The following essay is riddled with both Sith spoilers and process discussion, so if you want to avoid either, bail out now.

So, Revenge of the Sith. Where to begin, really.

The early eighties is as good a place as any. I’m in grade school in the early eighties; I’ve skipped a grade, and the feeling that I’m going to be found out as a fraud and sent back a year persists in various ways to this day, but is never stronger than it is in the middle of elementary school, stymied as I am by the multiplication tables and the girl who bullies me. The girl is thick, in every way, and she’s a puzzle I can’t solve; she just sits on my chest and squashes the breath out of me, actually at recess and then metaphorically the rest of the time, and underneath her, I can’t be seen. I’m a year late and twenty pounds short in the early eighties and I don’t give a good goddamn about Darth Vader’s motivations. My boy the Sith Lord can strangle a general without touching the guy, enough said. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the fat girl and the nine-timeses letting me the fuck up off the ground for five minutes? I’ll have what he’s having.

This is why I loved Darth Vader as a kid: he is one hundred percent tragic-opera yippee-ky-ay-motherfucker stone-cold spaghetti-Western-black-hat who’s-your-daddy this-is-how-we-do-it-on-the-Death-Star-bitch we-who-are-about-to-die-salute-you capital-B bad-ass. That dude is not trying to hear anything about Indian burns or the silent treatment, and the only thing he’s long-dividing is your ass with his foot.

So, we begin with the age-old story: Girl meets villain; girl falls in love; villain is revealed as a whiny bitch with confusingly written motivations, portrayed by a wooden and miscast actor in a series of movies whose timelines don’t work; girl dumps villain, citing irreconcilable midichlorians, and takes up with villain’s icky and wrinkly but far more campily satisfying boss.

And we begin with that story because this is the primary problem with Revenge of the Sith — not the only problem, God knows, but the one problem I couldn’t get past, namely that if you hit George Lucas with the previous paragraph? He wouldn’t get it. I mean, there’s barely anything to get, but he…still wouldn’t get it. He wouldn’t know that it’s a riff on “boy meets girl, boy falls in love, boy loses girl,” blah blah blah arc-cakes, because the man does not seem to understand any of the conventions of language, or of storytelling, at all.

At first, it seemed like he did. Lucas started the story with A New Hope in the middle of things — in medias res, a time-honored literary device that served Homer and Vergil (among others) well. It just drops you into the action and expects you to keep up, a little exposition from Menelaus here, a little flashback action to the fall of Troy there, and everything eventually comes into focus. Lucas didn’t give us a whole lot of background on Vader, because he didn’t need to; Vader is the enemy, he’s all in black, and once we find out that he turned evil (versus being born that way), and that he’s Luke and Leia’s father, voila, depth. It could have stopped there, and probably should have.

Because I don’t think Lucas set out to create a towering figure in the annals of villainy, and in fact is on record at resenting the burden placed on him creatively by the chords the story struck in moviegoers. I think his line is that he just wanted to make shiny, crunchy, kaboom-y action movies, and then he sort of got saddled with a bunch of Milton’s-Lucifer hero’s-journey stuff and didn’t know what to do with it — and I don’t mean that he saw the parallels to Paradise Lost but couldn’t incorporate them into his own mythos. I mean he isn’t familiar with Paradise Lost at all.

I’m not suggesting, for what it’s worth, that Lucas is uncultured, or an idiot. The last two seasons of Buffy suffered from a similar malady, namely the obvious unfamiliarity of the writing staff with fundamental principles of spiritual or mythological narrative. I believe that Joss Whedon has said that he is not religious and received no religious education, which is fine, and I don’t think Whedon is uncultured or an idiot either, but in order to take on a concept like The First Evil, you should probably go in with at least a basic grounding in Edith Hamilton, the better-known Bible stories, the Book of Revelation, Milton, Homer, Vergil, and every Batman comic you can put hands to. If you take the structural balancing backbone out of a myth, it won’t stand up, and later Buffy didn’t.

The Star Wars prequels don’t, either, because I don’t see that kind of familiarity with centuries of storytelling — how it gets done, how it gets physically put together, how and why it functions — in Lucas’s work. A big part of writing is the reading that got done before it, the understanding on conscious and unconscious levels of how a story is told and how it should sound, and either Lucas has some sort of plot aphasia where he really does know the building blocks and he just can’t put them in the right order, or he hasn’t done the reading, and I can’t really tell which it is. The dialogue is notoriously putrid throughout the entire series, to the point where it would have worked better if he had done a cliché search on the IMDb and just used hackneyed lines from other movies; clichés become clichés for a reason, and even if you couldn’t say anything else good about it, the dialogue would have worked in the past once or twice. Lucas’s doesn’t work at all. Take Anakin/Vader’s line in the climactic fight scene, when he’s basically telling Obi-Wan to side with him or fuck off:

“If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.”

