Are We All Mythtaken About Star Wars?

It’s not often that I feel self-conscious about my pop culture pursuits. I was happily watching cartoons back when it was not socially acceptable for an adult (nor even a teenager) to do so, and I like a good chick flick now and then, and when Warren Ellis suggested in Transmetropolitan that “TV wrestling is phallocentric soap opera for retards and intellectually lazy intelligent people who get off on cultural slumming,” I may have laughed knowingly and conceded his point without protest, but I still tuned in for that week‘s episode of Monday Night Raw.

Indeed, only one thing embarrasses me: I have become a Star Wars fan.

Consider Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, pretty much unanimously held aloft as the most triumphant entry in the entire Star Wars series. Here you have a movie which admittedly boasts wildly imaginative creatures, vehicles and set designs, but which offers not a single memorable line of dialogue. Oh wait, here‘s one: “I don‘t know where you get your delusions, laser brain.”

“Laser brain”? And this is one of the world’s most celebrated works of science fiction?

A buddy of mine likes to argue that the dialogue in the Star Wars series is intentionally limp and uninspired, the better to reflect the spirit of the pulp serials that inspired the saga in the first place. I don’t want to say that my friend is wrong, necessarily. But his claim is either nonsense because he‘s wrong, or it‘s nonsense because he‘s right. Either option points to a seriously disheartening bout of creative bankruptcy on the part of George Lucas; Star Wars is intended to be the apotheosis of science fiction pulp sagas, and anyone who decides to produce the definitive space opera should also endeavor to imbue it with memorable dialogue. After all, the Indiana Jones movies are no less cheerfully absurd and delightfully over-the-top than Star Wars, but they offer dialogue that dares to make you believe in the story.

It’s difficult to imagine Han Solo, for all his ostensible edginess, saying anything so menacing as what Indy says to taunt Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark: “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

That said, the triumph of the dialogue in the Indiana Jones series is that it treats high drama with such frivolous nonchalance. As a teacher and a parent, my most recent favorite example is from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, wherein Indy admonishes Marion to take it easy on her son, Mutt, who should be allowed to drop out of school, by Indy’s reasoning, in order to pursue his own interests. Moments later, Marion reveals that Mutt is Indy’s son, to which Indy indignant replies, “Why isn’t he in school?!”

However, the funniest dialogue from the Indiana Jones series might be from The Last Crusade. Captured by villains who threaten to hunt down his friend Marcus Brody, Indy boasts, “He’s got a two day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody’s got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He’ll blend in, disappear, you’ll never see him again. With any luck, he’s got the grail already.”

Soon after, Indiana’s father Henry pleads, “But you said he had a two day head start. That he would blend in, disappear,” to which Indy replies, “Are you kidding? I made all that up. You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum.”

The dialogue in the six Star Wars movies, by contrast, is distressingly dull, self-serious and somber.

Roger Ebert wrote something interesting about the underrated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in May 2008: “The movie isn‘t a throwback to the Saturday serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It‘s what they would have been if they could have been.” (“I admit it: I loved ‘Indy'”, 19 May 2008)

It would obviously be foolish to suggest that any director of a sci-fi or adventure serial from the early 20th century would not have been thrilled beyond measure to have produced anything half as visually arresting as Star Wars. But while Star Wars is, perhaps, like Indiana Jones, what the serials of the ‘40s and ‘50s would like to have been, it is also clearly not all that it could have been.

Still, I found myself unaccountably drawn to the series, and so I revisited first the original trilogy, and then the prequel trilogy. My initial reaction was to concede that perhaps I’d been mistaken about the Star Wars films, which are enchanting despite their shortcomings. My second reaction was to note that everyone else is wrong about the Star Wars films, too.

For one thing, the best movie from the original series is not The Empire Strikes Back; it is Return of the Jedi. Why? There is more at stake in Jedi, if not where the plot is concerned, then certainly within the characterization, which raises another point about which the majority is mistaken: Luke Skywalker is more compelling than Han Solo.

