I waited in line for thirty-six hours to buy tickets to the 12:01 AM showing of Star Wars Episode I.  Well, I shouldn't say "waited in line" as much as "put a lawn chair in line to hold my spot while my friends and I crashed shopping carts together in the parking lot and did other inane shit while acting like dumbasses at three in the morning", but whatever.  The point is this - why would anyone in his right mind start off an update with such a horrible and embarrassing confession?

Well, it just so happens that I love Star Wars as well as most things that are Star Wars-related.  I'm not alone, though I know as well as anyone that it can be a difficult thing to admit to people.  Having said that, I should also admit that I didn't see Episode III until last Thursday afternoon, which was coincidentally the last day that it was showing in non-dollar movie theaters in the greater Boston-Cambridge area.  I had to trek out to freaking Fresh Pond theater, which is a little Buck Rogers set reject-looking craphole built in the 70s by underprivileged retards or something and located out by the dumpsters behind Stop & Shop and where your feet stick to the floor as soon as you step inside the building, but I figured that I owed it to myself to see the third movie no matter how bad I knew it was going to be.

Now perhaps my expectations had been severely lowered by all of the ridiculous backstories, midiclorians and retarded cameos in the first two shitburgers or maybe it was that I already knew ahead of time I would be watching a movie that looked like a three-hour long Xbox cutscene, but I have to admit that I didn't hate the third prequel nearly as much as I hated the first two.  I went in there fully expecting to have some material for an update about how shitty the prequels were, but I came out a little less pissed-off than I thought I would be.  I guess when you don't expect much, it's difficult to be let down.

One thing continues to bother me however... the fact that Anakin Skywalker throughout the prequels was nowhere near as badass as he could have been (and was in the original trilogy). 

A couple of years ago when I had heard that Lucas was going to do a prequel trilogy, I know for a fact that I was one of the first people to send in a headshot, resume and essay about how awesome I was and why I should play Anakin, but I never even got so much as a callback.  Instead, they cast this other kid who ended up being a total fucking disaster.

Well this week I have decided to let you, my esteemed readership, in on what I would have done differently had I been Anakin Skywalker and how much more the prequels would have ruled if they starred me and not some reject from Dawson's Creek.

As far as spoilers for this update, there probably are some... though if you were really interested in seeing the movie you probably already should have.  If you did happen to miss something, you can get completely caught up on the entire trilogy in about fifteen minutes by reading Rod Hilton's hilarious and excellent abridged scripts here:

Episode I:  The Phantom Menace - The Abridged Script

Episode II:  Attack of the Clones - The Abridged Script

Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith - The Abridged Script

Now, on to how I would have improved the character of Anakin Skywalker.

Holy shit, I can't believe how much time Anakin Skywalker spends crying about stupid pointless crap.  He's always bawling his fucking eyes out and saying shit like "Oh God, I miss my mommy" or "I can't believe these guys or trying to kill me, why don't they like me" or even something as lame as "Oh, I'm sad because I just choked my pregnant wife".  It's fucking ridiculous.  You're the Dark Lord of the motherfucking Sith - if Ike Turner can get over it, you can.  If you were so interested in caring about other peoples' feelings or whatever you probably shouldn't have spent so much time being a dick to everyone, dropkicking babies or turning to the Dark Side anyways. 

At one point, Anakin goes and works over a bunch of jackass computer-generated alien creatures and then his wife shows up and the camera closes in and shows that he's crying.  WTF?  Dude, get a hold of yourself.  SERIOUSLY.  I understand that there has to be some sort of gradual decline into evil, but this is ridiculous.  How are we supposed to take him seriously as a villain if he can't even make it ten minutes without crying and complaining about how much his pussy hurts?

I never cry for any reason because I'm an emotionless automaton and I like it that way.  I just get pissed.  And if I were Anakin, I would have been awesome.  There wouldn't have been any of that wussy "ouch, my feelings!" crap.  If the Jedi Council or the Emperor or whoever was like, "kill these dudes because they're bitches" I'd be all like, "hell yeah, motherfucker.  Want me to punch this chick in the face while I'm at it?  Got any dogs around you want me to kick?"  And when the Sand People killed my mother, I wouldn't fall to my knees like a pussy and be like "oh why, God, WHYyyyyy!!!!", I'd just completely flip out and start trashing bozos and pulling off peoples' faces with my bare hands.  When I was finished with that I'd go kick someone in the nutsack for no reason at all.

And I'd do it all without crying.

