Re: \'Revenge of the Sith\' reviews (Spoilers)
From all accounts, George is not a director that deals well with actors, and a lot of actors need a good relationship with their director to pull off a good performance.
Crap. Most
good actors can pull off a good performance on film* without any input from or relationship with their director whatsoever. When a good actor's screen performance looks bad, 90 percent of the time it is because that's the performance the director
wanted. That's what he or she pushed that actor towards, those are the takes the director printed, this is what the director built by cutting together those bits and pieces of film into finished scenes. Stage actors have more power over their own performances. The director’s control ends the moment they step on stage and the lights go up. In film or television the director’s power only begins with the directions on the set and the camera angles and light he chooses. He can create or alter (or uncreate) and entire performance in the editing room, too.
That was certainly the case here. George Lucas has never been much of a director and if anything he's gotten worse over the years as his films (and his ego) have gotten bigger. There's also the "best seller" problem. In publishing as writers like Danielle Steele, Stephen King and Tom Clancy (to pick three more-or-less at random) started selling more and more books they became an important part of their publisher's "bottom line" and keeping the writer happy (and preventing him/her from jumping to another house at the end of the current contract) became more important than turning out good books. So the editors did less editing, and when they did they backed down more often if the writer complained. Because of his economic clout nobody wanted to tell Stephen King that his books were becoming bloated and needed cutting. Similarly nobody (at least in the industry) wants to tell Lucas his films have been getting worse and worse over the years. And most actors aren't going to push to hard, either. When people as talented as Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson come off as badly as they do in this film you can point directly to George Lucas and his inability to understand what a good performance looks like.
RotS (love that acronym
) is "the best of the new trilogy" - which by all accounts is setting the bar pretty friggin' low. (I must say that after seeing
The Phantom Menace - ONCE! - I refused to see
Attack of the Clones, so I only know what I heard about that one, which was enough.)
RotS works, to the degree that it does, because it had a structure imposed on it by the need to set-up "Episode IV". And the film gets better the closer it gets to the climax precisely because it is getting closer to the original trilogy. The lava planet is like the light at the end of the tunnel. We're approaching the end of Lucas's ill-conceived prequel and back to the early days when he was constrained by limited funds, and when he knew enough to get out of Harrison Ford's way.
BTW, for those of you convinced that Lucas didn't have any of this planned out - I attended an SF convention in New York sometime between 1978 and 1980. (I used to go to a couple of cons a year in those days, so my memory is a bit hazy. Oh, and I was still drinking back then, which probably didn't help matters.
)
Empire had certainly been announced, but it hadn't yet been released and it was known that Lucas was proposing a nine-part epic movie series. A dealer I had gotten to know a bit took me aside and offered me something he wasn't openly selling at his table - a purportedly bootlegged copy of the treatment for the last film in the (chronologically)
first trilogy. I bought it. It is probably still floating around here in a box somewhere. I read it that same night and concluded I'd been had and that the thing was a forgery. The climactic battle seemed especially over the top as an explanation for how Anakin Skywalker (as he was already named) became Darth Vader. That was my judgment until Thursday night when I saw the movie and watched Obi-Wan and Anakin fight exactly the light saber duel amid the flowing lava of a volcanic planet that I had read and dismissed over 20 years ago. Oh, and it is established that Leia was adopted and knew she was adopted in
Empire. Luke takes her aside just before he goes off alone to face Vader. One of the questions he asks her is what she remembers about her mother, her
real mother. Leia doesn't remember much, just a soft voice and the fact that she was very beautiful - which certainly suggests that Lucas intended at that point for Anakin's wife to survive at least for a time after the birth of the twins. I suspect that Luke would have been sent to his family on Tatooine and Leia and her mother would have lived hidden in exile with Senator Organa and his wife, with Padme still dying young - maybe for a year or two, then dying. As with JMS and the circumstances surrounding Sheridan's destruction of the
Black Star I think when it came time to actually tell the story on screen, Lucas decided to alter his earlier conception of events to serve the needs of the dramatic structure he was now working with. (Leaving her alive would have been a loose end - skipping ahead a couple of years would have spoiled the "snapshot at the moment" survey of where everyone is at the end of the film. So he killed her off early.
Mentioning JMS and
In the Beginning reminds me of some of Lucas's other sins, so here's a quick recap of "things that really piss me off about Lucas in general and this movie in particular, in light of the works JMS - or the World-Famous Billionaire no talent vs. the almost unknown toiler in the vineyard":
1. George Lucas couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag, at least not when dealing with this kind of material. (He did OK illuminating the lives of some not-terribly-bright high school kids in
American Graffiti. But then he was writing about a world he knew. When it comes to science fiction he's dealing with a world he
likes - and finds interesting, but not one he
inhabits. So he can't really write SF stories, he can only cobble together SF
pastiches, cobbled together from bits and pieces of other people's work.) Some people complain about JMS's dialogue, saying it is too "stagy" and self-consciously articulate, that the speeches sometimes go on too long, and that his attempts at humor sometimes fall flat. And there is - in particular episodes and scenes - something to this criticism. But I'll take his dialogue over George Lucas's any day - especially when Lucas is attempting actual human emotion. He just can't pull it off.