Now clearly, Han Solo has more street cred than Luke Skywalker (and we all know that street cred is all that matters in a children’s space opera), but while he is easily ten times cooler than Luke Skywalker, Han Solo pretty much remains what he is throughout the trilogy; he changes, sure, but from a smug, vainglorious, cocksure pirate of muddy morals to a more selfless and heroic pirate who is otherwise still smug, vainglorious and cocksure. Luke is the only character in the entire trilogy to undergo significant change.

Like so many awkward, confused young men, Luke Skywalker has a capital-L Legacy he feels compelled to defy, and partly as a result, he relies largely on friends and surrogate family members to provide the guidance a father is supposed to offer. Obi-Wan and Yoda serve as mentors for a young, naïve, impressionable Luke, while his father is little but a distant, ominous shadow. Still, and again like so many awkward, confused young men: Luke needs his father.

Meanwhile, the Emperor, a symbolic Grandfather Skywalker of sorts, makes the obligatory space opera references to “evil”, but he places stronger emphasis on something far more commonplace and relatable: anger. Indeed, when is Luke at his weakest? When he triumphs over his father in their final light saber duel; each blow he rains down on his father’s fallen form represents more loss of Luke’s self-control. There’s a reason the Emperor applauds the young man’s victory.

For me, Return of the Jedi calls to mind Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno’s The Incredible Hulk series, for if The Incredible Hulk could be said to boast a single, defining statement, it would be summarized by the first two or three seconds of footage in the opening credits sequence, as ANGER flashes in red, then the camera pulls back to show that what we’re seeing is a warning button in a science lab, which reads DANGER.

This could also be the Return of the Jedi thesis: ANGER = DANGER.

Before succumbing to his fury, Luke pleads with his dad to escape the Emperor with him. Anakin responds, “It’s too late for me, son,” which is exactly the self-pitying copout you would expect from an absent father; “it’s too late for me” sounds like something you might hear from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, or from real-life pro wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts in the Beyond the Mat documentary, wherein we see Jake flee his grown daughter to smoke crack in his hotel room. (Meanwhile, I asked some friends what they thought might have happened had Luke had been successful in his attempt to persuade his father to flee the Death Star with him before their confrontation with the Emperor. My friend Chip‘s answer: “Weird ride home.”)

Luckily, Anakin rescues Luke from the deadly consequences of his own anger when Luke himself proves incapable, leading to the most poignant exchange George Lucas ever penned:

Luke: I’m going to save you.

Anakin: You already have.

I am a very lucky son, for I got to enjoy just such a cathartic moment with my own dad, and in our case we have enjoyed the happy aftermath for 15 years now, rather than the few hurried deathbed moments the Skywalkers are allowed. Is it because my own troubled relationship with my father rebounded in such a wonderful fashion that the closing moments of the Skywalker father/son saga struck me (to my surprise and near-embarrassment) as so touching? (If so, what feelings does the Skywalker conflict and its resolution stir in my friends who are enthusiastic Star Wars fans whose fathers are absent?)

Or is it just that George Lucas paints his father-son drama in such broad, mythic strokes that it cannot help but feel powerful? (I am reminded of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Once More With Feeling”, which creator Joss Whedon suggested was a fitting and inevitable episode because the characters in his series were so histrionic that you’d always kind of expected them to break out in song.)

So Luke and Anakin Skywalker save one another; the father saves the son’s life, the son saves the father’s soul. And along the way, both men change and grow. “Vader” learns to love again, and while Luke’s furious denial of his father in The Empire Strikes Back is like a caricature of a typical teenager (“These are not my parents!”), he learns, like so many young adults, to reluctantly accept (and even stubbornly insist) that “there is good” in his father. Really, Luke Skywalker’s arc calls to mind an old quote that is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

But if fans are mistaken about Return of the Jedi and Luke Skywalker (they dismiss Jedi because of its Ewoks, and Skywalker is often deemed a wuss), might they also be wrong about the prequel trilogy?

