My avoidance in writing about George Lucas' Star Wars Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith thus far has been a matter of circumstance: until this afternoon, I have not had the opportunity, or more accurately, taken the opportunity to see the latest installment in the trilogy. Moreover, since most of you have seen or will see the film regardless of what any critic thinks, there seems little reason to expend too much energy composing a piece on Revenge of the Sith. In my opinion, at least, the job of the critic is not to discourage one from seeing any given film; it might be to temper excessive critical praise, but it shouldn't be to sabotage a film's box office. (Not that any critic on the planet has the power to do this with a film like Episode III.)
That was before I saw the latest Star Wars. Having belated seen 2005's biggest event movie, I feel the need to offer my impressions of the picture, for no other reason perhaps than to feel as though I am receiving some sort of justice for the nearly two-and-a-half hours and $10.75 that I spent seeing it. It goes without saying that I didn't enjoy the experience. However, I will concede that that reaction alone doesn't merit my writing and certainly doesn't justify your reading. So let me be more clear, and certainly more objective: Star Wars Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith is a failure. By this I don't mean that it is poorly made, written, or acted: these are all to varying degrees imprecise characterizations that are ultimately open for debate anyways. (Though yes, it is all three.) More to the point, Revenge of the Sith is internally incoherent and is therefore a failure, though not a complete one, given that it does set up the fourth episode in terms of plot.
To preface, it is important to note that Episode III does have a viewpoint, which is in itself a good thing, so long as we expect something more from our movies than visceral pleasure. That its viewpoint is undeniably anti-Bush (and critical of Iraq) is in this way a value neutral aspect of the narrative. The problem with Revenge of the Sith is not that it holds this position, but rather that it is inconsistent it its rhetoric. To make this assessment, all one really needs to do is recall pretty much anything that the Padme character professes. At one point Padme asks if it could be that they are on the "wrong side." She argues likewise that the war was a result of their failure to listen and similarly that they should have allowed diplomacy to run its course. Were this not enough, we are explicitly told that it is the Sith, and not the Jedi who believes that "if you are not with me, you are my enemy." Only they traffic in absolutes. I hope Laura has been able to console her undoubtedly devastated husband/the leader of the free world.
The irony in all this, of course, is that the Jedi too believe in absolutes. Shortly thereafter, Anakin says that it is the Jedi who are evil, "from my point of view," to which Obi-Wan snaps back, "then you are lost." This point seems so exceedingly obvious that one wonders how Lucas could have missed this massive contradiction in his discourse. The Siths in this film are evil, they are wrong. Full stop. That Star Wars operates according to moral absolutes -- the force and the dark side, for instance -- is one of the clearest dimensions of the films' collective perspective. In attempting to make the sixth installment more politically sexy by infusing the work with a certain moral relativism, Lucas has contradicted the moral laws of his fictional universe. The problem is not that he is skewering the Bush administration's Iraq policy; it is that his attempt to do so has rendered his text incoherent, and therefore a failure, as long as it is relatively clear that this is one of the purposes for his film.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. No one will remember this film a hundred years from now. Perhaps in some film textbook somewhere, someone will read that people spent weeks standing in line to see a film proffering a Buddhist viewpoint (that the source of suffering is desire) with an Old Testament inflection, evident in the Emperor's garden tempter and the insistence that evil be purged by the sword (or the light-saber). No, it will be enough to say that Revenge of the Sith made a lot of money, which is perhaps Lucas' greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker. In future, I hope he sticks to making cameo appearances on the O.C. If I offended you in my criticism of the film, there's your olive branch: I'm a regular viewer of the O.C. Now we're even.
If you are interested in viewing English-language science fiction that will be studied long after we're gone, then I would recommend the work of Canadian director David Cronenberg. Recently, I caught up with his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome, which shares little with Lucas' work beyond their ostensible genre. Videodrome is basically everything that Revenge of the Sith isn't, which is to say that it is self-conscious, and possesses a coherent viewpoint.
James Woods stars as the programmer of a small-time, soft-core porn channel. When he discovers a program entitled Videodrome, his life begins to change relative to the violent content he witnesses on tape. Ultimately, Videodrome is an allegory for the effects that violent and sexual content have on their viewers -- the two are conflated in this Baudelaire-inspired narrative -- within a narrative that has each in equal measure. Yet, if the frankness of Videodrome is enough to offend its more conservative viewers, Cronenberg finally renounces sexual and violent pornography alike, arguing that it was their consumption that was the impetus for the destruction meted on a number of the film's characters. Its presentation is no contradiction as long as one assumes non-virginal audiences in both these respects. This is a film for adults, thoughtful adults.
The true strength of Videodrome, to be sure, lies in Cronenberg's successful integration of this thesis into the narrative structure of his sci-fi-horror film. If Revenge of the Sith tells us its message, Videodrome shows it to us through a form that has fully integrated the contents of its message This is the kind of art from our distant past which we still study, and will continue to do so long after there are no wookies left in our collective consciousness.
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