I led a little expedition from the office to Star Wars Episode III on Friday. We were one of many work groups who took off a couple hours in the middle of the day to see the Star Wars series come to its end-- or full circle. Of course, in broad strokes you know what happens; but since I went to the first Star Wars in the summer of 1977, when I was 12, I've been watching this series for most of my life.
The critics (like Anthony Lane in The New Yorker) are right that most of the movie is excessively busy, the acting is so bad calling it "wooden" is an insult to wood, and Hayden Christensen makes Mark Hamill look like Lawrence freakin' Olivier. Yet, my wife and I watched the original Star Wars this evening, and I have to say that while it retains a fresh exuberance that other movies lack, yet is now incredibly familiar visually, Episode III isn't any worse a piece of filmmaking. Incredibly, while the dogfights were landmarks of excitement at the time, now they seem simple and clean (and that's a very good thing): the limitations of special effects in the mid-70s forced Lucas to a level of simplicity that improved his storytelling and composition. But no one compares Revenge of the Sith to the real Star Wars; we compare it to what we remember watching Star Wars for the first time was like, and we now see Star Wars through a dense filter of personal memories, cultural associations, even references to video games and Star Wars books. (I notice certain weapons in the movies more than others: it's because I've used them in the games.) George Lucas can make visually busier and cleaner movies (the new series lacks all the fascinating grubbiness of the first), but I contend he hasn't gotten worse as a director: Carrie Fisher's performance isn't an order of magnitude better than Natalie Portman's.
But there's a real problem with Episode III, which is that Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader is both central to the film and yet strangely under-developed. This is the story of Good Guy Anakin becoming Bad, Bad Guy Darth Vader; and unless you can read a lot into the performance that isn't on-screen, you'll never quite get why Anakin goes over, or fully appreciate why it's so terrible. My argument, which involves some spoilers, is after the jump.
[To the tune of Röyksopp, "In Space," from the album "Melody A.M."]
[WARNING: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]
Lucas never manages to bring this out explicitly, but at the start of Episode III, Anakin's problem is this. As we've seen, Anakin has a problem with losing his temper and doing bad things. He kills the sand-people who kidnapped and killed his mother in Episode II, and he beheads an unarmed Count Dooku-- not just a metaphor: Anakin cuts off Dooku's hands before killing him-- in the opening of Episode III. But he's also incapable of not doing good things. When, in the same opening scene, Palpatine urges Anakin to abandon an unconscious Obi-Wan, Anakin doesn't hesitate to risk the success of his mission to take his mentor. Episode III is about a self-conscious effort-- most of all by Anakin himself-- to destroy that goodness, rationalized as an attempt to save Padme and end the war.
The hinge of this effort is Anakin's attack on the Jedi temple, and reaches its climax when he kills off dozens of unarmed children who are training to be Jedi (again in that explicit-but-not-graphic manner). In other hands it would have been a Macbeth-like scene, and even Lucas can't quite drain it of its terrible power. From there, it's a race to the moral bottom: at the end Anakin-- now transformed into Darth Vader-- is led to believe that he's killed Padme, yet doesn't have the strength to turn on Palpatine. He's failed, and is trapped in his fate.
Had the movie been directed by someone who could really deal with the challenge of good and evil-- a Spielberg or Paul Schrader, say-- it would have been an incredible story. The full nature of Anakin's choice; the amount of savagery required to not just embrace the Dark Side, but kill off his impulse to do good; and the magnitude of his failure, all would have been more apparent. As it is, we have to fill it in for ourselves, much in the way your brain can fill in details in a pencil sketch of a landscape.
The great difference is that a Rembrandt or Picasso drawing has sparse detail but great emotional power; Episode III overflows with detail, but is emotionally sparse. It's like a movie made by someone who's a little autistic: brilliant on the technical side, but almost oblivious to the emotional states of the characters.
I suspect that the movie-- that all six-- are going to be remade in my lifetime: that eventually, even Lucas is going to tire of tinkering with the six, and will open up the series to other directors. We'll have competing versions of the story told by the next generation's Kenneth Branagh, John Woo, Wachowski Brothers, Peter Jackson-- much as there are competing film version of Hamlet. The basic structure of the Star Wars story is certainly strong enough to support a rich variety of interpretations, and the franchise arguably would be strengthened by a combination of obeying the internal logic of the Star Wars universe, while encouraging competition among directors offering different spins of the story.
So I'm optimistic. Some day, someone will get this right.
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