983, when home video was still just getting started, that wasn't such a bad thing to see. It was nice to have another, flashier version of Star Wars with some nice dramatic bits at the climax and a mega-happy ending. At the time it was actually my favorite of the trilogy; I liked happy endings.

What made it seem worse was the Special Edition re-releases, which returned the original movies to theaters close together in time. That made me resent Return of the Jedi a bit; while not all the CGI and editing changes were good, I'd greatly enjoyed the re-releases of the first two movies, and it was a letdown to see how much worse Return of the Jedi was. I'd never really realized it before then.

The other thing is that's fun to make the counterintuitive statement that one of the prequel films is actually better than one of the original ones, and RotJ is the obvious target if you're going to do that. I said it myself about Attack of the Clones. I was probably wrong-- Clones' plot is pointless tosh even by Star Wars standards-- but it's at least a very pretty and exciting movie, and since those are also RotJ's good qualities maybe it makes sense to compare them on those purely surface terms.

As for Sith, comparing it to the original trilogy in relative quality is so apples-and-oranges that I'm not going to do it, except to say that Star Wars is still my favorite. Sith's good and bad points were pretty different from the original films'.