Long-haired swordsmen whose souls are tortured by the darkness of their feelings are only cool in Japan and other places that like crap that sucks.  Now I know George Lucas is all like, "check out my awesome directing - you can see how much time has elapsed between movies because look at how much longer Anakin's hair is", but that damned mullet has GOT to go.  Anakin in Episode III looks like he's better suited to put on Top Gun sunglasses and a Dale Earnheardt jacket to go hang out at a truckstop with a mouthful of chaw and his pregnant underage cousin/girlfriend than he is to rule the galaxy as Darth Vader.  I suppose it's an improvement over that gay-ass hair braid that he was sporting in the second film that made him look like a mix between Pipi Longstockings and a My Little Pony, but it's still fucking lame.  Get a real haircut, you damned tree-hugging nuclear warfare-hating hippy!  The fact that you have a mullet completely negates all the cool hardass points you receive from having a wicked facial scar! 

Now I have a haircut that you can really set your watch to.  I just wake up, take a small amount of pomade and rub it in there.  It takes about ten seconds and I don't end up looking like I should be driving a pickup truck with a rebel flag on it through a Wal-Mart parking lot while blaring Hank Williams and chewing on a hayseed.  Before that, I had a buzz cut.  Easy.  Walk into the haircut place, tell them "number 3" and you're out of there in about thirty-eight seconds.  It even sounds badass, because it had the word "buzz" in it.  Like "buzz saw" or "buzz bomb".  It's just tough.  Plus, nobody accidentally mistakes you for a girl when they see you from behind.  So not only would I be a more badass Anakin, but I also have more masculine hair than the guy they picked.  Jerks.  But I'm not bitter.

On an unrelated note, Anakin also seems to suffer from the same "purple lips syndrome" as A-Rod.  What's up with that?

Mullet Vs. No Mullet

When I saw Anakin Skywalker and his girlfriend rolling around in a field wishing upon distant stars and making necklaces out of fucking dandilions in Episode II I very nearly wretched up my cranberry juice and punched the person sitting next to me in the theater.  THIS is the man who would destroy all the Jedi and dominate the entire known galaxy?  This dude who is holding hands with his girlfriend and skipping through the tall grass while cartoon bunny rabbits hop alongside them and sparrows merrily chirp out their songs?

That shit would not fly with me.  Hell no.  I would be a kickass Anakin Skywalker because I'd sweep all kinds of chicks off their feet and I'd do it in far more manly ways than having a picnic in the park on a cool April afternoon, putting on mud masks and making potpourri from crushed flowers or sticks whatever the hell out make that shit out of.  No, I think I've learned a thing or two about what chicks like, and it certainly ain't prancing around like a fairy or crying your eyes out about how much you miss your mom.

Anakin and Padme, seen here being completely fucking lame.

First off we'd go to a monster truck rally or a Demolition Derby or something, because watching cars get crushed and catch on fire really makes girls crazy like nothing else.  Then, I'd put my awesome Force powers to some good use by Force Choking anybody who looked at her funny.  Imagine the potential of that for a minute... if she leans in and whispers, "that dude is checking me out" or "she's really dressed like a skank", you can just choke the shit out of them from the other side of the street and both of you could get a good laugh at it.  Then when she points at somebody on the sidewalk and asks you if you could kick his ass, you can be like, "hell yeah, wanna see?" - It's as effective as using your Force Telekinesis to pull her shirt right off, only without all the nasty "aggrivated sexual battery" charges!

There's lots of other shit you can try that would be just as effective and a lot less fruity that an afternoon skipping around the Nature Trail Planet.  You could take her out for drinks, or go to a baseball game... you could even buy her some incense.  It's a scientific fact that the chemical compound in incense messes with womens minds and makes them want to take their clothes off.  If all that fails, you can always just try yelling at her until she agrees to be your girlfriend.  Or do what I did with Hot Andrea;  get down on your knees and BEG her do go out with you and don't leave her alone until she relents.

Jedi Knight Amazing Ben gets all kinds of chicks.
Because he's so hot.

In the end of Episode II, Anakin gets his hand cut off by Count Dooku in a climactic battle which features a computer-generated Yoda doing backflips and using a lightsaber.  There are so many things wrong about that sentence that I think my head is in danger of exploding into tiny fragments of solidified disbelief, misery and anger at any moment and then impacting my aortic artery.  Even thinking about that scene makes me want to barf (in a bad way). 

Anyways, after Anakin gets his hand chopped off, of course he rolls around on the ground like a pansy and whines about how much his arm hurts and how he'll never play piano or drink raspberry-flavored jasmine tea again with full pinky extension or whatever it is that total wusses bitch about when they get their appendages amputated by Christopher Lee.  Well like any person with two brain cells to rub together he feels compelled to get a new hand created but instead of being completely rad to the maxxx and getting a pirate hook for a hand, he gets a completely functional cybernetic hand that looks remarkably more sophisticated than the fake hand Luke Skywalker gets, despite the fact that this film is supposed to take place several years before The Empire Strikes Back.  But that's a different story altogether.  And that was a hell of a sentence.  Anyways, here's the hand:

Anakin, seen here crying into his fake arm because he lost his favorite Tori Amos CD
and that's just too much suffering for one man to bear.

