Star Wars Episode 2 Attack of the Clones (2002) dir. George Lucas
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Christopher Lee, Samuel L. Jackson

*½

By Alan Bacchus

I can’t think of a worse piece of dreck foisted upon the pop culture annals with bigger hype and anticipation than Attack of the Clones, George Lucas’s second (or 5th depending on how you number these things) chapter in the Star Wars saga. A teenaged Anakin Skywalker struts his stuff as a Jedi-in-training caught up in a political power struggle in the galaxy far, far away, with strings pulled by some nefarious clandestine omni-being.

To give it credit, the story is plotted out sharply. Lucas’s desire to create a nebulous cloud of evil, pulling the strings on both the galactic Senate and the business-oriented Trade Federation, deepens the big picture world of Star Wars more than the first series ever did. In the first three pictures we knew only a few planets and only a few characters. And the movements of the characters themselves occupied a very short time span and were in contained spaces. Here, characters move and make decisions all around the galaxy involving complex plotting that surprisingly holds itself together.

With that said, Lucas’s tin ear for dialogue was never more off key. Everyone seems to be sleeping through this picture, especially Ewan McGregor, who looks exhausted at playing the increasingly useless character Obi Wan Kenobi. Take the opening dialogue scene introducing an older Anakin Skywalker to the audience. They’re riding an elevator up to Senator Amidala’s quarters bantering about their past battles with 'humorous' lines like, “I haven't felt you this tense since we fell into that nest of gundarks.” Unfortunately, McGregor just can’t fake the ridiculousness of the attempted comic exchange.

It’s also an uneventful debut for Hayden Christensen, who speaks in a whiney cadence from the back of his mouth and with a Marlon Brando mumble. The romantic exchanges offer the most laughable moments in the entire series, specifically Anakin’s lakeside confessions expressing his love for the softness of Padme’s skin. And the groundwork of Anakin’s future conversion to the Dark Side is laid with the grace of a jack hammer.

It was a bold move by Mr. Lucas to shoot the film digitally, one of the first major mainstream films to do so. For the most part it’s indistinguishable from film, offering us some remarkably pristine and robust imagery. That said, Lucas further demonstrated his disdain (or laziness) with physical production by shooting almost everything on a soundstage in front of a green screen. His hubris in thinking that his other baby, ILM, could render special effects, background landscape and everything else in the frame with a computer and pass it off as real is completely off base.

For example, there’s a shot early on during a running chase between Anakin and a mysterious assassin who tried to kill Amidala. We see Hayden Christensen running across the neon streaking cityscape dodging pedestrians in order to keep up with his assailant. Unfortunately, the crop lines around the actor’s body and the awkward and inconsistent motion of the actors within the space tell us this is not a real space, but a puzzle of separately shot elements cropped together on a computer. In the original films Lucas used motion controlled cameras to link elements together, an effect that still looks realistic today because he used real tangible objects shot with his camera.

Without the anchor of real objects in the frame (other than the actors), most of the action in this film is a swash of colours and light, which fails to stimulate us or at least move us emotionally. The final act, featuring the Jedi battle in the arena, is incomprehensible and over-produced. The only two scenes to keep from this entire film are Obi Wan’s fight with Jango Fett in the rain and the final double-Jedi match against Count Dooku. Both scenes are exciting because of the simplicity of the choreography in the Dooku battle and the real-life rain falling on the actors in the Obi Wan/Fett scene. Again, these are physical effects that the audience can innately feel are real.

I don’t think I’m off base to say it’s the tangibility of this new Star Wars world that is the greatest loss of the series.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) dir. George Lucas
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Jake Lloyd, Natalie Portman

***

By Alan Bacchus

Yeah, I don’t hate this movie, and sure it’s a slight disappointment, especially when compared to the first and second original films. But The Phantom Menace successfully puts us back in the tone, style and pacing of the original series, however cartoonish and wooden most of these new characters are.

Like everyone, my expectations were high. Not only for the return of the characters I grew up with and loved, but more for George Lucas’s return to the directing chair – the first film he directed since Star Wars (1977). Unfortunately, it’s marred by a strong feeling of laziness on his part. But more on that later.