Sigh. No. The line is “If you’re not with me, you’re against me,” or “Either you’re with me or you’re against me.” It’s a cliché, true, but it works because it contains parallel structure — two prepositional phrases, the meaning of each in opposition to the other. Parallel structure makes it effective. The Lucas version does not have that; the Lucas version is run through Babelfish, I guess, because if you’re going to use a line that tired, why would you rewrite it so that it sounds like stereo instructions in the second place? Why not just use the original? And then there’s Obi-Wan’s response:

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.”

Ewan McGregor did his best with the first part of that, and the sentence is supposed to signal to us that Obi-Wan sees Anakin has turned completely to the Dark Side, of course, but — couldn’t Lucas have let McGregor telegraph that to us with his face? He’s probably the best actor onscreen at any given time; he could pull it off. But no, Lucas has to insult everyone involved — McGregor, the Obi-Wan character, the audience — by shoehorning in a ridiculous Mike-Brady-lecture line like that, because he’s a terrible writer and terrible with the actors, too, and that first sentence proves that he’s got no more regard for what they do than he does for a piece of set dressing. “I will do what I must” is a good line. It’s simple; it’s got heft. It communicates the intent while also reflecting forward to Obi-Wan’s role in the original three movies. But it’s ruined, like a sunflower whose stalk snaps because the head is too heav– whoa, speaking of bad writing. Heh.

Anyway. The dialogue is dreadful, but the dialogue is always dreadful, and while it’s disappointing, it’s not nearly as disappointing as the storytelling screw-ups. From a story-arc standpoint, the entire transformation from Anakin into Vader is…wrong. I really can’t find another word for it. It just doesn’t work, for a number of reasons, and we may as well start with his motivations for turning to the Dark Side. Ostensibly, Anakin turns on the Jedi because 1) he is told that only Sith powers can protect Padme from the death he has foreseen for her, and 2) he is an impatient, short-tempered, somewhat petty apprentice who wants power he hasn’t earned.

The “and” is key. Why two motivations? After all, we’ve seen evidence of #2 going back into the previous prequels, and what with the hard sell Palpatine gives Anakin vis-à-vis the Jedi trying to fuck him over, #2 is, on paper, the more believable stimulus. But I suspect that Lucas felt he had to give Anakin a good reason for turning — not “good” as in “understandable” but “good” as in, you know, good. Honorable. Sympathetic.

But the thing is, you can’t have it both ways — not with the way these motivations would play out in the plot, and not with Hayden Christensen tasked with acting them. Christensen is a fine actor; I liked him a lot in Shattered Glass. But he’s just not very good in the prequels. He looks too much like Uma Thurman, for starters; he doesn’t make a convincing conflicted hero or a convincing nascent bad-ass. He just doesn’t have the weight, emotionally. He’s too young, too light and pouty. But in his defense, almost nobody could have portrayed Anakin with these two motivations, because they work at cross-purposes.

#1 should lead to a lot more inner conflict in Anakin — he doesn’t want to turn his back on the Jedi, but he must, because it’s the only way to save Padme, and he can’t tell the Jedi what he’s up to because their romance is a secret in the first place, blah blah. Okay, that would have worked for me. But that plot calls for a slow evolution, the deep ambivalence of the character shading into a grim determination to do what needs doing to save his lover’s life, and then he’s morally compromised by doing it, and then she dies anyway and he’s bitter and has no legs and he just decides, well, it’s easier just to keep on this way, because I’ve betrayed everything I used to believe and besides, these powers are neat.

#2 is a continuation of what we’ve already seen from the character; the way that should play out is that he’s seduced by the power offered by Palpatine under false pretenses, turns his back on the Jedi because he thinks they’ve betrayed him, slaughters the lot and takes on the Sith title, and doesn’t look back — as far as he’s concerned, he’s ascending to the position he rightfully deserves, and the fact that Padme died anyway means that she’s dead and he’s bitter and see above.

Either of these is a perfectly valid driving force for the character, but Lucas did need to choose one of them — either the redeeming #1 or the more credible #2 — and stick with it. He didn’t, and as a result, the whole thing’s a mess. The scene in which Windu is killed is Exhibit A; according to #1, Anakin should feel enormously uncomfortable with and remorseful about having to kill Windu to preserve the source of his power, but Christensen doesn’t play it that way. According to #2, Anakin should not give much of a damn, because allegedly he believes Palpatine’s assertion that the Jedi want to dick him out of the master title, and Windu had given Anakin some attitude to that effect only a few scenes prior. Christensen doesn’t play it that way, either. He’s supposed to play it both ways, and it’s impossible, and I don’t think much of Christensen in this role but I also feel that there isn’t an actor alive who could have portrayed both of those particular cross-written motivations at the same time.

