Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Review
by : Eric Barker
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Starring:
Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Natalie Portman
(Padmé), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker),
Ian McDiarmid (Supreme Chancellor Palpatine), Frank
Oz (voice of Yoda)
Visual Effects Supervisors: Roger
Guyett and John Knoll
Animation Director: Rob
Coleman
Written and Directed by: George
Lucas
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How DID he get to be so handsome? Revealed, the answers
finally are. |
Thank
God the wait is over. Revenge of the Sith is in theatres,
it’s generating massive cash flow like a good Lucas
film should, and George himself has earned a little redemption
from the faithful, even from a few skeptics. It’s overlong
by a good fifteen minutes, its love story still fails to persuade
in any meaningful way and some of the performances remain
hopelessly uneven, but the mythic tinge that colored the first
trilogy is back in high style, holding everything together
with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Revenge of the
Sith may or may not be the Star Wars film that
fans have been waiting for, depending upon one’s affiliation
- and there are many factions among fans - but it is a ripsnorting
space opera for sure. As the Old Hollywood clichés
used to go, it’s got Thrills! Chills! and Adventure
Beyond Belief!
Visually,
Revenge of the Sith is the richest and most complex
movie in either trilogy, a typically sprawling film - the
original Star Wars (1977) is the only series entry
that uses a straightforward narrative structure - portraying
a galactic war in progress on several fronts, giving us lush
and strange new vistas on a half dozen worlds. If there’s
one thing Lucas and company have perfected over the past two-point-five
decades, it is the art of making epic stimulation for the
eyes and ears. But in Revenge of the Sith, the various
planetary environments that pepper any Star Wars
movie have finally been relegated to their proper place as
backdrops for a larger story.
It is
a story that has been roiling in the minds of fans and George
Lucas ever since Obi-Wan Kenobi first told us about Luke Skywalker’s
father, in that other trilogy so long ago: “He was the
best star pilot in the galaxy. And a cunning warrior....And
he was a good friend.”
Sith
opens with a breathless space battle/rescue mission, a self-contained
serial chapter of superbly choreographed, intragalactic derring-do
and narrow escapes, and all of it designed to reveal - hold
onto your lightsabers - character motivation. Not just another
exercise in state-of-the-art digital effects, the first twenty
minutes of the film maps out the friendship between Anakin
Skywalker and his mentor, Obi-Wan, a friendship which is at
the center of all that follows, revealing their matched Jedi
skills and their deep personal bond with such humor and imagination,
we might almost think Lucas has re-learned how to write a
polished script.
We would
be wrong, but no matter. The film’s opening does announce
that Lucas has recaptured the jaunty tempo and the Saturday
matinee peril which informed the original Star Wars
films, albeit setting a darker tone than usual. Revenge
of the Sith must inevitably slide toward some very bad
behavior, and the rest of Obi-Wan’s tale of Jedi woe:
“A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of
mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down
and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your
father.”
As we
all know by now, Obi-Wan was leaving out a small detail (or
two), and with good reason. But the moment has arrived for
all good storytellers and characters to come clean about what
happened in that galaxy far, far away, before it put the zap
on millions of mop tops and their collective dreams. The question,
for legions of the faithful and detractors alike, becomes,
“Can Lucas pull it off?”
Answers
will vary, and already have, but for me it is a resounding
“Mostly!”
Everything
dealing with Anakin’s prowess as a Jedi, his reasons
for turning to evil, and his final destiny on a dark plain
erupting with lava, is handled with skill and considerable
visual grace - the astounding opening shot, an extended journey
swooping and spinning through a hellish space battle while
Anakin and Obi-Wan fly their starfighters in perfect synchronization;
Anakin’s discovery of the Sith Lord’s true identity,
the two of them circling each other in a narrow hallway; the
final confrontation with Obi-Wan, blending tropes from Errol
Flynn swashbucklers and old sci-fi movies with Homeric intensity;
and the moment when Anakin dons that world famous mask. One
of the more melancholy aspects of the Star Wars saga
reaching an end is the palpable feeling that it is finally
coming back together for George, this moviemaking business,
and that we’d really see something in the next installment,
if only there was one.
The rest
of the film’s subplots and detours, and there are many,
run the spectrum from spiffy to god-awful, as usual. The new
aliens are deftly imagined and the constant action is exciting
and varied, but Lucas still can’t write a line of dialogue
that Natalie Portman can say, and she doesn’t help him
any. Couldn’t she have taken an acting class while she
was at Harvard? (ba-boom-boom) But seriously, folks, there
are other actors here, all working with the same clunky script,
and they manage to bring a bit of magic, clunk-and-all, when
it counts. In Portman’s defense I can only say that
her character, Padmé, is the most poorly conceived
in the entire series, whether we are talking human or alien,
a stock girlfriend figure who is given almost no motivation
for anything she says or does.
All is
not lost, however. Ian McDiarmid, as the Machiavellian Chancellor
Palpatine, is this trilogy’s Alec Guinness, a crusty
pro who loves the craft of acting for its own sake, and he
roars magnificently in this last film, blue screen be damned,
outshining anyone unfortunate enough to be in the same scene
with him. Ewan McGregor is the most reliable actor in the
whole trilogy, tireless after three grueling movie shoots
as the early Obi-Wan Kenobi, still finding and delivering
flashes of the sage we know he will become. That is, whenever
the script leaves an opening. And it’s time to lighten
up on Hayden Christensen, who has proven elsewhere that he
is a good actor: you may not like the petulant and impulsive
character he has been given, but there is no denying that
he is convincingly petulant and impulsive, or that in this
film he cajoles some genuine madness and tragic doom out of
a two-dimensional villain.