Let’s start with the good stuff. The main reason this film succeeds is Liam Neeson, the guiding force (pun not intended) of this movie. He’s a commanding physical presence, which lines up perfectly with the powerful and Zen-like existence of the Jedi knights. I’d argue that it’s the best performance by any actor in a Star Wars film.

Lucas also sets up a strong political plot, laying the seeds for the eventual takeover of the galaxy by the evil Emperor whom we got to know only briefly in Return of the Jedi. While in the previous films the journey we’re taken on is a relatively simple trajectory from the point of view of a naïve country boy-turned fearless Jedi Knight, these new films, based on Phantom Menace, promised a complex chess games of sorts.

The character of the Phantom Menace, as referred to in the title, unfortunately fails to provide any tease or mystery. The man under the hologram cloak looks and sounds exactly like the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, who looks and sounds exactly like Senator Palpatine, the wily seat-filler who engineers most of the action. By the time Revenge of the Sith comes around there’s almost nothing to reveal.

The laziness referenced above is the over-reliance on computer special effects, which moves beyond a mere technical aid and overwhelms the drama. Lucas accomplished some remarkable achievements in technology, but he also pushed it so far as to show its seams. Most of everything in this picture is shot on a green screen soundstage, a process which is more invisible to its technique than ever before. But it’s still not 100% photorealistic. Unfortunately, our human eye can tell even the slightest variance from reality, thus creating a barrier between us and the characters on the screen.

Lucas also overpopulates this film with non-human characters, seemingly caused by this same overconfidence in the technology. He did the same thing with Return of the Jedi, using more alien creatures as main characters than in Star Wars or Empire. Unfortunately, in any of these films the best characters are always the human ones. Yoda might be the exception, but he was operated as a physical hand puppet by the great Frank Oz. In these new episodes much is lost in the transition from human to puppet to CG. As such, Jar Jar Binks, Anakin’s Tatooine slave master Watto and the Japanese nose-less Trade Federation boob Nute Gunray are ineffectual supporting characters that can’t match the heart or soul of human actors.

That said, Lucas has also crafted what is arguably his best villain, Darth Maul, the red-faced acrobatic Sith warrior who looks absolutely menacing with his Maoris-style face makeup and snarling teeth. Lucas is smart to tease us with Darth Maul's abilities until the film’s absolute best scene at the end (and probably the best scene in the entire 6-film series), that is the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan/Maul lightsaber battle. This trump card, which he keeps in his pocket until the last 20 minutes, is enough to make up for any ill-feelings from Jar Jar, the over-reliance on CG effects and the usually stiff human acting.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) dir. Richard Marquand
Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Billie Dee Williams, David Prowse, Anthony Daniels

***

By Alan Bacchus

Even at age 8, after seeing this film in the theatre, I remember having a feeling of being let down. I even remember my reaction to the revelation that Leia was Luke’s sister. Even to my then unsophisticated movie brain I knew this twist was unnecessary and didn’t add anything substantial to the big picture story at play. I also remember my disappointment at Lucas for his decision to bring back another Death Star for Jedi, robbing us of a fresh new piece of cinematic awesomeness to top what came before it. Another Death Star, even to an eight-year-old, felt like lazy writing.

But I also remember the fear that overcame me when Luke Skywalker surrendered himself to Darth Vader and resigned himself to facing the Emperor, putting his own life on the line to convert his father back from the dark side. This is the strength of Return of the Jedi, a flawed finale, which, as I mentioned in my Empire Strikes Back review, has the daunting task of having to wrap up a beautifully unveiled story of moral corruption and one man’s redemption across generations through his estranged son. Space, lightsabers, Wookies and Ewoks aren’t even mentioned in this one-sentence summary, which demonstrates the thematically profound story that is the foundation of this popcorn franchise.

