The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy (Recently Seen: Revenge of the Sith)

I am in the midst of reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and just watched RotS. Interesting parallels to be drawn between these two, especially the emphasis on the protagonists' status as "The Chosen One". And the death of a much beloved character in Half Blood Prince mirrors the "death" of Obi Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie (now called Star Wars IV: A New Hope, but which will always just be Star Wars to me).

I hope that RotS is the last movie that George Lucas plans to make on the Star Wars saga. I did not dislike this movie, but the entire "prequels" trilogy has been a disappointment. The first two misconceived prequels damaged the franchise and robbed the Star Wars mythology of some its magic. For those of us who watched Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Jedi as children and young adults, this is unforgiveable.

In keeping with my previous posts on the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies, I will dredge up painful memories of the first two prequels. I saw both movies only once each, and had no desire to see either again.

Ep 1: The Phantom Menace.
AKA The One with the Non-Acting Moppet
This was okay, passably entertaining summer-movie fare. The action sequences were exciting and made for a thrilling experience when watched in a super large-screen cineplex. I rather liked the pod race with little Anakin Skywalker. Seeing young Obi Wan, Yoda and the Order of the Jedi was also rather cool. On the minus side, Jake Lloyd, the child actor who played Anakin, was cute but an unconvincing actor. He was no doubt hampered by George Lucas's famous preference for CGI characters over human performers. This was also the movie that inflicted Jar Jar Binks on the world, so I am compelled to hate it on principle.

Ep 2: Attack of the Clones
AKA The One with the Non-Acting Pin-Up Boy
This movie should have been subtitled The Annoying Adolocence of the Chosen One. It was downright painful and cringe-inducing. The effects were better than ever and the movie looked great, but the action sequences seemed to drag. When the action scenes are not going well in a Star Wars movie, you know you are in deep trouble because the talking scenes are not going to save the show. My goodness, the screenplay was simply atrocious. Each time Anakin or Padme were given lines to say, my eyes got a rigourous rolling workout. The whole story line about the clone army was also boring - surely Lucas could have found a more interesting narrative device to tell his story about Dooku and the Dark Side. And the entire Harlequin-tinted romance between Padme and Skywalker took up far too much screentime. The scenes showing the "development" of their relationship were overwrought and yet managed to leave me completely cold. And as for the actor who inherited the role of Anakin Skywalker, the good news was that Hayden Christensen is a strapping and fine-looking young fellow. The not so good news was that his acting was unbearably bad. To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he just could not rise above the awful dialogue. Although, it has to be said that most of the other actors had equally bad dialogue and did manage to come across better.

And now, onto Ep 3: Revenge of the Sith, AKA The One where Things Improved.

Judged by the standards of the preceding movies, this is a masterpiece. It's certainly the best of the three prequels, and in some ways, a better movie than the rather cheesy Return of the Jedi (but it lacks the charm and satisfying closure of RotJ). On its own merits, this is a very flawed movie, but nevertheless a thoroughly respectable addition to the Star Wars canon.

Because there were more things I liked than disliked, let me get the negative points out of the way.

• The screenplay has more than its fair share of clunkers. George Lucas cannot write a love scene to save his life, as evidenced by these gems:
  
  Anakin: You are so ... (huge, awkward pause) ... beautiful.
  Padme: It's only because I am so in love.
  Anakin: No, it's because I am so in love with you.
  Padme: So, love has blinded you?
  
  Padme: Hold me, like you did by the lake at Naboo, so long ago, when there was nothing but our love.
  
  As some might say, OY! Kudos to the actors for not falling about laughing. Poor Natalie Portman - that "Hold me, like you did ..." line is just excruciating, like something from a parody of bad Gothic romance novels.
  
  Apart from the love scenes, bad writing abounds. Obi-Wan's speeches, Palpatine's lines when he seduces Anakin to the dark side, even the expositional exchanges between members of the Jedi Council; all could have done with some tighter editing.
  