And so the movie goes along like this, stepping on its own cape, not explaining the timeline and making Anakin’s conversion into Vader seem abrupt and unearned as a result. If Lucas had chosen a single motivation, he could have brought it along effectively, but as it is, Anakin kneels before Palpatine, he’s dubbed Vader, bip, end of story — and on a side note here, we could have gotten an explanation of the name, any explanation at all. Lucas’s naming conventions border on the fan-fic as it is, with the Sidious and the Grievous that and the Plagueis (did I even spell that right?) the other thing — what’s next, Darth Fection? Darth Vasion? Surrection? Syphilis? Get a naming dictionary or Google “name origins,” George, jeez — but Palpatine just sort of plucks the name out of the air. We’ve waited for twenty years to see Vader’s origin story; whether Lucas wanted that responsibility or not, he should have done better by the naming (although at least we didn’t have to hear anyone else call him “Anny,” because my GOD is that twee), and he should have made the timeline clearer. Anakin just kind of…flips, government-witness style. He’s whiny and suspicious, and then he’s Vader, and he’s all murderous and glare-y in his hood and his pancake makeup, so…does he have the Sith powers, then? Because it’s not clear how they differ from Jedi powers (it looks like Jedi can Vulcan-pinch, too), and since Padme dies, do we believe that he didn’t use the powers to save her because he was injured? Or…did he not have them yet? And if he didn’t get them in time to save her, why doesn’t he try to kill Palpatine? Windu held Palpatine off for a good five minutes, and Anakin is supposed to be a much more powerful Jedi than any of the others. Why wouldn’t he just send a bolt of lightning up Palpatine’s robe and end it? Oh, that’s right. Because he has two incompatible motivations, not just the one, so nothing he does makes sense because Lucas has never read even a single novel, or watched any movies besides his own, because if he had, he would probably see that having Vader wrench himself off the operating table all Frankensith, yell, “Nooooooooooooo!”, and start destroying half the room with his mind is a rip-off of Mary Shelley, Michael Bay, AND Carrie which saps the Vader character of any dignity.

I don’t mean to fetishize Darth Vader here, but: honestly. “Noooooooooooo!”? Are you…kidding me? And then Lucas just…cuts a…way? To the next scene? Because…what? We all sat patiently through the first two piece-of-shit movies, and we did it because we trusted Lucas not to sell out the character with a B-movie “Damn you, Salazar!” moment like that, and then…he sells Vader out.

It’s a damn shame, too, because I wouldn’t trust George Lucas to write me a thank-you note, but he knows how to paint a picture. If I read the screenplay of Sith, I’d have no choice to give it an F. Or a letter farther down in the alphabet. I’d give it a P. It’s that bad on paper. But on the screen…the shot of Vader’s helmet going on, from the side, and clicking into place, locking him in, and his skin is still smoking up around it, and there’s a beat, and then you hear that first “fffffff…ahhhhh”…that shot is flawless. It’s profoundly satisfying. Everyone in the theater just kind of…relaxed at that moment, because the circle had closed, finally.

The last twenty minutes of the movie, in fact, are lovely, because nobody is really talking all that much; it’s just pictures. Christensen is in the weeds for most of the film, but when he’s on the ground, screaming and burning, clawing for purchase with his one remaining limb, on the floor of hell, and Obi-Wan turns his back on him, knowing that no matter what he chooses to do, it’s wrong, and in that moment is also the moment in A New Hope when Obi-Wan puts up his light saber and lets Vader run him through, and Lucas cuts back and forth between Luke and Leia’s birth and Padme screaming on the table and Vader’s “birth” and Anakin screaming on the table…it’s so good. It’s as good as it gets, gratifying and balanced. It’s everything coming together — the funeral procession, the hand-off of Luke at two-sun sunset, Leia’s theme playing as the Organas cradle her on the balcony, Vader silently joining Palpatine on the bridge to look out at the shell of the Death Star, which looks like the old Coney Island Cyclone with the moss and the weeds taking it back to the earth. It’s gorgeous and chilling, and then, it’s done. And thus, the damn shame, because Lucas can really make a movie look like a million bucks. A big set piece, no problem. Huge battle sequences, shit-kicking Muppets, aging an evil chancellor three hundred years with static electricity, ain’t no thing. Two people just talking to each other and he’s at a complete loss.

And I know he didn’t ask for that job, American film’s epic bard. I know he didn’t want it and I bet it’s because he knows he’s not good at it, at the telling part. And it’s not like they’re going to kick The Iliad out of the curriculum to make room for “The Subheroes”; I’ve had to start that shit from the beginning three times and it’s still kicking my ass. But one of my favorite parts of my job editing TWoP recaps is seeing how twenty different writers will get from A to B in twenty different ways: colloquialisms, legal reasoning, song parodies, dialogue breaks, cursing, chiasmus. Everybody comes at a story a different way, some hearing it, some seeing it in the mind’s eye, or maybe proportions of both, and not everybody is supposed to tell a story with words. As a writer, Lucas is a great cinematographer, and it’s a pity he didn’t figure that out and hand off the screenplay to a great writer, because I wanted to love Sith, but: “Nooooooooo!”

May 23, 2005

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