Only one Sith shops in Absolutes, but “Star Wars“Fans love to handle hyperbole.
This fan has such an explanation to do: “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” is the best “Star Wars” movie of all. It’s a personal blockbuster film As you find this century, a work of operatic greatness and wave and despair that was based on each “Star Wars” movie before it to deliver a final statement. Well, a final statement for George LucasAt least who fell up his director’s chairman once for everyone after “revenge” met theaters in 2005.
Over the past ten years, since Disney took over the franchise and washed out his Galaxy’s value of films and television programs in the “Star Wars” universe, Prequels has received an approval boost. The cynics will say that Prequels have not changed, it is just a matter of how disappointing much of Disney’s offers have been. I am here to say that the critics and the “fans” who hated prequels, especially “Revenge of the Sith”, were wrong all the time. “Revenge” was good in 2005 – I already said it was one of 10 best films from the 2000s for BBC culture 2016 – And it’s even better now. And not just because events in the real world have reflected galactic events.
The largest fee against Prequels was a conceptual: they only filled in details in the broad stroke that we already knew – that Darth Vader needed his suit because he had been terribly injured in a volcano was established in “Return of the Jedi” novel in 1983. The emphasis on “what happened” but “how things happened.” And with “Revenge of the Sith”, the big takeaway is not how it ends “, but” here is what it means. “Prequels make the original trilogy so much richer, because they add meaning: they say much more why the original films played the role of the original.
And with “Revenge of the Sith”, Lucas gave his boldest philosophical tag: that the same characteristics that make a hero can make them the most beautiful villain. The fact that the institutions you stick to can be crumbled at a moment, faster than Death Star which powder a planet. That the key to winning a battle in fact can be … not to fight a war at all. These absolutes may not have much value at all. Not even the difference between the dark side and the bright side of the power.
Take a look at the stage that is the heart of the movie in so many ways: when the leader of the Jedi Order Mace Windu takes three Jedi with him to arrest the chancellor Palpatine in his office. Ian McDiarmid finally gets the chance to remove the mask as it would be the Emperor and reveals the character’s full, tantering villain. Murdering Mace three colleagues before they hardly have a chance to defend themselves, Palpatine seems to have the upper hand – but Mace is in the position he is for a reason, and he disarms Chancellor. With his purple light saber at Palpatine’s neck, Mace Anakin Skywalker says that the chancellor “is too dangerous to stay to the courts” and that this will end “here and now.” The leader of the Jedi order will literally murder the unarmed chancellor. It’s all true what Palpatine said about Jedi who wants to take over!
Now you and I know that Jedi would not have thrown the galaxy in the dark and created the empire if they had killed Palpatine there. But to commit a murder to serve your stated goal of restoring democracy … Doesn’t that mean you have already lost? No matter which government you would put in place, then would forever be stained with murder, born in blood, no matter how noble its possible intentions can be. Palpatine wins and becomes an emperor because he forced Jedi to become their worst self, unlike Obi-Wan later in the film, hand over their moral high ground. Maybe killing Palpatine there meant that Jedi couldn’t lose. But they could never win either.
Of course, as Autocrat, Palpatine will use this attempt at his life to justify actually Slaughter thousands of Jedi. The way for all autocrats: they not only commit their barbarities, they feel morally motivated, even worthy, by doing so. There is an indignation that McDiarmid conveys in these scenes after the trial of his life that is particularly potent: how dares you Do me have to commit unthinkable horror?
For those who buy in with fascism it is a simple calculation: Yes, you who oppose us would do this us If you had the chance, right?
McDiarmid’s work here is spectacular and shoots beyond every measure of realism, until he plays that part of the Emperor, the scarce face under the hood and everything, as if he is the evil queen turned Hag in Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Visually, they couldn’t be more alike. But it is a brand of Luca’s justice that he realizes that it is much more likely that an old man is the villain in a situation like this than an old woman, even with the logic of the fairy tale that is the basis for much here. (A similar reversal occurs with the permission of Western iconography in “A New Hope”, when the Jawa -New Builders are not massacred by the “native” people, Tusken Raiders, but by the forces in Empire, which covers their traces by getting the blame on Tuske’s chose.) Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose Chose, McDiarmid’s turn here as one of the best performances on 2000s.