And how.

First, though, let us all agree on something: the Star Wars prequels are painfully corny and overwrought. But so was the classic trilogy. Since I’d always derided the entire six-film series, I feel no sense of betrayal when viewing the prequels. I lack the powerful emotional attachment that most geeks my age bring to these films, and so just as I can admit that the old Star Wars movies are good despite their glaring flaws, I can admit the same about the prequels.

Especially the most derided of the bunch: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

IT’s CGI Heavy

It’s CGI Heavy

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg seems to argue that if tumbling over the edge of one waterfall is awesome, then going over the edge of three waterfalls in a row is three times as awesome. Naturally, he’s right.

Likewise, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace would have us believe that the only thing cooler than a giant fish-monster trying to eat our heroes as they navigate a series of tumultuous underwater caverns is an even bigger fish-monster showing up to eat the first one. This is also true, of course. Further, fully aware that there is no sense in going at such a concept in a half-assed (or even subtle) fashion, George Lucas chooses to have the same thing happen to our heroes again, just a few seconds later.

God bless him.

I do not know why this movie’s flaws irked me (and most everyone else) to the extent that they did back in 1999. A decade later, I smiled and chuckled and marveled at The Phantom Menace with all the happy abandon I brought to my viewing of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Even some of its flaws are fascinating. Firstly, filming any sort of science fiction prequel many years after its predecessor(s) can have a strange impact on what came before, owing to nothing more than the inevitable progress of technology. The Jedi-Sith saber fights and the various battlefield dramas in The Phantom Menace are rendered and choreographed with so much more complexity and at such a larger scale than those of the original trilogy that, taken chronologically, the Star Wars saga as a whole would almost seem to suffer from what could only be described as a case of diminishing returns in retrospect.

Put another way: if one were to sit down to a six-film Star Wars marathon, Episodes I through VI, each seen for the first time, would it not be anticlimactic to follow Darth Maul‘s dizzying, brutal dance with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan with the relatively stilted, kids-with-sticks style of fight that Darth Vader and Obi-Wan perform in Episode IV? Having seen Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon casually dispense with hordes of droids with a mere wave of the hand, would one not find Luke‘s stumbling efforts to master the Force less than engaging?

The Phantom Menace is of course one of the most CGI-heavy movies in history, and I have made no secret of my staunch opposition to CGI. That said, the effects in The Phantom Menace are approximately as effective and approximately as flawed as those in the original Star Wars trilogy. Still, had Lucas depended slightly less on CGI, the final result would have been far more effective; just look at the Special Editions of the original three Star Wars movies, where CGI was only used to supplement existing footage which had been produced with practical effects. Clearly, CGI works better as a tool on a canvas rather than as the entire canvas.

In the Special Editions of the old-school trilogy, there is no issue with actors struggling to “act” against a meaningless prop like a tennis ball that stood in for a creature that‘d be inserted into the scene on a computer monitor months later. Instead, actors interacted with other actors (or perhaps muppets), and so the footage appears real and lived-in, with gravity and shadow and weight.

When done properly, supplementing such practicals-based footage with CGI yields best-of-both-worlds results. The animated Dewbacks in Episode IV are an amazing example; in the untouched theatrical version of the movie from 1977, an actor in a Stormtrooper suit sat atop a motionless Dewback in the distand background, but the Special Edition has the Dewbacks weaving in and out of the foreground and interacting with the existing scene in stunning ways. That said, these and other CGI monsters are also often insubstantial in a way that those old props and puppets and costumed actors never were, and Lucas sometimes allows the CGI additions to intrude on the original footage in distracting ways.

