Fourteen Years Since Revenge of the Sith
So then, what ABOUT the droid attack on the Wookies?
A quick note before we get started: there is going to be a lot of Star Wars content in this newsletter between now and the end of the year. I know that isn’t everyone’s favourite thing, so I promise that I won’t write a single thing on here about the franchise in 2020. But for now, buckle up, because this is where the fun begins.
It all comes tumbling down.
As of writing this, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the last film George Lucas has directed. It looks likely that it will be the last film he ever directs. At the time of making it, he might not have known it would be his last film, but he certainly knew it would be his last big blockbuster, his last Star Wars. This is his final statement on what the franchise is, and who he is as a filmmaker. It is, on many levels, the thing he has been building up to his whole career.
It’s the culmination of George Lucas’ career and of Star Wars, but coming chronologically in the middle of the series, it’s also the keystone. And possibly the rosetta stone. I lose track of which is which on those, but it’s definitely some kind of stone. Lucas layers meaning in these films through the way they echo and rhyme with each other, and Sith is really the pinnacle of this. You can see it happening in three different directions:
As the third film in a trilogy, Sith echoes Return of the Jedi. On a narrative level, this is important to contrast the way Anakin gives into Palpatine and succumbs to the dark side with the way Luke rejects it, embraces good and love and all of that gooey stuff, and finally brings his father back to the light. Structurally, Lucas emphasises this by devoting the first acts of both films to a side rescue mission (saving the Emperor from the Sepratist ship vs saving Han Solo from Jabba’s palace), as well as finally showing us Kashyyyk and the Wookie army in contrast to Endor and the Ewoks (the earlier drafts of Jedi of course used Wookies in place of Ewoks). Sith is the “bad ending” to Jedi’s “good ending”, the two films are yin and yang, high and low, the dark side and the light.
In following what’s become known as the “ring theory”,Sith echoes A New Hope (I know it is called simply Star Wars and I generally call it that, but it’s A New Hope here to avoid confusion). Quite obviously, we end where we began, with Luke on Tatooine and Anakin in the Darth Vader mask, but we open with a big space battle reminiscent of that film’s Death Star destroying conclusion. While A New Hope opens of course with the famous shot of the Star Destroyer overhead, this film quite literally shows us a very similar ship from below the camera. It’s that film upside down. This is where the ring composition really pays dividends, as it allows the story structure to show that we are coming full circle as well as the events of the plot.
It’s not just Lucas’ end to Star Wars but also the prequel trilogy. In order to close this smaller but still significant journey, Sith echoes The Phantom Menace. It opens with two Jedi sent on a diplomatic mission and closes with Obi-Wan Kenobi cutting a Sith Lord’s legs off. It shows how Obi-Wan has succeeded where Qui-Gon Jinn failed, becoming a Jedi Master and joining the Council, but he fundamentally fails in training his apprentice, something Qui-Gon did successfully, and also fails to live up to his promise to teach the boy.
All the threads Lucas built starting from 1977 are being brought together here. It’s something of a retcon (there is very little to indicate it was what Lucas thought he was making in 1977), but if Star Wars is “the tragedy of Darth Vader” then this is the central moment when it all collapses. The story being told in Sith is the least blockbuster friendly the franchise has ever attempted: the fall of a democratic society to fascism through the lens of one man’s personal descent. It’s not a shock, then, that the scope of the thing leads to some issues. The first act is less an act than a prelude, as Lucas found he needed to cut down something that originally took over an hour to around 22 minutes. We’re dropped into an episode of The Clone Wars with Jedi turned soldiers Anakin and Obi-Wan on a rescue mission to save Palpatine. The aim here seems to be twofold: show that the Jedi are in full on war mode, and highlight Anakin’s descent as he kills Count Dooku. But the problem is the same as the whole film and the prequel trilogy: there’s a lot of nonsense along the way. Lucas has always been keen to stress that Star Wars is for kids, but the fairly childish humour here totally undercuts the central point: the Republic is at war. This act has been heavily cut down but honestly it still feels extraneous.
The Star Wars movies generally have a pretty straightforward three act structure, but the side effect of a cut down first act is that the next two feel like epics. The main tension in act two is about Anakin being seduced to the dark side, and this in itself is a strong hook. The problem is that this is a huge blockbuster and the main conflict is about the protagonist talking to people in rooms and dealing with his conscience. Lucas shoots a lot of this beautifully, even with the poor CGI, and the sunset-infused colour palette is a big upgrade over Attack of the Clones’ cartoon shades. But Lucas still doesn’t seem to trust that talking in rooms alone will carry a blockbuster, so he again has to bring in fairly ridiculous subplots of Obi-Wan and Yoda fighting in big battles largely just to get the explosions in. It’s understandable, but frustrating.
The other issue here is in a change made fairly late on. The original idea of why Anakin turned was a more direct parallel to Luke’s conflict in Jedi: the dark side is a drug. It’s “fishier, more seductive”, and once it gets its hooks into you, it’s all consuming. You can still see the skeleton of this in the film. It apparently didn’t feel like a strong enough motivation, so instead we get the “just help me save Padme’s life” version. This undercuts the symmetry with Jedi and Anakin’s eventual redemption, but it’s a credit to Lucas that he found such a solution to a serious problem in his story. It does lead to the issue of Anakin suddenly taking such glee in killing the Younglings five minutes after he was so conflicted, which is extremely odd, and a line or two about the dark side taking him over once he turned could’ve cleared stuff up a bit.
But we’re really here to see how it all ends. Again, there’s some ridiculous stuff here. CGI Yoda wielding a lightsaber against venerable British stage actors never works, as cool as the metaphor of literally destroying the senate is. And Hayden Christensen isn’t really a strong enough actor to sell his big moments. But damn if Sith doesn’t go all out in its big moments. This big wieldy space opera tragedy wants you to feel the significance of this. It has the quality I most value in art: a lack of embarrassment about itself. It fully believes in what it’s doing in the third act, and for that I can go along with it.
In terms of storytelling, you really have to place it in context to understand what on Earth Lucas is trying to say. Take Yoda as an example. Within Sith, he’s treated as a wise sage, the only person in the room who senses even a sniff of Anakin’s demise before it comes. But in the context of the original trilogy, almost everything he says ends up being flat out wrong. Despite Yoda’s claims, the prophecy wasn’t misread. Anakin does bring balance to the force, eventually. He isn’t completely consumed by the dark side. What’s presented as total darkness here is brought back to the light in the end. This trilogy acts as though the Jedi are an intelligent operation that inexplicably get completely played, but the clues are there that Lucas does not see it this way. He’s always stressed that the message of the franchise is an incredibly straightforward one: “love each other”. If anything, the idea the film wants to express about the Jedi here is that they should have shown Anakin more compassion rather than distrust. The Last Jedi makes it somewhat canon that Yoda and the Council got it wrong, but the seeds are right here in this film. The prequel trilogy in completion is the story of blind arrogance from establishment elites attempting to uphold liberal values that blinds them to the rise of a fascist autocracy taking place around them.
Look, this is a stupid film about stupid characters doing stupid things that make no sense. But it’s so fully committed to itself that I can’t help but adore it. Lucas will never be the most expressive director, but by his standards he’s really going all out here. After the staid camerawork of Menace and Clones, Sith is a film of fluid tracking shots and split diopters. Everything was put into this film. It is Lucas’ final, purest expression of who he is as a filmmaker. And of course I’m all in on that, warts and all.