Revenge of the Lucas

Context is everything. So into what kind of space are we going to situate Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith? Well, how about personal space: The last time I really enjoyed myself at a Star Wars movie---the last time I knew I was seeing something really special... was 28 years ago. And my girlfriend of the time now has children considerably older than we were when we saw the original together.

I should really call them up and see what they think. Because I have a feeling that when you were born is going to have a lot to do with how you feel about Episode 3. If you are a child of the age of Nintendo, ‘special edition’ DVD’s and the Sony Playstation, you’ll probably feel somewhere close to home. If you’re a child of the Age of Movies, well, you’ll probably be relieved that the whole panjandrum is finally coming to an end.

The Playstation connection is the defining one. All three movies in the second series of Star Wars have felt like video games that played themselves. There were points in Episode 2 and about a half-an-hour here in Episode 3 where the script shakes itself awake, you get some genuine emotion, and you feel like you’re watching a real movie. But for the most part these episodes are inhuman---their real home is to machines bouncing off other machines. Personality is virtually nonexistent. Now, personality is something you bring to a video game, but it’s something you hope a movie will bring to you. Personality in script and character is what brings excitement to your big---and here generic---special-effects events, but the feeling you get here is that all the clutter and big effects are there to keep the actors from drowning.

Over the three decades he’s been tinkering with his cinematic toys at the Skywalker Ranch, writer-director George Lucas has lost the ability to credibly put human beings onscreen. His direction of actors here, to say nothing of the lines he gives them, is as futile as directing tombstones in a cemetery. How can you botch a scene where a girl tells a boy she’s pregnant? They do.

So there are no thrills. There’s lots of business; there’s lots of actor boilerplate, but there’s no excitement. This was supposed to be the big climactic movie in this series; the one where all the dots are finally connected. And they are. But mostly it’s connect-the-dots.

There’s a movie coming out later in the season called Stealth, and it’s about a computerized military fighter-plane that starts to think that’s its an genuine warrior. Analogously, I think George Lucas is actually a spaceship that has convinced itself that it’s a movie writer-director. Star Wars has been around for almost three decades and it’s changed Hollywood. If you go and see this movie, you’ll see a half-a-dozen trailers for similarly mechanical blockbusters that will rule theaters this summer. I think what’s happened is that the success of Star Wars has purged most of the humans from the industry. The clones have won.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, June 2005