Top 5 Things why PT worked for me!

[Broccoli Shrapnel]

I'm intrigued. I never read the novelisations. It sounds like they are more successful at telling the story than the films are. I just don't know if that could make the films seem any better or if it should.

In my mind, I let the books fill in the internal workings of the characters.

A great movie would make the characters' motivations and rationalizations for their behaviors apparent, but Lucas is really a "big picture" kind of guy. He can plot where he wants the story to go, but he's not good at writing or filming character development, aside from American Graffiti, which conveys a nice bit of emotion (but has a timeline of only a single night), and the original Star Wars--just think of Luke staring out at the Tatooine suns.

I think when Lucas tried to pull that same moment with Anakin--when he is staring in tears out at Mustafar--the audience is stuck in this mindset: "If Anakin is so upset with himself that he's tearing up, why does he continue to be a Sith? And how does he go from being so conflicted in this scene to about a minute later when he's strangling Padme and telling Obi-Wan the Jedi are evil."

Compare this to the novelization, where I seem to remember the author focusing on how the war has just drained Anakin, that he's seen so much killing and had to make war-strategy decisions like letting certain people die b/c it made strategic sense. Then, when you think that he kills a couple younglings, it's not so bad if it ends a war where young people are dying all the time in the name of the "greater good."

I think that line in AOTC where he says to Padme--paraphrasing--that a dictator is better than bureaucrats that do nothing really plays out in his later decision-making. After fighting in a war for years, in a galaxy that was corrupt before Palpatine even began the staging of the war (which Anakin has to have figured out by the time he is on Mustafar, as well as the fact that Palpatine is largely responsible for all the attempts on Padme's life), Anakin has to be justifying to himself that even a dictator will be more stable than the Jedi who are incredibly indecisive + Palpatine can help him save Padme. It's the war that weighs a lot on him, and the movie barely reflects the horrors of war, despite the opening line of ROTS being "War!"

Maybe I'm romanticizing the novel, but I seem to remember it being a lot less awkward. Now I feel like I should read it again.

 

[abake]

Actually the one key scene that gave me a lot of insight into Anakin's state of mind throughout ROTS is right at the beginning, when he wants to save the clones who are escorting him and Obi Wan, but Obi doesn't let him.
That bit right there showed how important saving lives was to Anakin, and how inhumane the Jedi's decisions sometimes seemed.

 

[TheGent]

Yep, Anakin saving clones against other orders is shown more than once in SWTCW.

 

[Darksider]

Realistically ROTS needed to be 5 hours long to make up as much ground as they needed to. There were a few key points that needed to be made in AOTC but it was only about 1 hour of content stretched into 2 hours. While ROTS was 5 condensed into 2. It is too bad they could not split parts of ROTS between the two and better justify the haste of Anakin's actions.

 

[a-dev]

I'm sure someone other than Lucas could easily have done that.