  
• I am sorry, but Hayden Christensen is almost as bad here as he was in Ep 2. It is especially frustrating because he plays Darth Vader, iconic evil bad guy whose name alone is supposed to strike fear in every heart. As played by Christensen, the guy is petulant and a bit of a love-lorn wimp; it's difficult to imagine being terrified of this Darth Vader. Even at the height of his madness and fury, he seemed little more than a teenager that didn't get his own way.
  
  
• I don't know if these were intended, but the allusions to Bush's decisions on Iraq and the corruption that comes with absolute power were extremely heavy handed. Yes, a movie can have topical relevance and a movie can be a cutting commentary on the norms and mores of our times. But not this movie. The screenplay is nowhere clever enough to be taken that seriously.
  
  
• Either because of the screenplay or the direction (or both), Anakin's motive for joining the Dark Side is rather muddled. I think that Lucas was trying to say that Anakin was first attracted to Palpatine's offer because of the promise that he could save Padme from foreseen death. It was later that he began to crave power in and of itself because of his disillusionment and frustrations with the Jedi. If this was Lucas's intention, it was never communicated clearly enough (or perhaps, acted well enough) such that we understand and feel the full impact of Anakin's journey into darkness.
  
  I found this annoying because the overwhelming impression I got was that Anakin did it primarily to save Padme. I suppose this is not implausible, but to hinge the creation of Darth Vader on this makes a mockery of the greatest villain in pop culture. The big bad man killed all those people, including innocent kids (albeit kids in Jedi training), all to keep his one true love alive. Excuse me while I gag. If this was true, and if Padme had survived, she would have divorced his lame ass faster than you can say "Naboo".
  
  For the story to have true gravitas, Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader should be underpinned by his attraction to his own darker side; his own weakness for power and power's promise of invincibility. Oh well, that is the story I have in my mind, and I think it is also the story that Lucas was trying to tell. It's just too bad that it didn't quite come out that way.
  
  
• General Grievous is George Lucas's latest CGI wet-dream. A blah and uninteresting character, despite all the CGI wizardry, this was a character we could have done without. He seemed to have been included so that Lucas could film another light sabre duel.
  
  
• Darth Vader's cry of "NOOOO!" when he learned that Padme has died was laughable, mainly because it took so long to get out. After Palpatine told him that she was dead, Darth Vader seemed to just lumber around aimlessly for quite a long while, before letting out that wail. I suppose he could have been emoting, coming to grasp with the horrible revelation, but when the actor is in a mask, we cannot see what he is doing. I thought he was just coming to grips with his new metal encased body, because the whole sequence suggested a physical rather than emotional struggle.
  

Unlike the first two movies, the good stuff makes up for the bad. What I particularly liked about this movie that the Star Wars universe now looks like the one we first encountered in 1978. The costumes and hairstyles are especially well chosen, with special mention to Padme's breadroll hair that appropriately acknowledges Carrie Fisher's famous Leia 'do. The design for the Imperial Army's uniform and the space crafts and the look of the droid units are also spot-on.

As in all Lucas films, the set designs are dazzling and the look of the movie breath-taking. As Anakin and Obi Wan fly through intergalactic space in the first sequence, you have to admire the details on large spaceships, small crafts, distant planets and various bits of flying and floating objects.

Any Star Wars film must first and foremost be an entertaining summer movie and RotS fares well in this department. The action sequences (including many light sabre duels) are well staged and everything moves along at a snappy pace. The rescue of Palpatine, which opens the movie, harkens back to the tongue-in-cheek campiness of the original trilogy. It's all great fun and reassures the viewer that whatever else might happen, this is an entertaining movie.

