I wonder if it would be too jarring to splice in footage from either incarnation of Clone Wars, in order to better establish that some people ever actually thought Anakin was a hero.
Probably, but obfuscation really is your friend here: the audience has to assume that Anakin acts more or less the same all the time as he does onscreen. If you expose more of his positive actions (which are admittedly rare but present in the movies) the audience can go ahead and believe that, pre-fall, he wasn't a huge jerk.
Which of course the opposite can be true too: Show too much of Anakin being a huge jerk and nothing else and it's reasonable to assume that he's just a huge jerk all the time. That's a major reason why I think Kid Anakin is important. If Teen Anakin was well-played then I'd say the Kid could be excised, but.
The Yippee! stuff doesn't make him more relatable, it makes him LESS relatable.
The point isn't really to make him relatable. I don't even think he
should be relatable. He exists in the universe merely as an example of an idealist being trampled and turned by an innately broken system into a monster. Making him a bit of a caricature of himself at the start helps, or at least, it's one of the better options given the source material.
And it doesn't lend itself toward the "YOU WERE MY BROTHER!" bit at all.
Sure it does. Anakin is Obi-Wan's dippy, immature, excitable little brother, even as a teenager, and Obi-Wan cares for him as such.
Remember, it's Obi-Wan's story, not Anakin's.
He's the one who learns lessons and teaches them to the next generation. Darth Vader just throws a guy down a hole.
7. Make it so that Anakin's fall isn't Palpatine's plan from the start, it just sort of happens. Easiest way to do this: Keep the beheading of Christopher Lee, but remove Palpatine goading Anakin into doing it. All of a sudden the situation goes from "Everything has gone exactly as I planned" to "Uh, wow... well I guess just lost another apprentice. Hey, who IS this guy anyway?"
Interesting. Don't know that I think weakening the Emperor as mastermind is the way to go, but it's got its advantages.
Arguable that it actually weakens him. We see him quickly and subtly spinning various unfortuitous circumstances to his advantage. To a lot of people, that's the sign of a
really good strategist, and it fits with his M.O. in the later movies - the Death Star blowing up and Vader's increasing lack of competence become things he uses (or tries to) to his advantage.
It certainly makes him seem like like more of a credible threat in general than if we're to believe that his plans only come together when everything he gambles on just happen to go his way, and that the moment something unexpected happens he ends up getting thrown down a hole.
It'd run a bit counter to the "get the whole thing under 90 minutes" goal.
Assuming your goal is to make a movie and not just tell a better story. Eh.