It’s a similarly structured film as Empire containing a lengthy opening action-packed set piece like the Hoth sequence. Here, the heroes from Empire have convened on Tatooine to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hut. Looking back, the scene is hit-and-miss. Luke’s introduction is terrific. No longer an innocent teenager, he’s wearing his new all-black duds and has a strong air of Jedi-confidence – a long way from his introduction two films prior. The idiotic musical sequence, which attempts to trump the original Cantine sequence, is just plain awful – as awful to my 8-year-old eyes as it is to my 36-year-old eyes. The barge siege from Luke, Leia, Chewy, Lando and the droids is well shot and cut, and Carrie Fisher still looks sexy in her Jabba-bikini. If there was something Lucas did right in his revamped ‘Special Editions’ it’s the digital touch-up work he did to erase those ugly green-screen lines around the actors superimposed in front of the Rancor.

Once outside of Tatooine, the film hits a funk. Han Solo’s recruitment as the squad leader for the Endor attack doesn't befit the former selfish space smuggler. His lovestruck p-whipped softness is a sad trajectory for his character. And sure, the Ewoks don’t really work. The irony of the pint-sized teddy bears taking down the mighty Empire, like Solo, only results in severely softening the dangerous allure of the Stormtroopers.

Thankfully, the final confrontation between Luke and Vader is not bungled. In fact, the escalation of suspense through the Emperor’s temptations of Luke to the dark side is frightening. It’s a wholly credible threat elevated higher and more threatening than Vader’s confrontation with Obi-Wan in Star Wars and Luke and Vader’s first meeting/fight in Empire. This is really all we wanted from this chapter of the series – a moving and emotional reconciliation of father and son. Jedi, thus, does not disappoint.

And for the record, I do abhor the newly added voiceover of Vader yelling ‘NO!’ when he picks up the Emperor and throws him in the cavernous pit. No, it’s not as bad as Hayden Christensen’s Vader yelling ‘NO’ at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but it’s still unnecessary. Vader’s unspoken actions resonate infinitely stronger than his inarticulate monosyllabic grunts.

And so, while Jedi is the lesser of the three original films and lacks the freshness of the first film and the sustained suspense and urgency of the second, it adequately concludes this great trilogy – something many other franchises (The Matrix) have not been able to do.

Return of the Jedi is available on Blu-Ray from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Star Wars: The Empire Strike Back (1980) dir. Irvin Kershner
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, David Prowse, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels

****

By Alan Bacchus

The celebrated second entry in the Star Wars saga indeed still packs an emotional punch more grand than the first and third films. After the campy but terrifically exciting first film, Lucas and his team expertly delve into the characters’ back stories revealing a bigger story at play – one of father and son, the corruption of the innocent by greed and anger, and the search for redemption across the generational gap.

Few, if any, franchise films can share the effect of this second chapter on the series. It’s not hard to remember my reaction upon hearing Darth Vader proclaim his true identity to Luke Skywalker high atop that precariously hanging structure in the bowels of Cloud City. I remember being shocked. But I was five years old. How would I have reacted as an adult? Would I have foreseen this reveal? It doesn’t matter because each and every time I watch this scene it still sends shivers down my spine – it’s a monumental shift in our perspective engineered so perfectly across two films.

In this entry in the series, Lucas and company split up their heroes after the initial Hoth battle. It’s a terrific opening taking us into a new environment we didn’t see in the first film. We’re introduced to burgeoning relationship between Han Solo’s charming ruggedness and Princess Leia’s hard-to-get aloofness. We’re also teased some more by Luke Skywalker’s abilities with the force. In battle, the rebels get a tough beat down at the hands of the Empire attacking in those intimidating Imperial snow walkers (though the practicality of such a piece of machinery I could never really figure out). It all looks very cool and kick-starts the film with the heroes on the run from the Empire, a chase that will encompass most of the film.

With Han/Leia/Chewy separated from Luke, Lucas is free to manipulate the suspense and tension of the film with ease. Every scene seems to end with a minor cliffhanger of intrigue as the film cuts between the Millennium Falcon on the run from the Imperial space destroyers, Luke on Tatooine learning the force from Zen-master Yoda, and Vader in space orchestrating the conflict with supreme malevolence. And John Williams’ magnificent music-stings provide delightfully teasing punctuation, thus keeping us all constantly on the edge of our seats.

This type of pacing is in keeping with Lucas’s original inspiration for the series, an homage to matinee serial films like Flash Gordon, which he used to watch as a kid. I’ve seen a few of these films, and indeed Lucas achieves the same rhythm and sense of impending jeopardy. And key to achieving this is the ability to cut from the film's hero at the point of maximum jeopardy.