Still, the CGI in The Phantom Menace allows for far more visual complexity than the original films could ever muster. (And the audio is no less complex; the sound editing during the podrace scene is one of the film‘s most staggering accomplishments.) Scenes in The Phantom Menace teem with incidental details and intriguing, half-glimpsed creatures and other delightful curiosities. And there seems to be something of an Asian influence on certain details of both the film‘s aesthetic (Queen Amidala‘s geisha make-up and posturing) and its action (light sabers are used much more cleverly and majestically here than the largely by-the-numbers swashbuckling of the original three films; who can say whether this would have been the case without the influence of samurais movies and Anime.) The architecture of the cities on Naboo is gorgeous, and the film‘s overall color pallette is richer than anything Episode IV, V or VI could have ever hoped to present; Queen Amidala‘s assistants are clothed in long, ceremonial robes that seem to be composed of every shade you see during the sunset.

Ultimately, and largely because of its heavy use of CGI, The Phantom Menace strikes the viewer as being somehow more cultural than the first three films. It is almost more feminine in some elusive, peripheral sort of way. And it is certainly more beautiful.

Would that its dialogue was so artfully crafted. Indeed, perhaps there is merit to my friend‘s claim that the film‘s woodenness is deliberate, the better to reflect its having been designed to pay tribute to Flash Gordon serials and their ilk. Still, one cannot help but wonder what might have been; imagine a series as visually complex and inviting as Star Wars, but with deeper characterization and engaging dialogue. That would be a film to behold.

Much has been said about The Phantom Menace‘s limp, uninspired political content; truly, senatorial bureaucracy is not the stuff of which space operas are made. Consider the opening crawl synopsis from Episode IV: A New Hope (which will always be simply Star Wars to me):

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy…

Compare that to this listless offering from The Phantom Menace crawl:

The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute…

I could also do without the two-headed Nascar-style podrace announcer; his voice is such an overt nod to something so identifiably American and contemporary and mundane that one is completely pulled out of the film‘s otherwise otherworldly landscapes.

The slapstick approach to the climactic Gungan/droid battle (mirrored by Anakin‘s accidentally activating a ship‘s autopilot and unwittingly saving the day) is perhaps too silly for the film‘s climax, but on the other hand, we have by this point seen such scenes played out with complete earnestness in no fewer than three previous Star Wars films; perhaps a lighter approach is justified?

Episode I‘s biggest flaw might actually be an uncharacteristic show of less-is-more restraint on the part of George Lucas: how short-sighted to have so carelessly and quickly done away with Darth Maul! Actually, this flaw damages the two films that follow The Phantom Menace, and really, it would have been rather rote to have built Maul up for Darth Vader‘s same three-film cycle. Even so, Darth Maul‘s creepy appearance and Ray Park‘s chilling confidence during the final battle with Ginn and Kenobi are so gripping that one cannot help but wish for more of Darth Maul, even at the risk of spoiling his mysterious appeal somewhat.

Liam Neeson‘s Qui-Gon Ginn is missed, too, in the two follow-up films. One of the Episode I’s grandest moments (if also the plot‘s worst-kept secret) is Padme‘s revelation that she is in fact the queen, and that our “Amidala” has secretly been her bodyguard acting as a decoy. Part of what makes this moment so great is the way its dramatic impact is so deliciously subverted by Liam Neeson, who turns and gives Ewan McGregor‘s Obi-Wan not a stunned gasp or a wide-eyed look of shock, but rather a bemused, admiring smirk; the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, and Qui-Gon Jinn seems to respond with little more than an appreciative, I‘ll-be-damned kinda shrug: “Who knew?” Or perhaps even “Far out.”

While histrionic fans would have no doubt screeched in protest had his role not been diminished to the point of invisibility in Episode II and Episode III, I daresay that even Jar-Jar Binks might have made meaningful contributions to the rest of the prequels had he been allowed more than brief cameos. He does not grate on one’s nerves today quite the way he did a decade ago, and he even elicits a chuckle now and then in The Phantom Menace. My favorite example is the scene during which Qui-Gon asks Jar-Jar where his people might have disappeared to, and Jar-Jar says, “When in trouble, Gungans go to sacred place.” Then, practically in the same breath, he cheerfully adds, “Me-sa show you!”

