Confessing Evangelical

Mark Steyn's review of Revenge of the Sith has now appeared on his website. Very entertaining. Steyn's not impressed, and he nails the real problem with all three prequels:

Lucas is truly one of the all-time worst directors of actors, and I include the teacher who put together the school production of Fiddler on the Roof I saw last week and got a more touching love scene out of a couple of 11-year-olds as the middle-aged Tevye and Golde than anything Christensen and Portman manage here.

Presumably actors say yes to Lucas because they figure Star Wars will do for them what it did for Harrison Ford. Instead, Lucas turns everyone he touches into Mark Hamill.

He illustrates this with the hilarious scene when Padme tells Anakin that she is pregnant, and Anakin:

...reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so... beautiful.’

‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.

‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.

The real let-down of ROTS is its total failure to convince us that Anakin Skywalker could possibly turn into Darth Vader. Darth Vader is a truly great character, and without this film we might have imagined he had emerged from equally great and titanic forces, rather than from a lame teen romance in which the two lovers "have all the sexual chemistry of their Burger King merchandising tie-in action figures".

As Steyn points out, Lucas seems to have forgotten where Darth Vader was supposed to have come from:

In 1977, the original movie said only that Darth Vader had been "seduced by the Dark Side of the Force". There's no seduction here: he's played for a sap and suckered by Sidious. He's Dork Vader, all-time fall guy for the machinations of another. Even for a paint-by-numbers space opera, that doesn’t pass muster.

For me, one other way in which ROTS undermines the later films is the loss of timescale. In the original film, the sense is of new hope emerging from a period of darkness so prolonged that all memory of the Jedi has all-but vanished. When we first encounter Yoda, he seems like a figure from a lost and forgotten antiquity.

In fact, by the time Luke Skywalker comes along, the Empire is - what, eighteen? nineteen? years old. Yoda and Obi-Wan have been in exile for about the same time as the last Conservative government was in power (interesting I should make that comparison... guess it's all the Billy Bragg I've been listening to recently... sending me back to the Left Side...). The Empire ends up being, not a great darkness that could overshadow an entire galaxy for countless ages, but "eighteen wasted years". (Which in turn means that Luke Skywalker is in fact Tony Blair. No, let's not go there.)

The sad thing is that a large part of the appeal of the original series was the mysterious shadow cast by the backstory (as with Lord of the Rings). It now turns out the backstory wasn't worth a hill of beans. That can only undermine the original trilogy.