An aspect of this scene that always gets to me (along with everything mentioned here) is the heat. Space is cold, and to Anakin, from Tatooine, even some of the more temperate planets are still chilly to him, we know he has difficulty acclimating, but Mustafar is raging with heat. It ripples his hair. Scorching embers are falling around them. And it’s a different heat than the dry, sandy expanse of Tatoonie - it’s in motion, it’s sulfuric, it’s boiling over. Which is exactly what’s happening to him. He’s already burning - with emotion he so often has suppressed, which has twisted and molten into something else, something dangerous and destructive, something it shouldn’t be. He’s incredibly expressive here, in a way he was never allowed to be before, because he was trying to keep hold of himself, trying to honor that Jedi code, trying not to show too much (trying not to be too much), but all of that has been unleashed, only it’s consuming, it’s not him being made free, it’s an unhinging.
I may have said this before in tags, but it always gets me how completely beatific his face is when Padme first arrives. He’s briefly had Sith yellow eyes, he slaughtered the Separatists, and then he cries, and all that grief and freezing, creeping fear comes back to the surface, and there’s still humanity there despite what he’s done, and then he sees her, and she’s the balm to everything, she’s his reason for being, he’s justified this horror for her sake, and she’s there because she loves him, and she runs to him and he holds onto her, and it’s so gentle. But then she begins to recoil, the weight of the truth hits her and she witnesses something in him she doesn’t recognize, something terrifying, and seeing fear in her unbalances him even further (if she’s afraid of him, then he really is a monster, then his warped justification for what he’s done begins to fall apart, and that…that can’t happen), and then he looks over her shoulder, before we even see him, before she has any idea that he’s there, Anakin is looking at Obi-Wan, and everything is ruined irreparably, there’s no pulling him back. Watching him feels deranged and wrong and desperate and unsettling, because it is those things. We flinch away much like Padme does, because we knew him as that good person, we knew his heroism, we knew his trauma and sorrow and love, and suddenly we’re bearing witness to its utter decay. He paces like a caged lion, and he’s helped lock his own chains. He stands in the fury and the tumult of this hellscape of a planet, and he is the fire, ashes strewn in his wake, roaring and uncontrolled, and somehow unspeakably, terrifyingly beautiful, right before the maw of flames leads to that final chasm of a fall.
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