I wonder what Lucas had planned for Jar-Jar Binks in Episode II and Episode III before fan backlash halted the character‘s momentum. I don’t believe for a minute that all those promotional tie-in products and all those advertising dollars were poured into the Jar-Jar character with the intention of so drastically reducing his screen time in the next two movies. It almost feels as if C-3PO took over for Jar-Jar in Episode II, for if anything, he is more tiresome in that film than Jar-Jar is in The Phantom Menace.

Looking Back to the Future

Looking Back to the Future

Still, that so many of Episode I‘s characters (Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Maul, Jar-Jar, the child Anakin) are never seen again in the franchise just serves to make The Phantom Menace a distinct entry in the saga; it has an aesthetic and an arc and a pace and a joy uniquely its own.

Meanwhile, there is no joy to be found in Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Such was my antipathy towards George Lucas and his bloated space opera in 2002 that I refused to see Episode II when it was first released, but I remember the unanimous verdict among the Star Wars fans I polled: “Well, it was better than The Phantom Menace.”

At the time, this struck me as hopelessly faint praise, but seven years later, it is clear that moviegoers were deluding themselves on two fronts; firstly, The Phantom Menace is not as bad as they wanted to believe, and secondly, Attack of the Clones is not as good as they wanted to believe.

Attack of the Clones opens on the planet Coruscant, which is truly a setting worthy of the Star Wars name, with its Blade Runner-esque layers of airborne traffic weaving between ornate skyscrapers. Alas, the chase scene that plays out against this inspired backdrop is completely forgettable and unconvincing, as Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are suddenly not merely mortal men with spiritual superpowers; now they are apparently invincible.

Each experiences a free-fall lasting several seconds, and each lands inside or atop a passing vehicle and suffers no harm or injury. When all physical realism and accountability is abandoned like this, the audience is denied any reason for investing in the narrative, for nothing is at stake. Even the Jedis themselves cannot be bothered to express concern; hell, Anakin brashly chooses to fall.

During the same scene, Obi-Wan makes a bemused, flippant, playfully exasperated remark to his protégé, Anakin: “Why do I get the feeling you‘re going to be the death of me?” It‘s the kind of line that seems loaded and significant and clever at first, but it quickly collapses under any real scrutiny. It‘s too contrived and self-consciously meta, with none of the subtle chill of Chancellor Palpatine‘s comment to young Anakin at the close of The Phantom Menace: “We will watch your career with great interest.”

I have noticed that Jake Lloyd has not been looked upon with favoritism by many critics for his performance as the child Anakin Skywalker in The Phanom Menace. Perhaps it didn’t help the boy‘s cause that his performance was visited upon the world during the same year that a young Haley Joel Osment put on a veritable acting clinic in The Sixth Sense. (The “boy” Jake Lloyd is 20-years-old as of this writing, incidentally.) Whatever the case, while Lloyd was perhaps somewhat less than believable at times (if no more so than most any child actor), I found him mostly endearing and credible, and 30 minutes into Attack of the Clones, Hayden Christensen‘s portrayal of the young adult Anakin had me experiencing considerable nostalgia for young Mr. Lloyd.

When Christensen‘s Anakin isn‘t simply dishwater dull, he is whiney and mopey and full of self-pity. He fares better when the time comes to express anger, for if nothing else Christensen seethes with believable fury and self-doubt. Really, much of the issue with Christensen‘s acting stems from the lackluster script; George Lucas gave Christensen precious little to work with. (Just as Christensen really gets into a good groove, rage-wise, he is forced to switch gears from shouting and crying about how much he hates the Tusken Raiders he murdered to nonsensically shouting that “It‘s all Obi-Wan‘s fault!”)

