Watching Star Wars

One of the ways I spent the lovely long Thanksgiving weekend was by watching all six Star Wars movies, in order, episode one through episode six. I also completely failed to achieve my real goal of working on a particular script, but for that I can blame the length of the movies I was watching, so it's all George Lucas's fault. Yep, that's it.

One of the things I was wondering, and can never really know, is how the movies play when they aren't watched in the wrong order. I imagine a day when I have a son, and he reaches the right age and we sit down together to watch the movies in the "right" order. There is much that might confuse him: in "A New Hope," Obi-Wan Kenobi says he can't remember ever owning a droid, when clearly R2-D2 was by his side almost non-stop through almost every moment of the first three episodes. Obviously these sorts of little errors are the inevitable result of making episode four in 1977 and not getting around to episode one till more than twenty years later. Inconsistencies will happen, and I will just have to explain why to my young viewer. But the real mythos of the Jedi doesn't really emerge until episode five, "Empire Strikes Back," which in context emerges even more clearly as the best of the bunch. This was fine for those of us who saw episode five as the second in the series: we get a taste of what the Jedi are about from Alec Guinness in "A New Hope," then in "Empire" we get really grounded in the straight-from-Japan mythos of the Jedi. But if you're watching in the "right" order and don't get this grounding till the fifth episode, that's a bit late in the game. Those of us watching in the "wrong" order accepted the nobility of the Jedi in the first three episodes because we'd already been primed for it; a new viewer might likely see them as simply another political faction who are just a little too fond of themselves.

But there are bigger problems, and let's not even dwell on the dialogue. (It was nice to see Lucas, when accepting his AFI lifetime achievement award, poke fun at himself as the "king of wooden dialogue," but it would be even nicer if he could have done something to actually, you know, fix the problem. Just look at the huge leap in quality, dialogue-wise, when Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan wrote the script for "Empire.") Let's also not dwell on Lucas's failures as a director of actors (again, note the improvement in "Empire" when one of Lucas's professors at USC, Irvin Kershner, directed.)

No, the bigger problems have everything to do with the character arc of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. You do see very clearly, as the episodes progress one to another, how the character fell, and that is rewarding--as far as it goes. The trouble is, you don't care. What's more, the Anakin/Padme romance completely fails; I for one kept finding myself watching the scenes between the two of them and wondering why this intelligent, grounded young woman would possibly fall for this petulant, whiny brat of a Jedi. (And saying that woman often fall for the bad boy just isn't sufficient here--these stories are supposed to operate as myth, and there's nothing mythical about this romance.)

The reason you don't care about Anakin is because there are never any moments of--here's that word again--nobility. There is skill--clearly the character is a phenomenally gifted pilot and fighter. But he completely lacks the humility that ought to go with those skills--he is, in fact, nothing at all like the noble Jedi Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan or Yoda. So when the collective Jedi Council denies Anakin the rank of master you think it's absolutely right and fitting; this whiny little jerk simply doesn't deserve it. Yeah it's sad what happened to his mother and all, but look at Luke Skywalker--his father murdered (or so he's told), his aunt and uncle reduced to smoldering skeletons, and he seems to find his way from whiny teenager to noble adult without any trouble.

It's not that hard to do, ultimately. You just need a couple moments in each of the first three episodes, when Anakin is tempted to do something wrong but rises above it. You also have to see Padme witness a couple of these moments, to see her realize that there is enormous human potential in this young man, and then their romance makes sense: she falls in love with the man he could be, but he fails and dooms them both. Now that would have made for a great tragedy. Instead, we're left not liking Anakin at all, and not much liking Padme either--this despite the fact that Natalie Portman is an inherently likable actor, but since the majority of her scenes are with Anakin, there's really nothing she can do.

With all that said, there's still plenty to like, particularly if you saw the films in the "wrong" order. (Is it possible to get the same kind of thrill from the Frankenstein-like first sight of Darth Vader in episode three if you've never seen episodes four, five and six?) The battle scenes are almost uniformly thrilling--and in one case where the first three episodes clearly outshine the last three, the lightsaber battles are clearly better in the earlier episodes. From 1977 to 1983, everyone was locked into this awkward two-handed fighting style, but after that movie fights in general began to absorb Oriental martial-arts styles, as in The Matrix, so that by the time Lucas got back to the series in 1999, the hand-to-hand work had improved significantly. Much more fluid, much faster, much more exciting.

And speaking of thrilling, all six episodes are worth the trip for just one perfect moment: in "Empire," when Luke tries to lift his x-wing out of the swamp with his Jedi powers but can't, and then little Yoda does it without trouble, Luke stares at his ship, turns to Yoda and says "I can't believe it." Yoda then says "That is why you fail." A perfect moment, one of those magnificently right movie moments, mythic and powerful in all the best ways, that makes you wish the rest of the series had been that good.

Still, I can't end without a few more complaints. Like the disturbing overtones of racism in the portrayals of Jar-Jar Binks and those weird Trade Federation guys, the ones with vaguely Japanese accents whose mouths never move right. I also wish that Lucas, in his fervor over new technologies, hadn't made all his scenes so damn busy--there always has to be a window in the background, and that window always has to be filled with distracting stuff. Not just a couple speeders flying past but thousands of the damn things, an endless stream of "lookie what we can do!" distractions that have nothing to do with the scene we're supposed to be watching. But nothing, absolutely nothing is worse than the midichlorians (or however the hell the name is spelled--frankly I can't be bothered to try looking it up). If there were five minutes of any movie that I wish I could wipe out with a wave of Harry Potter's magic wand, this bit of nonsense is top of the list. By attempting to provide a rational explanation for why the Jedi have their powers, where the Force comes from, Lucas damn near ruined the entire concept. It's okay, George--it's a movie, and we were perfectly prepared to accept the religious overtones of the Force. In fact we already had--to then hit us with this bit of preposterous blather was to very nearly ruin the entire series.

All in all, I'm still looking forward to the day when I can screen the series for a young child of mine. But until that time, it's doubtful I will find myself inclined to pull them out again.