10 Perfect Movie Endings That Sequels Ruined

9. The Phantom Menace Spoils The Revelation Of Vader's Humanity

The Star Wars prequels get a bit of a bum rap. They€™re not good movies admittedly, but if you analyse the vitriol they generate amongst fans, it is like people believe George Lucas went out and dedicated a decade of his life just to screw them over. Obviously this isn€™t the case - he was simply a different man at that stage of his life who incorrectly thought he had a good idea. Return Of The Jedi isn€™t fantastic, but it had some really cool moments. One of these was the beautiful ending where Darth Vader revealed himself to Luke as he was dying. Given the events of the previous two films, it added all new emotional gravitas that fans would not have expected to see when Star Wars came out, and Vader was just a megalomaniacal badass in space. Why this ending worked was because it was a €˜less is more€™ approach to humanising the character. There was still mystery, and his background was vague enough so that viewers could fill in their own perception of who Vader was. Unfortunately spending a couple of hours showing Vader as a little child in a poorly directed CGI world meant that these self-contained universes were all shattered. Lucas went with a "more is more" approach and while fans thought they may have wanted that initially, it became very clear that The Phantom Menace and its ilk were simply retroactively ruining the experiences viewers had with the end of Jedi.