Review: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith
Starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen
Written and directed by George Lucas
3 stars (out of 4)
It’s impossible to approach the subject of Star Wars with the kind of clinical detachment useful for giving any kind of respectable appraisal of a work of art. Members of my generation have never known a world without Lucas’s lumbering space opera, just as we have never known a world without CDs or PCs or MTV. We assimilate R2-D2 and C-3PO along with the other abbreviations without second thought. That says a lot about the sheer force with which Star Wars assaulted the public consciousness in 1977, an assault that carried through the 1980s and 1990s with countless books and video games until the release of Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999), the first of a trilogy of prequels Lucas wanted to do to detail the backstory behind his original trilogy. Specifically, these new/old films, this trilogy of prequels, would describe the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, the young Jedi who sired Luke and Leia (of the original trilogy) before becoming the evil Darth Vader. Now, with Episode III—Revenge of the Sith in theaters, Lucas has brought closure to the story we thought he closed more than two decades ago with Return of the Jedi (1983).
Making prequels, especially a trilogy of them designed to appeal to and appease a planet of fans, means working backwards. There are no true options left for the story in Episodes I-III because certain things must happen in order to gel with the original films. For example, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) must survive all his battles, as must Yoda. As impressed as we might be with the derring-do McGregor shows with his lightsaber, there’s no suspense: with the character’s outcome already known, the scene hangs as lifeless as Lucas’s clunky, expository dialogue. I was never for one second worried for Obi-Wan during his battle with the computer-generated droid leader, General Grievous. Obi-Wan dies an old man, struck down by Vader’s lightsaber; what is there to invest me in this fight when I know he’ll win? The answer, of course, is not much.
And on the dialogue, I’m inclined to disbelieve rumors that playwright Tom Stoppard was brought in to give the words a polish because, on the whole, the conversations are about as boring/embarrassing as they were in Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002) (I don’t think we need to revisit here the horrors of Jar-Jar and Episode I). Were I Stoppard, I’d do everything in my power to let people know I had nothing to do with the romantic interchanges between Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) that elicited unintentional chuckles even from the devoted crowd at the Hollywood’s Arclight Cinerama Dome. If the loyalists at that screening weren’t buying it, what makes you think it’ll play in Peoria? Lucas has an eye for visuals and a good head for story, but his writing makes you want to sit down and weep and pray for the movie to end.
The plot? Anakin turns to the Dark Side of the Force and pledges service to Chancellor Palpatine, who has been gaining more political power as the prequels have chugged along. Much has been made of the possible similarities between the Emperor’s ascension to power and President George W. Bush’s unilateral war tactics, although the Emperor’s rise is probably based more on Hitler than Dubya. Say what you will about the president (and I say plenty), at least we get to complain if we’re unhappy. Subjects in a fascist society, like Hitler’s Germany or Palpatine’s Empire, are afforded no such luxury.
Lucas’s story is an attack on the loss of liberty in general, not Bush in particular. The most telling line of all comes in the infamous yellow text that crawls across the screen at the film’s beginning: “There are heroes on both sides.” The point Lucas is trying to make, poor as his attempts may be, is that Anakin didn’t set out to choose evil over good, but rather made choices he thought were necessary for the survival of those he loved. This doesn’t alleviate his wrong-doing, as I’m sure Lucas (and others) have intention of letting the president’s behavior slide because he said he meant well, but at least we know where Anakin’s coming from when he chooses the Dark Side.
The reason Anakin turns to evil is one of the few well-played ideas in these backstories, although that isn’t saying much. I’ve given the film a 3-star rating not because it’s so good on its own but because it’s an improvement over the first two prequels. Heavy on the action, the film delivers all the plot turns we know it has to: Anakin turns evil, the Emperor seizes control of the Republic and re-christens it the Empire, all the Jedi except Obi-Wan and Yoda get slaughtered, etc. Unapologetically short on anything new, Revenge of the Sith blazes forth with stunning special effects and nothing to connect them.
Lucas himself once said that a special effect is worthless in and of itself. A special effect is a tool, he said, a means for telling a story. How hard the mighty do fall. The prequel trilogy has offered groundbreaking style with utter lack of substance. Under the pen and lens of Lucas, these new movies have been nothing but cardboard line readings by dead-eyed actors in front of green screens. The humor here is slapstick, a brutal farce of the character-driven interaction of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), still the best film of the six-episode series. I was blown away by the aerial battles here mainly because I had to be: I had nothing else to do.
Christensen, who hails from British Columbia, continues to speak everything in a mealy-mouthed, vaguely British accent, which makes him sound as uncertain of his presence in the film as we are. Who knows, maybe the quasi-Brit pronunciations were a subliminal ode to the sporadic accent Carrie Fisher displayed in the original Star Wars (long ago retitled Episode IV—A New Hope, which everyone should know by now). He does what he can with the role, but there’s precious little with which he can work. And when Anakin finally dons the infamous black suit and helmet he'll wear until his death in Episode VI, his entrance is so helplessly comic, his cries of grief (the voice of James Earl Jones) so over-the-top and unbelievable, we aren't awed by the suit or humbled by the finality of his fall; we're too busy biting our cheeks to keep from laughing.
The hard part is reconciling the slick, dumbed-down prequels, with their CGI and continuity errors, with the film trilogy that’s defined blockbuster filmmaking. Many fans are reluctant to embrace the prequels; these are apocrypha, anathema, a cute story but one so badly made it’s hard to see Jar-Jar Binks and Han Solo inhabiting the same storytelling universe. A film series once famous for its storytelling and visual ingenuity has become another exercise in computer-dominated filmmaking, men ruled by (computer) mice. I always found myself wondering: how much of what I’m seeing is real? That chair? That window? The actors and characters have been shoved to the background to let Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic team run wild, but they forget that, without characters to root for, special effects are meaningless. Would we have marveled as we did when the Death Star exploded if we hadn't been so attached to Luke Skywalker? Lucas seems to think so. It's a shame, too. With an eye like that, he really could have had a career in the movies.