Still, other actors managed to work small wonders with what meager offerings Lucas provided. Ewan McGregor, for example, shares the same quiet dignity that made Liam Neeson so arresting as the sorely missed Qui-Gon Ginn. One of McGregor‘s standout scenes takes place in what appears to be a ’50s diner, which is cute on the one hand and tiresome and maddening on the other; much like the podrace announcer in The Phantom Menace; this diner is so recognizable and familiar that we no longer feel that we are watching otherworldly science fiction. Still, McGregor‘s Obi-Wan is so sardonic and knowing in his conversation with Dex in the diner, and at the same time so warm (tough balancing act, that), that he elevates the entire scene.

Natalie Portman is given a largely thankless role, in that she must convince the audience that she has fallen in love with Anakin, whom it is not possible to even like. Still, she does what she can with the role and she does it well, and she looks beautiful while doing it, which seems to be the whole point, where women in Star Wars are concerned. (Unlike Carrie Fisher, Portman is at least spared the indignity of becoming a bikini-clad slave, though an inordinate amount of focus is dedicated to her bare midriff.)

Yoda, meanwhile, is no longer a Muppet. Instead, he is produced entirely through the use of CGI, much like Jar-Jar and Harry Potter’s Dobby before him. His movements are more fluid now, and his green, withered old face is more expressive. At the same time, his flesh looks flat and painted-upon, so that we are uncomfortably aware at all times that Yoda has become a mere cartoon. I for one miss the Muppet.

More so than even Yoda, the watery planet of Kamino represents everything false and off-putting and detestable about CGI. Filmmakers who come to rely too heavily on CGI can develop a blindness to even its most glaring failings, and the laughably unconvincing waves of Kamino are a perfect example. There‘s no polite way to say it: The water looks fake. Weak-graphics-in-a-dated-video-game fake.

It is difficult to overstate the crippling affect these ugly effects have on Attack of the Clones. After all, Star Wars has always been a series that depends on stunning visuals to compensate for its lackluster plotting and dialogue, and if ever an entry needed the aid of good visuals, it is this one. I shuddered when I first heard that Episode II featured a romantic subplot, and I was right to be afraid; George Lucas is not equipped to evoke love with mere words, and without the usual Star Wars imagery to support those words, nearly every bit of Anakin‘s motivation rings false. Worse still, his love for Padme Amidala develops on the planet of Naboo, which is admittedly beautiful, but which bears a discouraging, cheesy resemblance to the paintings of Thomas Kincade.

Sadly, the LucasFilm marketing department conveyed Anakin‘s plight better with a ten-word tagline than the film‘s entire 140 minutes managed to express: “A Jedi Shall Not Know Anger. Nor Hatred. Nor Love.”

There‘s a minimalist elegance and a haunting sense of foreboding at play in those three sentences, but you‘ll find no such elegance in Attack of the Clones. Nor, worse still, will you find any of the sweeping whimsy that has always been the primary trademark of the Star Wars series; even at its most intense, this film is never truly exhilarating. It feels less like a creative enterprise than a merely mechanical one.

Finally, there is Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it is difficult to gauge the extent to which people are mistaken about it, because it seems that many people never quite decided what to make of it in the first place.

This is interesting: when I decided to rediscover the original Star Wars trilogy, I went the cheap route and picked up whatever weary old video-cassette versions I could find at yard sales and second-hand stores, and as it happens, my VHS copy of The Empire Strikes Back includes an advertisement for a behind-the-scenes documentary in which a startlingly young George Lucas says something that seems much more significant today than it probably did when he first said it in the late ’70s or early ’80s: “Special effects are just a tool. A means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”

I leave it to you to determine the extent to which Lucas has forgotten this insight.

