By The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
When I got my first TV/VCR as an adult one of the first films I rented to watch on it was Star Wars. I was disappointed to discover that it was, in many ways, a pretty bad movie. It gets off to an excruciatingly slow start. The dialogue never really becomes good, though it is sometimes funny. The characters are two-dimensional, and some of the acting is pretty bad (*cough* Mark Hamill *cough* *cough*). Darth Vader has surprisingly little screen time, and the story arc seemed a lot thinner to my 22-year-old self than it did when I was 7.
However, I came to appreciate the original series all over again when Phantom Menace came out. Because although the production values were a lot better and the galaxy of talent much brighter, Phantom Menace was completely deficient in all the things that had drawn me into the Star Wars universe in the first place. To put it simply, the magic just wasn't there. The worst example of what happened between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace was the unbelievably stupid decision to make the Force biological. Midichlorians? As I put it at some point somewhere, if the Force is something that shows up on a blood smear, then I don't like this universe any more. The rest of the film was perfectly in keeping with this crass materialization of something that used to be mystical; you could see the action figures lined up on store shelves every time Lucas introduced a new alien, and the distinction between the Jedi and the Sith seemed to be more cosmetic than profound.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones was even worse. It had all the problems of the first prequel, plus it was much more badly written--especially the Anakin/Amidala romance, which was truly painful to sit through. Given vast armies of mechanized weapons and fighters, the CGI team went nuts, and the end of the film was unbelievably boring to me. I figured after Clones, I was done.
Well, I went to see Revenge of the Sith anyway, after having heard good things about it from people who felt the way I did about the first two prequels. And I have this to say: The magic is back, baby.
Clearly, the story told in Revenge of the Sith--the fall of the Republic, the destruction of the Jedi, and the corruption of Anakin Skywalker--is the only part of the prequel arc that Lucas really cared about, and that's why Sith is finally as compelling as the first three films. The writing is still, well, not good, though there are occasional moments when the script seems to finally be demonstrating something resembling insight. The characterization is still very broad-strokes, but here it comes across as epic rather than as crude and cardboardy. Many of the performances are excellent, especially Ewan MacGregor as the mature Obi-Wan Kenobi (MacGregor was also the only watchable thing about Clones; I hope Lucas is paying him very, very well), Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine/Sidious, Frank Oz as Yoda (CGI working much better this time around) and yes, even Hayden Christiansen, who I could not stand in Clones, does a pretty good job of handling Anakin's transformation. Jackson has more to do as Mace Windu, though the part still doesn't offer a lot of range. The visuals are, as always, good--but this time, finally, they're not just there to impress you; they're now an integral emotional and symbolic element of the story. Finally Lucas seems to know where he's going with all this; instead of pointless but elaborate set pieces like little Anakin's pod race or the underwater journey through Naboo's core, the CGI team has put their hearts into making the visual world reflect the waning fortunes of the Jedi, the rising power of the Sith, and the confusion, angst, and rage brewing in Anakin. Thus, the special effects in Sith actually can and do compensate for the weaknesses in writing and characterization, whereas in the first two prequels they were too irrelevant to provide any support for the story.
The best example is the final duel on the volcano planet, where even though Lucas goes completely overboard with the lava (trying to top Jackson's Mount Doom?) the emotions are at that point so big that you almost can't overstate them. Other more subtle touches include Anakin's counseling session with Yoda, which, for no practical reason ever given, takes place in a shuttered room that leaves Anakin barred with stripes of light and dark, and the weirdly beautiful yet also vaguely sinister performance Palpatine and Anakin are attending while they discuss the story of Darth Plagus and the secret of life. There are, of course, the obligatory space fights and action sequences, but Lucas keeps coming back to the core story, and when Anakin finally does turn, things really do get terrifying.
There was a woman in the row behind me who was loudly talking to her fellow-spectators before the previews started about how she hated violent movies and might have to take a powder. I told her that the violence in Star Wars movies is usually pretty antiseptic, and it's true; the weirdest thing about violence in these films is that no matter how many people get cut to bits, nobody ever bleeds. Lightsabers cauterize the wounds, I guess. As dishonest as Lucas's depiction of violence is, at least in Sith he does sometimes use this less-is-more approach to convey the horror of what Anakin is doing. Even if it's just to spare the children in the audience, it is actually more chilling to have the slaughter of the Jedi in the temple implied rather than explicit. The worst moment of the film, and I mean worst in a good way here, comes when Anakin walks into a room full of child padawans (I am NOT going to call them "younglings," that was a gigantic dialogue mistake) who are hiding behind the furniture. One of them says, "There's too many of them! What should we do?" and the film just cuts back to Anakin powering up his lightsaber.
