mightyfastpig

11:57 pm: Revenge of the Sith review
This review contains spoilers

There's still no blood in the Star Wars universe, but there is a lot of clean dismemberment. (Combined with Sin City, this is a big year for severed limbs in Hollywood.)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith certainly addresses a lot of complaints about the first two prequels. Instead of slow openings, Sith drops the viewer directly into the action, first a massive space battle and then more personal derring-do inside one of those ships. There's no cutesiness, in fact there whole thing is quite sombre. Some of the set-piece action scenes are breathtaking. There's also a great sense of scale. There's an impressive sequence when we see Palpatine seizing power and issuing an order that makes the clone troopers sucker-punch the Jedi to death on multiple planets. That, in turn, is part of an unexpectedly political subtext against the Bush administration.

The flaws are many: Lucas still can't write dialog to save his life, and character actors like Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson have their talent squandered and never get a chance to breath life into their characters. Hayden Christiansen makes Keanu Reeves look like Olivier. The sets are too sparse and cold; one of Lucas' great accomplishments was to create a futuristic world that looked like people actually lived in it.

Female characters get short shrift. All the interesting ones are shunted offstage into secondary texts, like the Clone Wars TV series, novels and comics. Amidala is practically the only female character with dialog in the whole movie. And her role is mainly to look sad, give birth and die.

And yet... here's what was so startling about the climax of the story, that cut through the limitations of the actors and the stilted dialog. Anakin Skywalker indirectly killed Amidala, in true Darth Vader fashion, by telekinetically choking her. Why did he do this? She confronted him about the lying and killing he has been doing throughout the movie, a last ditch attempt to pull him back from the edge.

He attacked her to shut her up. Amidala died from domestic violence.

It's a valid point, if made bluntly: that if you use violence and deceit in the political sphere, even for what you consider good reasons, you risk bringing violence and deceit into the personal sphere. Revenge of the Sith is not only the decline and fall of a state, it's the decline and fall of a family. It seems like the true face of the dark side of the Force is not rage or greed or fear, but paternalism.

Revenge of the Sith isn't a good movie, but it certainly is a vast improvement over the previous two prequels. It has a stronger emotional impact than it has any right to have.

Critical judgement isn't really important when talking about the Star Wars cultural phenomenon, however. The movies exist as the foundation for a vast array of secondary materials: prose, poetry, art, films, cartoons, video games, comics and more. Some of it is produced under the aegis of Lucasfilm. Far, far more of it is created by fans for fans. In that sense, Sith succeeds because it creates a solid foundation for all those secondary texts. That is what Star Wars is for.

Tags: review, science fiction, star wars

11:50 pm: Independent meme genesis
I'm not the only person bothered by the idolization of the incarnation of asthmatic evil, Darth Vader. Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee's film critic, has her own article on the cult of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

I think Lucas is aiming for tragedy, but I don't know if he can reach that mark. The question of why and how good people end up doing very bad things is a terrific theme, but it requires serious thought about human nature, and I don't know if the man who brought us Ewoks is capable of that.

Another good essay on the (mis)handling of the Vader issue.

Tags: review, science fiction, star wars

05:13 pm: Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away....
The world is at war. In the remote frontiers, vast numbers of people suffer and die in a conflict justified by trickery, while the merchants and ideologues scheme and profit.

At the centre of power, a secret follower of an arcane religion has risen to become head of state. The scion of an ancient lineage of the powerful and vicious, he covertly masterminds both sides of the war to achieve his goals: absolute power and the destruction of all who oppose him.

Our collective hero, separated from his secret love and his closest friend and teacher, battles on in a war that he barely understands, descending into his own darkness.

Funny how relevant the thumbnail of Revenge of the Sith seems in these dark days of 2005: neverending war in the Middle East, civil liberties and science under fire in the United States, a cabal of wealthy ideologues masterminding it all.

The original Star Wars had a very clear distinction between good guys and bad guys. Villains were monochromatic: Black Darth Vader (“The blackest brother in the galaxy! Nubian god!” to quote Hooper X in Chasing Amy), white stormtroopers and Nazi-uniform green for Imperial officers. They wore masks and spoke with upper class English accents.

The heroes were diverse. Luke Skywalker may have been a dweeb who dressed vaguely like a Japanese peasant, and Princess Leia had all the sexuality of a Carmelite nun (at least until Jedi). But Obi-Wan Kenobi made Asian robes stylish. Han Solo referenced not one but three icons of cool, one for each movie: cowboy (vest, low slung gunbelt, boots), flying ace (leather flight jacket) and guerilla leader (camo green trenchcoat). Luke gradually shifted to ninja black.
   
(If you want a female character who isn’t an uptight, asexual prig (whether your aim is identification or objectification), you’re out of luck in heroes in the movies. You have to go to the obscure female villains or ex-villains who lurk on the edge of continuity: Asajj Ventress, Aurra Sing, Mara Jade.)
    