Episode III is dark and troubling, and often convincing in a way that the prequels rarely were. But it is not without its flaws, and I am reluctant to even concede that it is better than Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Whatever its rank in the saga, it is Emperor Palpatine‘s movie, not Anakin‘s. (If Lucas had allowed his direction to become a bit more paranoid, one could almost see Revenge of the Sith as Oliver Stone‘s Palpatine.)

Palpatine is a cunning conniver, and some of his speeches to the malleable Anakin Skywalker are creepy in their cold persuasiveness. But while the first stirrings of Anakin‘s turn to the dark side are convincing, things escalate too quickly; he essentially kills “younglings” as his opening chore for Palpatine.

Admittedly, it’s a powerful scene. When the young child Jedi asks Anakin, “What are we going to do?” and then steps backward, eyes widening in horrible understanding, it‘s easily the most chilling and terrible moment in the six-film saga. But does it ring true? Darth Vader later attempts to bring Luke to the dark side in Return of the Jedi; had he succeeded, would Luke have so quickly killed kids, just because it was asked of him? I do not believe that he would have. For that matter, I do not believe that Anakin would have; his turn to the dark side, the axis on which all six films tilt, feels false.

Now that we know that Vader murdered children, it’s clear that his redemption in Return of the Jedi comes too easily; he killed kids and oversaw the destruction of the Jedi, and yet Luke and the ghosts of Yoda and Obi-Wan are so quickly chummy with him. I am reminded of an amusing recap of The Rock‘s long-ago Wrestlemania feud with Hulk Hogan, in which Scott Keith provided imaginary dialogue for the wrestlers when they suddenly became buddies after their match: “Hogan and Rock make nice-nice, as presumably Hogan is all ‘Sorry about the attempted murder, brother’ and Rock is all, ‘It‘s cool, I didn‘t sell the injury anyway.’”

Meanwhile, Padme‘s death, which should arguably be the most devastating moment in the series, is silly and absurd. The implication that Anakin killed her is an intense and important one, but it could have been handled with more grace and subtlety, to say the least; even after all the scripting blunders in Episode II, I still cannot believe that Lucas would actually have a character say, “She died of a broken heart.”

While Hayden Christensen is no Ewan McGregor, his distinct lack of likability in Episode II was indeed the fault of the script; even at its worst, the writing is more engaging in Episode III, and as a result, Christensen soars. But his character does not, or at least not consistently; Anakin‘s most convincingly Dark moment is the furious “I hate you!” he directs at Obi-Wan. He doesn‘t mean it, of course, but he is so lost that he cannot realize for himself that he doesn‘t mean it; he says “I hate you” the way my five-year-old daughter says it when she‘s past due for a nap. It‘s a sad, heavy moment, for sure, but it also diminishes Darth Vader somewhat; was he always little more than a scared child throwing a tantrum?

Later, we hear Quigon Ginn‘s name, though never his voice. I‘d have liked to have had another glimpse of Anakin‘s former owner Watto, too. Something about his brief, tense reunion with Anakin in Episode II was strangely touching. Watto‘s bewildered, tentative whisper of “Ani…?” is one of the only emotional moments in that burdensome film.

Ultimately, Episode III mostly ties the saga together and makes it complete, but one cannot help but speculate about the order in which the films are now intended to be watched. Entertainment Weekly found a ”Star Wars virgin” whom they asked to watch all six films in chronological order. He wrote:

For me, the biggest problem with seeing these films in their intended order is that Episodes IV-VI offered little surprises. I know who Luke‘s father is; I know that the little creature is Yoda. I have to sit through that uncomfortable kiss between Luke and Leia knowing that they are indeed brother and sister. Most of the mysteries and questions that drive the plots of the later episodes are nullified by having seen the first three. (“Losin’ It” by Michael Morrison, Entertainment Weekly.com)

It will be interesting to see how new fans will respond to the series in coming years, considering what our virgin friend says above. But then, the parents of these future fans may simply opt, as I did, to have their children watch the films in what we will always consider to be the proper order: IV,V, VI, I, II, III.