Early in the film, Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi and the Sith are "almost exactly the same." After Phantom Menace, that was one of my main complaints: the Jedi seemed as morally bankrupt as the film itself, and the only difference I saw between them and the Sith was what color cloaks they wore. The ending of Sith shows that in fact, there is a real difference between good and evil, and that's why this film works when the other two didn't. I've seen people argue that Lucas is using Sith to comment on the Bush administration's takeover of America, and you could certainly make a case for it; Palpatine/Sidious uses the Bush administration's language of security and his peace-through-conquest logic, and the Senate is portrayed as enthusiastically complicit in its own subversion, voting Palpatine more and more emergency powers and responding to the newly-evil-looking Palpatine's announcement that they are about to become the First Galactic Empire with, as Padme puts it, "thunderous applause." Obi-Wan's look of horror when he first hears Anakin talk about protecting the Empire, and his protestation that "my allegiance is to the Republic--to Democracy," may finally prompt a few viewers to think about what the difference is. Anakin's corruption begins when he executes an unarmed prisoner and concludes when he accepts the mission of committing Jedi genocide. But those parallels will only be visible to viewers who are already willing to see Bush as evil. For the part of the population for whom Bush embodies the light side of the Force (I know, I don't understand it either), they won't be particularly convincing.
So, because there's finally some heft to the good/evil conflict, Sith has recaptured the magic of the series. It does, however, have some significant problems, and they can be summed up in two words: Padme Amidala. Sith is more evidence that although Lucas is obsessed with fathers and sons, he really doesn't care too much about mothers. After failing abysmally to sell us on the Anakin/Amidala romance in Clones, Lucas is no more successful here in conveying why Anakin is so desperately attached to Amidala that he would go over to the dark side just to save her life. Amidala's part is so badly written that Natalie Portman is basically reduced to being a prop for the costume, and as in Phantom Menace there is a distressing vagueness about exactly how Nabooan politics work and what her role in the Senate actually is. For instance, announcing her pregnancy to Anakin, Amidala says the Queen won't "allow" her to keep serving in the Senate. Well, has she been elected, or not? What kind of a democratic system invalidates an election because the official gets pregnant? And while Palpatine is maneuvering, is she still serving in the Senate, or not? She's there watching when the Empire is formed--why doesn't she do or even say anything about this? When she asks Anakin to talk to the Chancellor about something, and he tells her to "make a motion in the Senate, where that kind of thing belongs," you can't help wondering why she doesn't use her power as a Senator to try to fight Palpatine instead of just whining to her husband about it. I can't, anyway. Perhaps it didn't cross Lucas's mind.
The 'secret marriage' subplot is inconsistent--Anakin is supposed to be pretending he's celibate, but he and Amidala appear to be living together, and everyone seems to know who the babies' father is--as is the pregnancy/death in childbirth. Amidala never looks big enough to be carrying full-term twins, which is what she eventually delivers; there is no medical explanation given for her death apart from the fact that after Anakin turned she "lost the will to live"; and although the medical 'bots say she needs an operation so they can save the babies before she snuffs it, she appears to be going through labor. Well, is it a C-section or a delivery, George? Make up your mind! As always, Amidala's death is bloodless; it doesn't even significantly disarrange her makeup or hairdo. Plus, as people with better memories than mine have pointed out, having Amidala die in childbirth creates a rather large continuity problem, because in the original series Leia tells Luke that she remembers their mother. It would have made much more sense, and been better dramatically, to have AMidala survive the birth, leave Anakin, and get stalked and killed by him later--he's halfway there anyhow in their confrontation on the volcano planet. But that would have involved making her a real character with some spine and a capacity for autonomy, and apparently that's not what Lucas is into. Instead, she winds up on a flower-bedecked bier--strangely, still apparently pregnant--drifting along like the Lady of Shalott, attended by the new Queen and, of all the indignities, a grieving Jar-Jar Binks.
So, on the gender politics front, Sith actually represents a significant decline from the original trilogy, in which Leia was a focal character and got to do her own battling. It even represents a decline from Clones, where Amidala does at least get to use a blaster, though she has to be partially disrobed while doing it. Despite the twin-danishes hairdo, Leia, in my humble opinion, will always kick Amidala's ass, and it is really too bad that Lucas passed up the chance to make the twins' mother as memorable a character as their father.
All the same, the bottom line is that the Force is strong with this movie. Sith really delivers on all the things that Lucas is legitimately good at, and makes you want to overlook its failings. Given the unbelievable badness of the first two prequels, that's something of a miracle. It almost makes you want to find a bunch of singing Ewoks to celebrate with. Almost.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
Back to the Adder's Lair