These political ideas about the debt and rescue complex that form the basis for fascism come directly from the 1930s, the era where the series “Flash Gordon” (complete with opening crawl) that inspired Lucas so much, first unspooked in film projectors around the world. What is extraordinary is that Lucas married them with the most up to minute technology, which he helped to ensure that every “Star Wars” payment pressed the boundaries of film form. “Revenge of the Sith” completely rejects all attempts at naturalism. It is an exercise in pure style, where the actors are almost completely filmed in front of blue screens – which means that McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor, as an actor with a strong theater background, depict things that are not there is a given, especially excellent. Film fans may have forgotten this, but there was even some talk in 2005 about “Revenge of the Sith” even meets the academy’s definition of an animated film.
Lucas and his VFX animators paint with pixels in “Revenge of the Sith.” If you are a revanchist who stumps for Wachowski’s “Speed Racer”, you must also come on a soap box for “revenge”. Both of these films can be seen eternal through a scrim of pure Artifice, where every last aspect of the frame is governed by the author. It works especially in “Revenge” because of how Lucas luxury in his pixel landscape and lets you like the audience just “be” in that galaxy far, far away too little.
Take the 56-second scene where you simply look at General Grievou’s vessels fly through space, enter the atmosphere on the planet Utapau and then come to a landing in a Sinkole city, where Cyborg General goes out and coughs to call Palpatin over Holonet. Nothing really happens here! It is only a gap that uses opera as a metaphor, to get the breath while the landscape is moved around on stage and to bathe in a bit John Williams’ Ghosting “Die Irae” Runs.
To is world -building. Environments are not explained, but you are encouraged to turn your eyes over the frame and explore. And it must be said that there are almost no moments in the “Star Wars” stories that have been told since Luca’s exit. Most of these stories after Lucas are simply told, and do not invite you to discover on your own (on the other hand, the first genuine “stop the action and deliver the exposure” scene more than half an hour in “A New Hope”, that’s how much that movie just “lets you in” and forces yourself to get your layers).
Luca’s special sense of Quirk also adds details and personality throughout: Grievouso’s inexplicable cough, the extreme close-ups of serious and Obi-Wan’s eyes in their duel, at the moment a blaster bolts almost hits while observing a battle on kashyyyk from abre, “good relations with the wookie. For British humor: Deadpan, inexplicable, presented as “take it or leave it.”
“Revenge of the Sith” stands as proof of everything that has been lost since: Instead of running boundaries and embrace artific from the digital revolution, the films in the franchise have since embraced the Throwback technology and all except threw VFX artists under the bus. The “practical effects” Mantra JJ Abrams threw out there constantly in the marketing campaign for “The Force Awakens” was a sign that “Star Wars” may not be interested in breaking new ground anymore, but simply seeing the past. It has a couple of moments of Lucasian humor sand mask looking around to look at the BB-8 tron in the desert is one, but something that Finn holds up the training of the remote control aboard Millennium Falcon is that type of blink, nudge nudge “Do you remember this?” Smarm Lucas would never have been involved in. The most he would do would be, like “Club Obi-Wan.”
The moral mum of “Revenge of the Sith”, its special deconstruction of the entire Manichaean, Dark vs. Light Ethos of the “Star Wars” saga, is so much deeper than even in “The Last Jedi”, which was held up by both supporters and detractors as the most radical “Star Wars” movie made then. When Luke thinks in a moment to kill his nephew Ben, it is only for a moment – unlike Mace Windu directly embrace murder. At the end of “The Last Jedi”, Jedi is as an idea as clean and holy and worthy as everything at the cinema could ever be, not the fallen enables of fascism they are in “Revenge of the Sith.”
Luca’s last film is a kind of elegance for a whole style of personal blockbuster film, Williams’ funeral music in the last moments suitable for the director’s last moments behind the camera. His franchise would be just that, a franchise, in the coming years, no longer a series of films that have a personal signature from a single creator who can imagine a whole galaxy. It has been good moments since and bad. But before handing over the reins, Lucas made a final statement with “Revenge of the Sith” that his fairy tale was really about something. It was not just to sell toys. It was about how good people become evil – actively chooses to become evil – and the motivations they make along the way.
These stories played any role. They matter. With its last turn behind the camera, Lucas showed us why.
