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Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
I deny the fourth horse head with great pain and reluctance to George Lucas’ supposedly-final Star Wars film. It’s not because the special effects didn’t completely blow my mind, because they did. It’s not because of an excess of cute and cuddly creatures performing slapstick comedy routines, because there wasn’t one. And it’s definitely not because Lucas failed to give this final installment the proper tone of seriousness and darkness, because it’s easily Lucas’ darkest film since THX 1138. Lucas delivered on just about every level for what was certainly the most anticipated film of his career, indeed possibly one of the most anticipated films in the history of American cinema. If only he wasn’t one of the most awful writers in Hollywood, we’d be looking at a masterpiece. To say that Lucas’ writing is a bit lackluster is like saying that Jabba the Hut is a little overweight. Much of the dialogue Lucas gives his characters is actually less interesting and exciting than a normal everyday conversation and it’s all his actors can do to try and wring out anything resembling emotion. Never is the importance of basic dialogue skills more evident than in a film that has everything going for it but the writing. Lucas’ was criticized in the first two prequels for his flat dialogue but in a way the story made it almost acceptable. There was so much exposition going on and so many details being delivered that there really wasn’t much time for poetry and lyricism. Here, though, in what is essentially designed to be an emotional peak for the entire Star Wars saga, the lines being uttered by the characters lack the sincerity, gravity and poignancy that we as moviegoers are expecting. The result is a bit of an emotional letdown but one which will be mostly overlooked once again due to the imaginative special effects from Lucas’ SFX empire, Industrial Light and Magic. From the very first shot of the film we are so entranced and so awed that most audience members will have already excused Lucas’ dreadful prose by the time they hear the first line spoken. The camera follows two small fighter ships over and around massive battleships and as the camera turns a corner, we’re suddenly zipping with the fighters through one of the richest, deepest and most breath-taking battle scenes ever created. Lucas takes us immediately out of the real world and back into the one he has come to define so well on the big screen. It’s the one thing he does well as a writer and he truly outdoes himself here. There are a few other truly spectacular sequences, including a very brief battle but thrilling battle scene on Chewbacca’s home planet and a truly bizarre sequence where Obi-Wan chases down General Grievous, the CG bad guy, while riding what looks like a massive Gila monster. In terms of action, you have to hand it to Lucas for being able to go six movies without ever doing anything even remotely unoriginal in an action sequence. That is, of course, if you’re not counting light saber fights, which, let’s face it, ran out of originality after the Darth Maul fight in The Phantom Menace. Acting-wise, you’re still going to see the same problems here as you did in the last two films but after seeing what Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor and even Hayden Christensen show signs of acting brilliance away from the series, the blame must placed elsewhere. Is Lucas a bad director of actors? Is his dialogue so bad that even Pacino and DeNiro couldn’t make it work? Or is it just too hard to get sincere emotion out of someone when they’re filming every scene on a blue soundstage instead of a real set or location? There’s no way to know for sure but I’d bet that it’s a combination of all three things and hopefully it’s something that can be remedied when Lucas begins working on the “small, emotional dramas” he’s been talking about. As far as the story goes, the plot elements here have clearly been in Lucas’ mind from the beginning of this prequel trilogy. Everything is built off of something tracing all the way back to Episode I so if something perhaps didn’t really work perfectly in the first two films, it’s a bit too late to back out of it by now. Lucas has carefully woven into the story of Anakin’s fall and the Empire’s rise some political undertones. The implication is that democracy should never be sacrificed for peace and security, a message that was universal when the first film was released but now has a very definite partisan slant. I can’t criticize George Lucas for injecting a political message since it was already there but giving Anakin the line “Either you are with me or you are my enemy” is a clear reference to President Bush. That’s fine, whatever, only Lucas then has Obi-Wan answer by saying that “only a Sith speaks in absolutes” which is a contradiction in several ways. First, he is contradicting himself since that very statement is an absolute. Second, the Star Wars series has always been built around a battle between Good and Evil. The Rebels never felt compassion for the guys on the Death Star when they blew it up. The line is clearly an unnatural injection of real-world politics into the unreal world of the film, yet another sign of Lucas’ incompetence as a writer. I can’t stand here and tell you that I was let down or disappointed by Revenge of the Sith. It essentially follows in the footsteps of the other two films in this prequel trilogy. The difference is that this film, much more than its two predecessors, benefits greatly from the narrative foundation created by the original trilogy. So this whole prequel project didn’t turn out the way we all hoped it would at the start. We may not have gotten the great sci-fi epics that Lucas gave us in the ‘70s and ‘80s but what we did get was a quantum leap in special effects, a neat little backstory for the original films and above all some real quality entertainment. For that, I thank you George and I can only hope that with these new films, you’ve drawn a whole new generation to your original classics so that they can see what you’re really capable of at your best.
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