Lucas spent the entire wretched Ep 2 on showing the Padme-Anakin relationship, but the true love story in the prequels is the bond between Obi Wan and Anakin. This is the relationship that will have the greatest repercussions in the future that takes place in the original trilogy. Obi Wan's sacrifice of his life in Star Wars is even more poignant in light of the events of RotS. The first part of the movie establishes the brotherly camaraderie between Anakin and Obi Wan and the easy banter between them is reminiscent of Redford and Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The buddy movie touch was a nice one and worked far better in establishing the tone of this relationship than all the romantic scenes did in establishing the Padme-Anakin relationship. As the movie progressed, we see that Obi Wan was genuinely concerned for Anakin and devastated when he learned of Anakin's brutal acts of murder. Anakin's side of the story is not so clear, again, because he's generally portrayed as a temperamental teenager.

Obi Wan emerged as the true hero of this film, and maybe even of the entire prequel trilogy. He had been a bit of a wet noodle previously, a little more so in Phantom Menace and less so in Attack of the Clones, but in Sith, he was classically heroic. More so than almost anyone else, he was betrayed by Anakin, yet could not bring himself to kill him. He was not as skilled as Anakin, but took him on and defeated him. Ewan McGregor gets first billing, and rightly so. He has the true leading role, and does it justice. (I had thought that McGregor seemed somewhat uninvolved in the first two movies, where the problem mostly laid with the under-written Obi Wan character.) In the buddy movie sequences, he displayed a cheeky sense of mischief which is his great gift as an actor. As the tone of the movie got darker, Obi Wan Kenobi was saddled with much speechifying, and McGregor did his best with clumsily written lines. His great accomplishment is that he succeeded in sounding like Alec Guinness. I could see how this Obi Wan will age graciously into the much-loved Ben Kenobi of Star Wars.

Apart from Christensen, most of the actors acquit themselves well. Ian McDiarmid is a standout as Palpatine. This was an over the top portrayal with much hamming going on, but with the lines he had to say, this was a brilliant approach to the role. He dropped the hamminess when the scene called for it and there was a genuine menace about his Palpatine. Even while he played off a rather stiff Christensen, McDiarmid was dynamic. Natalie Portman had to deal with corny lines and bad hair, and while this was not great acting, it was at least better acting than her screen husband managed. She even managed to inject deep anguish into the line "Anni, you are breaking my heart" (which Lucas wrote in such a "literal" manner). In smaller roles, Frank Oz (as the voice of Yoda), Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson provided reliable support.

This is an emotional movie, telling the tragic tale of a man's descent into darkness as he yields to the temptation of power. Notwithstanding the muddled motives (see above), Lucas handled this with the right dramatic touch, and resisted the temptation to relegate the emotions to second place behind the razzle-dazzle of special effects. Even as Obi Wan Kenobi fought Anakin in the final light sabre duel, the underlying emotions of betrayal, disappointment and resentment took pride of place over choreographed moves and the background CGI. I particularly liked how Lucas handled the pivotal moment when Obi Wan disarms (yeah, bad pun) Anakin. In that one second, we finally learned the background behind the powerful visual image we have always had of Darth Vader, in dark helmet and suit. Also in that one second, we begin to more deeply understand the words that the older Ben Kenobi spoke to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and the dying words of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Lucas could have indulged in excruciating slow motion (ala John Woo!) to underline the importance of this one second, but he resisted it. The moment is all the more powerful for its brevity and its suddenness (it did come from nowhere and I found myself thinking, "Holy S***! Did Obi Wan just kick Anakin's ass?").

After all the fighting is done, Lucas takes time to tell us the backstory to the separation of Luke and Leia and to set up the events in the first Star Wars movie. These scenes are filled with great pathos. We also learn how Yoda and Obi Wan ended up in their separate planets in the future. Lucas also explained how Obi Wan was able to come back to communicate with Luke, after seeming to die at Darth Vader's hand in Star Wars. I appreciated these touches, as Lucas is acknowledging the devotion of fans who had grown up with these movies.

When I watch the original trilogy again, any scenes with Luke interacting with Yoda and Obi Wan will take on greater significance. This, then, is the ultimate endorsement for RotS. I don't think it's quite great enough for me to forgive the first two prequels, but it's good enough to stand on its own without the baggage of those two films.