Attack of the Clones gave us the origin of the army of faceless, disposable soldiers, all clones of one person: Jango Fett, a masked, amoral bounty hunter. (He’s the clone/father of Boba Fett, the object of worship for a surprisingly large number of fans.) We see the massed armies of the white-armored clone troopers boarding the arrowhead-shaped starships that we associated with the evil Empire in the first trilogy. And these were, it seems, the good guys!
   
Republic Commando, the popular first-person shooter/squad control game, puts you inside the mask of one of these soldiers. To my knowledge, there has never been a Rebel Alliance Commando game. Why slip on the identity of a ragged guerilla when you can a play a character who is literally a copy of the biggest badass in the canon, armed with state of the art weaponry?
   
All the signs that indicated evil in the original trilogy seem to have been inverted: masks, militarism, conformity. It crystallizes around the dark samurai image of the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, the signature of the final chapter in the prequel trilogy.

Darth Vader is a classic case of “bleak male energy” if there ever was one: emotionally repressed, machine-like, armored from head to toe with mutilated body and soul beneath, violent to his friends and family, a willing servant of a social order dedicated to fascism, torture and genocide. He’s deeply frightening and repulsive if you think about it, which explains Luke’s horror at the idea he had any connection to this monstrosity.
   
And yet, walk through Toys R Us and you’ll see the image of Darth Vader everywhere, even in costumes for little kids.

Villains, it seems, always look more stylish and have more fun. It’s a rare hero who is cooler than his enemy: Bruce Lee, James Bond and Bugs Bunny top the short list. Batman and Wolverine have the styling and manner of villains: emotional detachment, spikiness. Some villains become so popular they become heroes: The witty, punkish vampire Spike turned into Buffy’s ally. The reptilian, armored Scorpius becomes a charming clown inside John Crichton’s mind on Farscape.
   
Other villains have a strange way of becoming, not heroes or even anti-heroes, but popular to the fans. We exalt Godzilla, a walking nuclear bomb with the IQ of an iguana, more than anybody else in his films. We remember Jason and Freddy more than the Final Girls who defeated them. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and Giger’s Alien appear on posters and as plush toys.
   
It’s an old, old problem with storytelling, one that goes back to Shakespeare’s Gloucestor in Richard III and Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, if not earlier. Somehow the bad guys end up more interesting than the heroes. Perhaps it speaks to a fundamental conflict: the desire to change the world versus the desire to preserve it. Usually, it is the villain who wants things to change, who represents the possibility of transformation, and the hero who struggles to maintain stasis.
   
But when that stasis is intolerable, the society is corrupt or repressive, that is when the possibility of change becomes enticing. In the French series of pulp crime novels, the master thief Fantomas is the nominal villain, but he’s far more compelling than the police who pursue him. The Italian film Danger Diabolik gives us another European master thief who guns down some poor schmuck security guard so his girlfriend can sleep in a bed of paper money. The film came out when the public faith in the government and church was at an all time low, following scandals.
   
Why be the suffering redeemer-hero of Campbell’s monomyth to preserve a social order that’s corrupt and hypocritical? Why not be a revolutionary, a transformative agent like the protagonists of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles or Marvel Boy, or the unfulfilled promise at the end of The Matrix?
If the hero is not allowed to transform society, the alternative is the outsider, the loner, driven by vengeance or nihilism or personal honor or just the desire to be left alone in a world that won’t let him: Eastwood’s Man with No Name, the hardboiled detective, Boba Fett, Batman, Hellboy.

And beyond that, there’s always the temptation to give up that personal honor that redeems the anti-hero, to loose the last shred of humanity and become inhumanly powerful all the way from your black armored shell to your black armored heart. There, at rock bottom, is Darth Vader.
   
But we know that some day, Vader will redeem himself, that there is a shard of selflessness left in his charred soul. He will see his son resist the temptation that he succumbed to, and finally sacrifice himself to destroy the monster who brought evil upon the world.

There’s nothing so compelling as a sinner striving for redemption. Maybe it’s the forgiveness in our hearts, maybe it’s knowing we’ve all done things we regret too. If it wasn’t for that knowledge that beneath that armor is a person who is ultimately good on the inside, the idolatry of Darth Vader would be deeply disturbing.

The sad thing is, sometimes in real life there is no humanity left under that shell of bleak male energy, or the armor is so well made that it will never open up, or not often enough. To all those out there waiting for their son or father or lover to finally open up and show those tender feelings you’re convinced still live inside, good luck.

***

The reason Revenge of the Sith is getting positive advance reviews is that much of the movie was imagined a long time ago, even before the original trilogy ended. Lucas had designed the climax of his epic’s back story back then: the final duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in the hellish lava pits, Anakin’s fall and transformation to the incarnation of asthmatic evil. It’s all in the Star Wars apocrypha that existed even before the term “Expanded Universe” was invented.



Tags: narratology, review, star wars, storytelling