2. Lucas has uniformly bad taste in naming people, places and things. It goes along with his tin ear for dialogue and his inability to hear when an actor's line reading is off. (Or his actual
preference for line readings that most normal people would call "off", hence the number of them from otherwise good actors that end up in his films.) In addition to being ugly, silly or stupid in and off themselves (Padme? General Grievous? Lord Dooku?) they also become confusing because Lucas keeps using the same sound elements over and over (Padme/Padwan, Dantooine/Tatooine) Anakin (with the diminutive "Annie" - redolent of red-headed orphan girls) was a poor name. Mace "Widu" a worse one. Emperor Palpatine? Puh-leeez. It sounds like "Palpitate" to anyone who knows more actual words and Lucas seems to. Again, the Stephen King syndrome at work. Lucas has gotten to big for anyone to tell him, "George, this is a really stupid idea." I have a feeling them second set of films could have been a lot better if Harrison Ford had agreed to do a cameo in each as Han Solo's father just so he could read the script, hang around the set a little and tell Emperor George when he was about to leave his trailer naked again. And someone really ought to hang a giant banner over Lucas's writing desk with Carrie Fisher's immortal words from the set of the first picture: "George, you can
type this stuff, but you can't
say it." (Evidently Lucas does not follow the advice given to every young writer of fiction - whether of books, TV or movies - "read your dialogue out loud, or into a tape recorder." Or else he
does and he's a bad actor as well as a bad writer, and unaware of both, and that he tries to make the actors match his own performance.)
3. More money isn't necessarily a good thing: I kept wanting to yell, "Stop! Enough! I can't
see anything!" The movie is too "busy" there are simply too many explosions, too many ships, too many clones/droids/whatevers, for the eye to focus on, or even take in, and everything in the battle scenes moves too fast. The result actually undercuts the audience's ability to feel any connection to the action, or even quite understand what is happening. Nowhere is this clearer than the "end of the Jedi" sequence. All I could think of while watching that was the "three years" montage from
In the Beginning, a terribly moving evocation of desperate courage in a lost cause. That's a theme that means something to JMS personally, and which engages his own emotions, so he finds it easy to write movingly about it. For Lucas it is another plot element in his paint-by-numbers "hero's journey", another item on the checklist to be completed and that's how it plays, with all the emotion of a giant video game except for when Obi-Wan or Yoda are on-screen. (Lucas could have used exactly the kind of voice over narration that JMS did to add a human connection for the audience by having Yoda or Obi-Wan describe the events which they sensed through the Force from the perspective of the immediate aftermath - to Chewbacca and the other wookie, for instance.)
4. JMS has influences, Lucas has
sources. JMS, like all writers, has been influenced, especially early on, by other writers and other works, and this shows up in his writing. There are echoes of Tolkein, thematic connections to Shakespeare, deliberate nods to the Arthurian cycle and the Greek myths and the tragedies they inspired. These are all ingredients - a pinch of
Lear, a teaspoon of the
Morte d'Arthur - in an original recipe for a unique JMS stew. Lucas just grabs whole vegetables, throws them in a pot of cold water and leaves them there, unblended and almost unaltered. And he can't resist showing off by visualizing elements of other people's stories that have nothing to do with the story he's telling, just to prove he can.
Obi-Wan was far closer to Tolkein's Gandalf than anything in
Babylon 5, but hardly anyone cried "rip-off". (Actually I always cast Alec Guinness as Gandalf in my dream film of
LotR.
) Tatooine and those oddly sandworm-like skeletons was like Lucas auditioning to do a film version of
Dune. (The handling of precognition in the
Star Wars and Anakin's arc in the first three films owes more than a bit to Herbert's novels as well.)
This time around we got to see what Lucas could do with
the Dragonriders of Pern I can't wait to hear people complaining about how
Pern ripped off
RotS when and if that series ever makes it to the big or small screen.
One of the reasons the
Star Wars films have collectively done so well is that Lucas tapped into themes and stories so appealing and so universal that even his incredibly clumsy handling of them couldn't destroy their power, and he added on top of them a shiny veneer of technology and visual effects that appealed to the child (or the geek) that lives somewhere in most movie fans. Like its near-contemporary
Rocky,
Star Wars took a simple story that had been told a thousand times before and dressed it up in just the right way to appeal to a new audience. He has vastly more luck than talent.
Just imagine what these films could have been had Lucas had enough genuine confidence in his vision and enough humility about his own limitations to hire a
real writer to do the screenplays (JMS
does come to mind) or a real director to make them. It is no accident that the best of the 6 films is the one written by a writer who proved he could created living, breathing characters, and a director who could tell human stories. (I also think it helped that Lucas was not yet so hugely successful as to be out of control.) It isn't like Carrie Fisher, Mark Hammel and Harrison Ford became much better actors between movies 1 and 2. It is that they had believable lines to other and a director who was not
looking for comic book performances.)
Anyway, that's my (short) take on the film. I suspect I'll see it again, at which point I'll have even more nits to pick.
To sum up: The movie did its job, which was to set up "Episode IV", it didn't embarrass itself, and it was better than
Phantom Menace, but probably not as good as
RotJ. (And doesn't even bear comparison with the first two films released.)
Later,
Joe