I wouldn’t argue against The Empire Strikes Back being the best of the series, but we should acknowledge that it cheats a little. After all, the film doesn’t have an ending. Lucas and company are allowed to end the film on a giant emotional and narrative teaser – Luke discovering Darth Vader is his father, Han being frozen and taken away to Jabba the Hut, and Darth Vader still alive and searching for Luke. Providing adequate closure after building up such an action packed narrative is not easy. And so Empire’s benefit is Return of the Jedi’s loss, as the latter had the unfortunate expectation of wrapping up all angles of the story. There's more on that later when I look at Return of the Jedi.

All Star Wars films are now available on Blu-ray from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Star Wars (1977) dir. George Lucas
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness

****

By Alan Bacchus

I can’t believe it either. I’ve been running this blog for almost 5 years and this is the first time I’m discussing Star Wars. While the mixed results of the three newest films and the general over-analysis of the entire Star Wars world threatened to tarnish the reputation of this film, the original 1977 Star Wars is still a magnificent piece of entertainment - it's simply untouchable. Back then it was a risky venture for George Lucas, who, like a true artist, threw caution to the wind for the sake of his vision – that is, a popcorn movie space opera told with the deep emotional resonance of classical mythology, but with the gleeful attitude of the hokey sci-fi serials of the '50s.

Sure, the elaborate costumes, creatures, special effects and cool lightsabers command our attention, but let’s not look past the stunning visual design and visual compositions from Lucas’s superb cinematic eye. Back then George Lucas was an inspired filmmaker. His previous two pictures, THX 1138 and American Graffiti, were stylistically and aesthetically different, but both were pinnacles of perfection with regard to composition. To clarify, by composition I mean the placement of the camera to frame a shot and the arrangement of characters, background, props and other set decorations within that shot to convey meaning and emotion. Whatever deficiencies Lucas has with dialogue and directing actors he makes up for in pathos, emotion and drama within his frames.

In Star Wars, his compositions are David Lean-epic. The opening shot, of course, which starts on the small passenger ship, slowly revealing the gargantuan Imperial destroyer chasing them down echoes Stanley Kubrick’s epic reveal of his spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But in Star Wars, the juxtaposition of the tiny rebel ship against the giant ship behind it conveys the good vs. evil battle that will rage on for the entire series.

This expression of theme through composition returns at the midpoint of the film when Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon gets sucked into the Death Star by the tractor beam. Lucas uses a David and Goliath metaphor with the enormous gaping mouth of the Death Star over and above the tiny Falcon slowly creeping into the frame.

Another one of my favourite scenes is the Obi Wan/Darth Vader lightsaber fight. It's a monumental battle of jedis and old rivals from years past in one final dual. The fight plays out in a frame-within-a-frame against the magnificent backdrop of the Death Star docking bay. While the actual choreography of action is rudimentary compared to the later battles in the subsequent movies, the stakes and drama of the battle complemented by Lucas's superb composition and direction of the scene equal anything else in the series.

On the pristine and unbelievably perfect Blu-ray transfers, Lucas's magnificent use of light within his frames sparkles as much as any of the recent movies. The interior design of the Death Star, for instance, is filled with source lights embedded into the walls, roof and floor. And the reflective surfaces of Darth Vader’s helmet or the shiny Death Star flooring are no accident either. This is production value and polish (literally) from what was a comparative medium-to-low budget made to look many times more expensive than it was.

And lastly, the lightsabers themselves, which we take for granted now because they're so ingrained in our popular culture, must have been monumentally cool when seen on the big screen for the first time. The bright red and blue glowing swords are still mesmerizing to watch on screen no matter when they’re used.

The ability and courage of George Lucas to boldly stand his real actors up against enlarged puppets and other outrageous Halloween-style costuming with complete seriousness can not be taken for granted. Under anyone else's watch, other than say Mr. Spielberg, who was also at the top of his game then, Star Wars would likely have been a complete failure. Thank God it wasn’t.

Star Wars is available on Blu-ray from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.