Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Or How George Lucas Managed to Overcome Almost Everything He's Been Doing Wrong

Here's the best thing I can say about Episode III: when I walked in, I was nervous, and was simply hoping that this wouldn't turn out to be a huge waste of my time. When I left, I was exhilarated, and felt that, for the first time since this whole "new trilogy" started, that I had just seen a Star Wars movie on the big screen. I felt, finally, fulfilled.

That's not to say that there aren't some major flaws in Episode III--in fact, most of them have been around since The Phantom Menace. But, for a variety of reasons, George Lucas finally managed to set up his film in such a way to downplay a lot of the things that had ruined the first two parts, and allowed fans to finally feel like they were back into the Star Wars spirit again.

The biggest problem with the "new trilogy" has been the fact that, in the 20 or so years since Jedi came out, Lucas forgot about people. What makes the original trilogy so great is not the effects, or the universe, but the characters who inhabited it. You had Luke, the young farm boy grappling with his destiny; Leia, the princess and early proponent of that phrase I hate, "grrl power"; and, of course, the cheerfully amoral Han Solo, the carefree mercenary who could stand in for the fans.

No, these weren't revolutionary characters. No, there was nothing brilliant in the story: noble heroes try to overthrow an insidious empire dedicated to oppression. But, hell, that was the appeal: it tickled that sense of simplicity in all of us, and more than that, dared us not to get sucked into it. We knew it was simple, and yet it worked--mainly because of the fascinating, involving characters who genuinely made us care about them. When Luke discovers the truth about his father, we are just as shocked as he is, and the emotional blow it dealt him, we felt. The blossoming love between Han and Leia, the redemption of Vader--all of these moments were what made Star Wars work. (In a way, it's the same principle that made Lord of the Rings work--get your characters right first, and the epic later.) Even when Lucas's writing wasn't perfect, the actors could make it carry on, and if nothing else, there was a great epic unfolding in front of our eyes.

Then came Phantom Menace. The signs that something had gone awry started as soon as that famous crawl went up the screen: the evil of the empire was gone, replaced by "trade disputes". Feel the tingles down your spine at the excitement of "trade disputes".

"But," you say, "of course there wasn't an Empire. And it all had to be this way to set up the rise to power of Palpatine." Maybe so...but did it have to be so incredibly dull? There's never a point in the story where we care about this trade argument, and even the clone war in Episode II is pretty anticlimactic. There's never a sense of good versus evil, just...confusion, and apathy.

But the plot isn't the main crisis going on in the new trilogy. It's the writing, and the acting--in short, the characters.

What sank Phantom Menace, and turned the love story half of Clones into such a disaster, is that in the 20 years it took Lucas to get around to making his prequels, he forgot how to deal with people. He's spent so much time dealing with effects and technology that he forgot that effects don't carry a movie--any number of bad sci-fi and fantasy movies can show you that. It's the story that carries it, and without that, you have just inert spectacle.

What's more, at least the original trilogy had the acting to fall back on. They might not have been brilliant, but they seemed life-like. The only people who ever seem to be true characters for most of the new trilogy are Ewan McGregor and Yoda. McGregor, because he seems to be the only person who brought his acting skills with him, and Yoda, because...well, technology creates fascinating things, right? Honestly, no; it's more that Obi-Wan and Yoda have the later movies to trade on. They might not be as well developed and drawn in these movies, but we know about them, because we know about their later lives. (The same trick failed for Anakin, because he is not the person we know in the later movies; he is someone far different.) The notable exception, and the best scene in the first two movies, is the scene in Clones where Obi-wan meets his old friend in a bar. It does little for the plot, but it does wonder for letting McGregor seem like a person, like someone who exists outside of the framework of these films.

Otherwise, the characters of this new trilogy are not people at all, but walking plot points. Padme is never convincing as anything other than a walking device used to a) birth Luke and Leia and b) die to piss off Anakin. Darth Maul is constructed to look cool, and give the first film the only worthwhile (and greatly needed) scene it has (the lightsaber duel); afterward, he dies, and no one cared. With no involvement, how could we care about the characters? They're not well drawn, and the dialogue...ugh, the less said about the attempts to make real people, the better. (Well, one thing, from Clones: "I don't like sand." Nuff said.)

So how could Episode III overcome this? Simple: it stopped with the exposition, stopped with the talking, dropped the stories that no one cared about, and got to work.

Here's the one thing Lucas hasn't forgotten how to do: create great spectacle and action. For all of Phantom Menace's problems--the juvenile humor, Jar Jar, the ridiculous Anakin sequence--the lightsaber duel is fantastic, a gem in an otherwise worthless wasteland. Clones is an even better example, with its bizarrely schizophrenic nature: the love story half of the movie is a cinematic disaster, but Obi-wan's exploration and battles are involving and even a bit exciting. So, when Sith gets going, it gets going well. The dominos have been set up in the previous films; now, it's just time to kick them over and watch the fun begin.

It does get off to a bit of a rough start; although the initial space battle is exciting, when Obi-wan and Anakin first enter the spaceship, the ensuing goofiness with the droids is off-putting, and puts one in the mind to remember the awful jokiness of Menace. But it soon ends with an exciting duel in which the moral grimness of the movie begins to assert itself quite clearly.

As the film progresses, it does bog just a bit here and there. No, Lucas hasn't gotten better at writing dialogue; no, the acting hasn't gotten better in emotional scenes. But there's more spectacle, more action, and it carries the film until Anakin finally makes his choice, picks his allegiance.

And it is at that moment that the best possible thing happens to the movie: the need for talking and explaining is over. There is no need for emotion anymore, save cold fury, from Anakin (and that anger is something Christensen actually manages to do well); the only people left to show regret are the only two capable of doing it well (McGregor and Yoda); and the best scenes--the fall of the Jedi, the final lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-wan, the battle between Palpatine and Yoda--unfold wordlessly, allowing Lucas to do something he does do well: tell a story visually.

It's those three sequences that sell the movie. Before that, it's good--a quantum leap from its predecessors, but nothing spectacular. But as Lucas truly embraces the dark side, all this setup finally hits a payoff, and by involving us in the tragedy, we find ourselves pulled along. We know that good fails to triumph here; we know that evil wins; and Lucas plays it just right, particularly in the beautifully done death of the Jedis.

For a little while, Lucas steps away from talking, and lets the story tell itself. And damned if it doesn't succeed.

The point is this: yes, Sith has some major issues. But Lucas, whether intentionally or not, has constructed a movie that manages to sidestep most of them. There's no need for the awkward love story; there's no worry about the juvenile humor. By embracing the darker side of his characters and his legend, he allows a story to be told visually, and does it right this time.

Episode III may not be the equal of any part of the original trilogy. It doesn't have enough emotional heft to match them (although it mostly does a good job in the action stories, the flat death scene of Padme sucks away a lot of that inertia it had going). But what it does do is bring back the spectacle to the series, something that has been seriously lacking in the past. It brings evil back into the mix, not politics. And in depicting the loss of Anakin's soul and the death of the Jedi, it strikes the perfect tragic note to ring in the next trilogy.

In the end, it's a damned refreshing film. It's almost enough to make you forgive episodes I and II.

Almost.