You mean how do you tell those films that follow this alleged template deliberately
from those that follow this template accidentally? Would you say that the religious theme and motifs found in The Chronicles of Riddick as outlined above to be accidental or deliberate? I think it's safe to say that we can assume all that to be up on screen quite deliberately, both the dialogue, the prologue by Judy Dench and the imagery. It's all very deliberate on the part of the scriptwriter and director both.

So when we see essentially the same things happening to a similar character and the thing that is changed is genre and milieu should we chalk it up to coincidence? Or should we say this is the same story retold in a different setting? Just as West Side Story is really Romeo and Juliet, just shifted to the US with musical numbers added.

The guy who came up with this theory is not a Star Wars fan. He'd only seen the first Star Wars when it was initially released. However, he still had an inkling, because of who he was up against, that Darth Vader was actually the Jesus figure of an inverted retelling of the fallen angels vs God. So he got his hands on the entire six movies and watched them all. And of course he noted that Darth/Anakin was a prophesied child, born without an apparent father, who met the temple elders and so on and so forth.

Did he have a lucky guess? No, he'd worked it out just from seeing the first film. It would seem that Lucas had in mind from the very first film exactly what Darth's origin story would be; that he knew in '75 what he had to film in '97.

Perhaps the best way to tell, I would suggest, which films aren't deliberately following a template is accounted for in the initial hypothesis. There's a checklist of identifiers or attributes for the antichrist if you wish to portray this character in fiction. It stands to reason that other characters might share one or two such identifiers, perhaps even three or four. But when you're consistenly seeing six or more in movie after movie you have to ask yourself just how frequently do you allow coincidences to be before you stop calling it coincidence?
(Dildo Bugger destroyed a ring on, Wed 7 Dec 2011, 2:11, Reply)