Star Wars Episode III: Gotterdammerung gone digital

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Chris Mitchell

Dum dum dum, dum de dum, dum de dum...I think I might break a rule here and actually talk about some of the popular culture whose brains we're supposed to be picking. And you can't get more pop culture than Star Wars Episode III. Opening here in Bangkok today as it did around the world, I was deeply excited to be seeing it on the first day. Star Wars is perhaps the last great bastion of shared culture, before fragmentation set in for good - the one thing people of my early 30s generation can all remember and almost uniformly have fond memories.

Despite the battering such goodwill took over the first two prequels, the lure of Episode III has always been inescapable - not only to see how the prequels join with the originals, but because the events of Episode III are so close to the original film that its story arc must, by necessity, rely on many of the crucial characters within the original. Where Episode I and II failed, in part, is because they had a whole raft of new characters which basically no-one cared about - whereas in Episode III, everyone's entranced by finding out how Darth Vader became Darth Vader before they even get into the cinema.

I was desperate not to be disappointed though, so I went with few expectations. I came out absolutely buzzing with excitement about what I'd just seen. Star Wars is often defined as the mother of all blockbusters, the essence of a popcorn movie - but the depressing vapidity of the films that these terms usually describe doesn't fit Star Wars Episode III at all. This was Gotterdammerung gone digital, a visually dazzling and genuinely intricate movie. Episode III is also a dizzyingly fast-paced film whose whole managed to gloss over the frequent but mercifully short crappy bits of dialogue. Sith provided the classic Star Wars magic in spades - insanely complex space battles and lightsabre fight sequences, and the magical sense of genuinely becoming completely involved in the film's epic battle of good versus evil.

Everyone knew that Episode III was likely to rival The Empire Strikes Back in its bleak depiction of fascist triumph. But dark doesn't even begin to describe the atmosphere created by Revenge Of The Sith. There are some genuinely horrifying moments [*possible spoiler: the Jedi betrayal and the demise of the younglings*] where Star Wars stops being a schlocky space opera and fully embodies the timeless themes of power, corruption and tragedy. (Small children may well get very upset. My bottom lip distinctly wobbled a couple of times). Lucas has frequently cited Julius Caesar as a prime inspiration for the story, and the voluntary ending of democracy forms the film's key plot movement. "This is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause" as Senator Padme puts it. And indeed, for all the eye-rollingly bad dialogue during the love scenes, there are some cracking lines in Episode III. Much has been made of the similarity between Anakin's vow that "If you are not with us, you are my enemy" and Bush's "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terrorism". But it's Obi-Wan Kenobi's disgusted response, "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes" that is the far more important line. The moral ambiguity that runs through Episode III, both as perpetrated by the Jedi and the Sith, adds an gratifying extra level of complexity to the plot that makes it wholly engrossing.

Beyond all that though, Revenge Of The Sith simply delivers what everyone craved from the prequels - a film to rival the original Holy Trinity. It doesn't put a foot wrong in its plot pacing or in its handling of the Republic's darkest hour. Where I fully expected Lucas to clumsily throw away moments of significance in the story, he deftly builds them up to keep the audience wholly hooked into the fate of the characters. It's almost like the first two prequels were simply experiments in preparation for this one, where everything is welded together. More importantly, beyond all the merchandising tat and the sad fuckers who spend days standing in lines outside cinemas, it reignites Star Wars' potency as its own myth - and in the classic myths from which it's derived. Lucas recently said in a Wired interview that he's reconciled himself to being happy with being "the Star Wars guy" because he's realised that no-one is telling the old stories anymore. Episode III proves they're worth telling once again.