Before the return of the mythical villain of the ‘Star Wars’ saga, I debate whether we are facing news or sacrilege.
Darth Vader has returned and I don’t know if we are facing news or sacrilege. The return of the mythical villain of the ‘Star Wars’ saga has been one of the highlights of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series for Disney Plus, in addition to the obvious fact that Ewan McGregor unearthed his lightsaber from the burning sands of Tatooine. They say that initially the enemy was going to be Darth Maul, but when it comes to recovering characters, it is better to throw the house out the window and do it in a big way. McGregor was back, yes; but Hayden Christensen too. Since ‘Return of the Jedi’, the knight in black armor, cape, metallic voice and deep breathing had been kept in the relics cabinet and it was only taken out for very specific occasions and out of fear that someone might break it while playing with it. Lest she take to clenching her fist to choke from a distance while he was saying “your lack of faith in him is annoying” (Insert Vader’s breath at the end of this sentence).
Although there are those who have been disappointed with the Obi Wan Kenobi series, it is an indisputable fact that Vader has returned in style and that the future of the galactic saga is on tv. The series created by Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau have weighed more in the future of the franchise than the multimillion-dollar sequels of the Abrams era. His episodes have cameos and moments destined to hit the fan’s heart hard and make him fall at his feet. The Obi-Wan series has known add new details to things that the movies told us, with the utmost respect for the ideas of George Lucas.
When the prequels were announced in the 1990s, the promise of seeing Vader in all his glory kept fans hooked on their seats. In the end, there were a few scenes at the end of Episode III that left many more than satisfied. The moment the black helmet adheres to his head and we hear the Dark Lord of the Sith’s deep breath again gave us goosebumps. The circle was closed by completing the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. Film by film, we had known a new trait of the villain and finally we had the complete drawing, giving it a tragic background. One of the problems with these prequels was the fact that Hayden Christensen generated waves of hate and that the internet was not as active then as it is now.
Since the beginning of the saga, Marvel and ‘Star Wars’ have inspired each other and have drunk from each other. If at the beginning of the classic trilogy, Vader seemed inspired by Doctor Doom from ‘The Fantastic Four’, the efforts to humanize the villain made him more of a kind of galactic Magneto who was corrupted by the tragedies of his life and led to the wrong. Of course, always making it clear that there was a possibility of redemption. When Disney announced that they would make a new trilogy that would continue the story after ‘Return of the Jedi,’ we soon realized that the main problem was that Vader was not. The mantle of villain was inherited by Kylo Ren, a bad guy for the times of the nini generation. A spoiled brat who lets himself be dominated by his tantrums and without tragic background. Adam Driver generated a lot of hate in his role as Kylo Ren, but the problem was never in his character, but in the scripts of the third trilogy. And that’s when ‘Rogue One’ and its shocking final scene arrived to discover that we didn’t want decaffeinated Vaders or substitutes. We wanted him totally unleashed, as Lord of Evil and without internal struggles.
In the documentary ‘I’m your father’, the Mallorcan directors Marcos Cabotá and Tony Bestard tried to do justice to the figure of the actor David Prowse, that stranger under Vader’s helmet in the classic trilogy and whom we neither saw nor heard. James Earl Jones was the one who put the voice in the original version and when the character took off his helmet they changed him for another interpreter. In the Obi-Wan series, it’s Hayden Christensen who hides behind the black uniform and we don’t hear his voice either because James Earl Jones speaks for him again. A flashback scene allows us to meet again with the actor, whose career was cursed after his intervention in the saga. In the version dubbed into Spanish we can no longer count on the unmistakable voice of our sadly missing Constantine Romero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnOhoUFe9m8
In Obi-Wan, we’ve seen that Anakin Skywalker hasn’t yet completed his journey to being the ultimate villain. It is not because there is an internal struggle or because there is any humanity left inside. Is that yet tries to control his anger and impulsiveness. He is still a little bit that little boy who irritated the haters, without the cold blood that made him end the life without blinking of the subordinates who failed him. That haste makes him make mistakes and underestimate his opponents. And by the end of the series Obi-Wan has learned the hard way that he still can’t outdo his master, no matter how much he sold his soul to the devil. He has also served us to delve into that phrase that Obi-Wan said to Luke Skywalker: “Darth Vader killed your father“And that it does not seem like a script hole. Now it is a matter of time to see if the writers sit down to look for new untold stories between episodes III and IV. Although at the moment we have a few premieres of ‘Star Wars’ pending ahead The first of them is Andor, the prequel to ‘Rogue One’, which will hit our screens next month, while for Ashoka we will still have to wait until next year. The Force is with us.