They’re
all at the mercy of their director, his choice of takes in
the editing suite where the final draft of a script comes
together, and George Lucas just doesn’t care about the
acting, not in these films, anyway. There are times when he
seems to be deliberately choosing the most awkward line reading
he can find. But it’s really because he doesn’t
understand the emotional essence of character, doesn’t
want to be bothered with it, and so he uses a once tried-and-true
technique of hiring really good thespians to give him what
he doesn’t know how to ask for, and then he shoots as
quickly as possible. Many Old Hollywood directors did this
with good results, but they weren’t new money billionaires
living in their own private enclave. They were hungry, they
could be fired by a studio chief, and they shouted and bullied
on a tight schedule, shooting take after take until it was
right, usually “right” three or four different
ways. George doesn’t shout, he already is the studio
chief, and he hasn’t been hungry since 1983.
If these
things have bothered you about Lucas in the past, be forewarned,
nothing has changed since the last movie. On the other hand,
I am among a handful of people I know who do not consider
the new trilogy, or its creator, to be cinematic abominations,
a virulent pox on the cultural body. There are many more terrible
things that have happened to American film in the past twenty-five
years than an advance in computer imagery at the expense of
performance, or a franchise entry that fails to live up to
a couple of its predecessors. This verifiable observation
may make me an unreliable critic to some, I don’t know;
I do know that I’ve never seen a movie phenomenon that
was so divisive as the Star Wars series, and I don‘t
expect to see one again in my lifetime.
The new
trilogy has been incredible for its sometimes startling incompetence,
and for its overwhelming cultural importance, which is out
of all proportion to an essentially light entertainment, or
the ability of that entertainment to shoulder such profound
expectations. In the staggering noise surrounding The
Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, little
comment was made that these movies, in addition to being major
disappointments, took enormous risks. They often failed, yes,
but there was nothing like them, either, and not just because
they could be dreadful at times but because Lucas continually
overreached when he didn’t have to. The first two episodes
are not mere failures. In the manner of Lucas’ own mentor
Francis Coppola, they are also amazing experiments in pop
moviemaking, with an admirable willingness to gamble everything
on new technology, new characters, random goofiness mixed
with high-flown pretension, and a storyline straight out of
the Old Testament that greatly extends the boundaries of a
beloved fairy tale universe.
Who else
makes a trilogy of $100 million films about an innocent little
boy who grows up to choose evil because he can’t let
go of the things he loves? Who has the balls these days to
make a series of giant popcorn movies that address, in part,
how fascism gains acceptance in a democracy? That’s
right, a series; I feel it necessary to add that this last
subplot did not just appear in Episode III like some post
9/11 after thought. It has been brewing all along, with hints
throughout.
Revenge
of the Sith is a rousing culmination of the Star
Wars enterprise, and in my humble yet not uninformed
opinion, it is the best film in the series since The Empire
Strikes Back. It is a near revival of the old George
Lucas, a passionately imagined and executed story in the manner
of vintage movie serials like Flash Gordon and The
Phantom Empire (both 1936), which by the way, make the
writing and acting in any Star Wars film look like
a season of The New York Shakespeare Festival. Sith
has moments that vigorously transcend these sources, and moments
are the only thing that movies give us with any consistency.
Every
cast member enjoys at least one good moment in this movie,
even Natalie Portman, even digital Yoda, and the off-key bits
come early, between the thunderous opening movement and a
final hour in which all questions are answered, spectacularly,
definitively, capped by an elegiac, perfectly chosen final
scene. For the first time in years, it is a pleasure to see
the credit “Directed by George Lucas” flash onscreen
at the close of a movie.
Clearly
the entire Lucasfilm organization knew it was crunch time.
They have helped George make a terrific prequel to the first
trilogy, bringing an energy and a joie de cinema
to the project that has been missing for way too long.
Yet another,
fantastic John Williams score weaving the old with the new.
WHAT
OTHERS HAVE SAID:
“Post-Jar
Jar, our expectations have sunk so low that now fans will
celebrate a film just because it doesn’t completely
suck.”
- Ed Halter, The Village Voice
“...you’ve
probably heard that it’s a scathing indictment of the
Bush administration, complete with a power-hungry villain
who overrides the Senate willy-nilly in his megalomaniacal
quest to control the Galactic Empire. Stop the presses: George
Lucas has had a thought!”
- Stephanie
Zacharek, Salon.com
“...it’s
worth doffing our beanies to a man who wouldn’t settle
for Flash Gordon - who was driven to turn a Saturday-matinee
space serial into something that needed the combined forces
of Milton and Shakespeare to do it full justice. In the end,
there’s a breadth, a fullness to the Star Wars saga.
It’s so much more than the sum of its clunks.”
- David
Edelstein, Slate
“...the
trajectory of the narrative cuts sharply against the optimistic
grain of blockbuster Hollywood...we are witnessing a flawed
hero devolving into a cruel and terrifying villain. It is
a measure of the film’s accomplishment that this process
is genuinely upsetting, even if we are reminded that a measure
of redemption lies over the horizon in Return of the Jedi.”
- A.O.
Scott, The New York Times
“...what
this film does well is humanize one of the great screen villains
of all time, somehow managing to do so without robbing him
of any of his menace in later films...I think the effect this
is going to have on viewers who have grown up with this trilogy
is going to be deeply unsettling.”
- Moriarty,
Ain’t It Cool News (a lengthy, particularly good assessment
for long time fans: http://www2.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20201)
“Most
stories are really told for adolescents, which is why Star
Wars was aimed at adolescents. Societies have a whole
series of stories to bring adolescents into adulthood by saying,
‘Don't worry, everybody thinks that way....but if you
act on some of your notions, here’s what will happen:
Zeus will reach down and smash you flat like a bug or the
entire Greek army will come and crush your city and burn everybody
inside of it, including your heroes.’”
- George
Lucas
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