It looks sort of like a cross between C-3PO's forearm and the Nintendo Power Glove.  I guess it's functional or whatever, but it's still pretty boring, generic and a little lame.

Now first off, I would never allow my hand to be cut off by a guy whose name sounds like a word that a little kid would use instead of "shit".  However, Christopher Lee is pretty much awesome and he's the consummate villain (sort of like the Gary Oldman of the 21st century), plus it seems to be somewhat ingrained into Star Wars tradition that at some point in every single Jedi's career they must have their right hand chopped off, so I guess you have to be prepared for anything.  However, you can bet your sweet Aspercreme that I wouldn't be getting a generic hunk of metal shit attached to my arm to replace my hand even if it is capable of fully interacting with my copy of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! or picking up heavy objects or something.  No, I would certainly get a much more badass attachment to replace my severed arm:

Who wants some?

From the original movies, you sort of got the impression that Darth Vader traveled the galaxy hunting down Jedi Knights and systematically exterminating them.  You were lead to believe that there was a large war between the Jedi and the Empire in which Vader, being the incredibly powerful Jedi that he was, dominated all those who opposed him and essentially single-handedly hunted down and destroyed the entire Jedi order like the super omega fucking badass that he was.

In the prequels, you have lots of footage of the fucking clone troopers wasting all the Jedi with their rifles while Anakin slaughters unarmed moderately-Asian-and-definitely-fake-looking Trade Federation leaders and cries.  When the Imperial forces storm the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, the clone soldiers blast the shit out of all the Jedi Knights while Anakin completes the difficult task of murdering a room full of children.  THAT's how he became feared throughout the galaxy?  By ordering his soldiers to shoot Jedi and decapitating a couple of ten year-olds?  I mean, I'm not exactly opposed to killing kids (especially that annoying bitch that wouldn't shut the fuck up at the Red Sox game last weekend), but I'm not going to give you any respect as a badass until you show me something impressive.  The only honest-to-God Jedi Knights Anakin faces are Count Dooku and Obi-Wan, and he ends up getting his shit completely wrecked by both of them.

Well, I guess he kills Dooku the second time he faces him, but that guy is like three times his age, so I can't say I'm impressed.  I mean, I'd be a little worried if he couldn't kick the ass of a sixty year-old man.  Honestly.

Also - since when can Imperial Stormtroopers hit anything with their lasers, and how did they get tough enough to kill Jedi?  Last time we saw them they were bumping their heads into the walls of the Death Star, firing thousands of shots but miraculously missing Luke, Leia and Han, and getting the shit kicked out of them by three foot tall teddy bears that were armed only with spears, rocks and moderately sharp sticks.  I have a hard time believing that they could destroy battle droids, let alone Jedi Knights.  Maybe when they redesigned their helmets between Episodes 3 and 4 they forgot to put in eyeholes so the soldiers could see or something.

Yeah, well anyways fuck Order 66.  If I were Anakin Skywalker, I would use my supposedly strong Jedi Sense to hunt and kill all the Jedi myself because that's what a real hardass would do.  I don't think you can trust a job like that to other people.  Plus, that would really get your name out there as someone to fear and you could honestly claim that you personally destroyed the Jedi instead of making other people do it and then taking credit for their work.  I guess the difference between me and the Anakin from the prequels is that I'd be a bad enough motherfucker to actually KILL a Jedi Knight.  And I would.  Except for that one alien Jedi chick with the green skin.  She's hot.  I'd at least give her the chance to join up before I destroyed her.

Darth Ben getting ready to destroy some Jedi Bitches.

Is it just me or does the Emperor give off sort of a creepy molester vibe when he's talking to Anakin?  He's always like, "Hey, I've got something that you really want here... just do something for me and you can have it...".  I don't know.  It's just a feeling I got whenever I saw the two of them together.  You can rest assured that I wouldn't be the fucking Emperor's boy-toy or whatever.  If he pissed me off, I'd shiv him when he wasn't looking.  I'm just hard like that.  I'm like Gary Sheffield with a lightsaber.

"Hey, want to come to my chambers?  I've got candy..."

