Reviewed - Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith: But Donald Clarke wonders what's the point of George Lucas's extended back story
George Lucas's scheme is revealed in all its Machiavellian brilliance. By beginning his trilogy of Star Wars prequels with a film whose turgid pace and sloppy structure brilliantly summoned up the experience of swimming through medicated porridge, the director ensured that the subsequent episodes were certain to seem impressive by comparison.
Sure enough, Attack of the Clones, a poor film, was praised as a return to form, and Revenge of the Sith, an endurable film, has been hailed as a masterpiece.
Do I exaggerate? "So satisfyingly tragic you'll think you're watching Othello or Hamlet," Kevin Smith, the director of Jersey Girl, opines on his website.
Shakespeare's position as literature's greatest tragedian remains secure, but it cannot be denied that there are good things in Revenge of the Sith. No previous fantasy film has conjured up alternative worlds quite this beautiful. All those wonderful book covers from science fiction's golden years have finally been realised (or at least virtualised). Congregations of minarets in twilit metropolises; military landings on fantastical beaches; landscapes of molten lava: there is so much to look at that it is almost possible to close your ears to the reticent performances and blank dialogue.
And there is something oddly moving about the way this episode ends - I surely cannot be giving anything away here - with everything neatly in place for the start of the original. As Luke's stepfather cradles a baby and stares at twin sunsets, some men of a certain age may feel this is where their adolescence began. Maybe things will work out differently for us all this time.
That said, Revenge of the Sith is still junk. Conveniently leaving aside the anomaly that was American Graffiti, it is possible to argue that over the past 35 years George Lucas has only ever written one character with a distinctive, animated personality, and Han Solo, still a toddler, is nowhere to be seen here.
It's unfair to blame Ewan McGregor, all pinched vowels and sub-Rada rumbling, for delivering his lines in the voice that Scottish rugby fans use when taunting the English. And Hayden Christensen, quite dull enough to be Mark Hamill's father, should be forgiven his robotic torpor. So thin are Lucas's characters that only the most experienced theatrical buffers - Christopher Lee, Alec Guinness - have been able to invest them with any singularity.
Revenge of the Sith also suffers, as all prequels will, from the predictability of its plot. The film begins with Anakin Skywalker (Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor) waging war against the impressively realised General Grevious, a consumptive cyborg with many arms. The pregnant Princess Padmé (Natalie Portman), now secretly married to Anakin, chews her nails at home.
Lucas, stopping occasionally to draw analogies with contemporary conflicts, gets us where we know we are going (the two Jedi will fall out, Skywalker will acquire asthma and a big black helmet) by having his characters stare out the window and drone on at one another in instruction-manual prose. Not since the golden years of Ingmar Bergman have I seen so many windows being looked through by so many people. True, they are looking at spaceships and skyscrapers rather than the Baltic, but this isn't drama, it's tableau vivante (and not all that vivante, to tell the truth).
Ultimately, this second trilogy feels like an unnecessary attempt to flesh out an already satisfactory backstory. When, at the close of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader was revealed as Luke's father, that was all we really needed to know. Did Orson Welles, after exposing the truth about Rosebud in Citizen Kane, feel the need to spend the following decade making films about sledge manufacturers?