Poor Anakin.  He spends the entire movie trying to do what he feels is the right thing and all of a sudden oops! he's a Dark Jedi.  I hate it when that happens.  It's ok though, despite the fact that he's essentially pure evil in 99% of the original trilogy it's now obvious that his intentions were in the right place.  He was just so in love with his wife that he had to obliterate everyone that crossed his path.  He was totally just a victim of circumstance.

Fuck that.  If I were Anakin Skywalker, I wouldn't play it like that.  Fuck the whole side-plot about his premonitions of Natalie Portman dying during child birth.  I think I would just get so pissed about having my hand cut off and getting my ass kicked by Christopher fucking Lee at the end of the second movie that I would turn to the Dark Side, become super-strong and get my revenge on him because no wicked old dude is going to get away with whupping my ass and because that Force Lightning shit is bad as all hell.  Plus, if I were as tough as Anakin seems to believe he is and I kept getting dissed by the Jedi Council, heads would roll.  I'd show them who's "not ready to be a Jedi Master" when I shoved a lightsaber or two up their asses.

All of these are legitimate reasons to turn to the Dark Side and are infinitely less retarded and inane than "accidentally" becoming evil while trying to do what you think is the right thing and then just being like, "well fuck it, I've already started down the dark path so why not..."

Seriously.

Since we're changing around the character of Anakin here, we should go ahead and do it with Obi-Wan as well, I suppose, since the chemistry would be all fucked up otherwise.

Well who better to play the role than J. Catfood, my mentor and equal in battle who I would ultimately destroy only to be bested by his protogeé and then we could chill in the afterlife.  It's perfect. 

Not to mention the fact that J. Catfood was sporting an Obi-Wan beard even before Ewan MacGregor made it cool:

In his duel with Obi-Wan, Anakin does a wicked pro wrestling-style double-leg dropkick.  It's pretty rad, but I think that I could push it to the limit if I was given the opportunity.  Not only would I destroy the Jedi with my lightsaber, but I'd be Diamond Cutting, Pedigreeing, Tornado DDTing and Top-Rope Frankensteinering any motherfucker who looked at me funny.  They'd never see it coming.  Plus, I'm a master of the Diamond Cutter.  I can do it from any position.

Anakin cheap-shots Samuel L. Jackson when he's not looking.  While I'm not against this per se, I think you would have to be out of your damn mind to try and mess with him because if you don't ABSOLUTELY and COMPLETELY kill him in one shot, you are FUCKED.  Honestly.  He'll wipe your stupid ass off the face of the galaxy. Also, I sort of noticed that he was exhibiting some Dark Side tendencies when he was going to kill the Emperor, so why not try to turn him?  Could you imagine rolling around town with Darth Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson wasting idiots and Jedi dipshits who were fucking dumb enough to cross you?  It would rule.  It would be like the beginning of Pulp Fiction but with more choking people and Force Lightning and fewer Scientologists.

Obi-Catfood, Benakin and Jules Windu get ready to fuck some shit up.

SPOILER - At the end of the movie, Anakin puts on the black suit and becomes Darth Vader. 

I bet you didn't see that one coming.  Anyways, when he checks out his suit, he's like, "where's that bitch I was choking earlier?  Is she OK?" and the Emperor's like, "No you dumbass, you fucking killed her," and Vader gets pissed, yelling "NOOOOOOOoooooo!!!!!" and possibly crying inside his helmet.

If I got to wear the bitchin' Vader suit it would rule.  I'd be a little like Anakin from the movie though in the sense that I'd be like "holy shit, how'd I get my legs chopped off and then magically grow six inches and why is my new voice so much radder than my old one?", but ultimately it would rule.  I would throw a bitchen Death Star Dance Party to celebrate how awesome my new getup is, which would simultaneously help me get over the fact that I'm transitioning into a new phase in my life and would also act as a send-off party for my campaign to hunt down and either exterminate or turn all the remaining Jedi in the galaxy.  I'd invite Aerosith, too, because they kick ass.

If I were Vader, I'd get a keg tap built into my suit.

Darth Vader is one of the most badass characters in movie history.  He was the pinnacle of evil and was completely unstoppable.  In the end, it was only the power of the Emperor that vanquished him, and only because he could not bring himself to turn on his own son.  He was mysterious, powerful and ruthless.  Maybe it was the mystery around him that made him so awesome, or maybe it was the fact that we never saw him sitting in a field of daisies playing grabass with an eighteen year-old girl and crying because he accidentally stepped on a grasshopper, but nevertheless his reputation as an unstoppable killing machine and a total badass was hurt pretty badly by the prequel trilogy.  It's a little bit depressing.

If I were in Anakin Skywalker's shoes for the prequel trilogy, shit would have been a lot more badass.

"Dude, give me some money or I will choke you!"