SECOND HELPINGS: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

After the big Star Wars hype machine let us down for Episode I and II, we hardcore fans tempered our expectations for this third and final prequel installment. It’s true what they say- if you keep your expectations low enough, you’ll never be disappointed. Episode III, while far from the concluding chapter I had hoped for, hits several of the prerequisite marks well enough to make it the only prequel film that’s actually worth watching.

The first prerequisite is Anakin’s turn to the dark side of the Force. This is by far the least satisfying story element in the film. While Anakin has always had a chip on his shoulder and a need to prove himself, his conversion just isn’t very believable. Chancellor Palpatine tells him the dark side holds the key to preventing death, a major concern of Anakin’s after a series of nightmares involving his wife’s death in childbirth. Then, after being placed on the Jedi Council by Palpatine, Anakin gets all huffy when he isn’t granted the title of Jedi Master. Well duh! You don’t earn that title via political appointment. In the original trilogy, Anakin was said to have been seduced over to the dark side. Based on what I see in this film, he more or less gets played like a sucker and is duped into becoming evil. That is an incredibly difficult pill to swallow.

The emergence of the Empire finally occurs after a lot of build-up over Episodes I and II. To be honest, I am still a little iffy on this element as well. I can see robots turning on their masters through a change of programmed commands but sentient beings? I have a hard time believing that a person can be conditioned and brainwashed to the point of lacking any independent thought. Sure, Palpatine now has a grand army at his disposal but it never feels like there is enough hierarchical structure on his side to pull off a galactic coup.

Sure, the separatist movement was a clever ruse to achieve absolute power but how many people can be expected to believe that the Jedi tried to take over? One does not simply smash-and-grab their way to power and hold onto it without a lot of people in on the plan. Kudos to Palpatine for playing both sides as suckers but who exactly do you move into power positions underneath you now? With Anakin killing all the separatists (unknowingly eliminating the only possible evidence to show him he’s a sucker), he doesn’t really have anyone visibly supporting him anymore. I have a hard time believing that there are any hardcore loyalists left. That and the fact that long-time Star Wars fans knew all along that Palpatine and Darth Sidious are one and the same takes away from the overall reveal.

Technically, we don’t really need to see the birth of Luke and Leia Skywalker but it is a nice inclusion. Lucas boogers it all up by having Padme die shortly after delivering the twins, thereby rendering Leia’s faint recognition of her mother in Return of the Jedi impossible. I think Lucas could have had a few more people working with him to maintain continuity but by this point, we really shouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of silliness in a prequel film. It was nice to see Obi-Wan and Yoda plot out how to hide the twins though.

You may be wondering by now how this film is worth watching if all these little details still fail to please me. The humdinger of all prerequisites for this film is the battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan that cripples Skywalker to the point of needing the iconic mechanized suit that defines Darth Vader. There had to be a battle, it had to be on a volcanic planet, and Anakin had to lose several limbs and get messed up pretty bad. Despite Lucas’s overreliance on visual effects, the long-awaited duel is done mostly right. Obi-Wan pours his heart out to save his friend but Anakin has slipped too far to the dark side. This is the only point in the prequels where Anakin’s story feels tragic, making it worth the wait.

Overall, the emotional arc of this film (and the whole prequel trilogy) is stunted. More time was invested in fancy visual effects than crafting the kind of emotional story arc audiences need. Yes, the first Star Wars film was fairly simplistic in its structure. Empire and Jedi made up for that. Lucas returns to his roots by giving us a feast for the eyes that is more dressing than meat. Anakin was never presented in a sympathetic light, which diminishes the entire prequel trilogy and the entire Star Wars saga should you choose to watch it in episode order. Lucas got that one critical scene right and for that I still give him kudos. If not for that, this film would probably score a half-point lower.

ORIGINAL RATING: 3 out of 5

NEW RATING: 3 out of 5

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

After taking the box office by storm but underwhelming anyone over the age of 10 with The Phantom Menace, Star Wars is back in action with the second installment of the prequel trilogy. Despite a darker tone and much less Jar Jar Binks, parts of this film are agony to sit through. By retaining total control over the script and the film’s direction, Lucas creates another dud that I hold to be worse than its predecessor.

Ten years after the invasion of Naboo, times have only grown darker and more frustrating for the Republic. A separatist movement led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) threatens the stability of the galactic government and the Jedi are stretched thin in their attempts to maintain order. After two assassination attempts on now-Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman), Jedi-in-training Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) takes her into hiding for protection while Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) heads to the far end of the galaxy on the trail of the bounty hunter responsible for the assassination attempts. While protecting the senator, Anakin must balance his affection for her while discerning the meaning of his nightmares involving the slave mother he left behind on Tatooine.

Once again, the story has some promise but the execution is sorely lacking. The presence of a sedition group is quite interesting but we never delve enough into it to be engrossed by it. Starting the prequel trilogy at this point would have made things better. I also enjoyed Obi-Wan’s uncovering of a secret army, though I despise the retcon that makes Boba Fett a clone. Sedition, secrecy, and assassination plots would make for a pretty awesome film.

The only pre-requisite is the budding romance between Padme and Anakin. George Lucas botches this royally with wooden dialogue that is borderline cringe-inducing. Anakin’s affections are painfully and awkwardly obvious but we never see that same spark rise out of Padme. I believe this is largely due to the fact that there is zero chemistry between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman. It’s easy to see why some people thought Portman was the problem because her performance drags even with an adult co-star to work with this time around.

The real problem is actually that Lucas has no idea what to do Padme’s character. She helps the plot pivot a little bit but she’s really only around to give birth to Luke and Leia in Episode III. I’m not sure if the character even warrants being a main character but Lucas thrusts her into that position, leaving Portman hanging onto a weak co-star and an even weaker script. She may fill the prequel’s need for a Princess Leia type character but Lucas doesn’t give the character enough meat and it’s clear that Portman struggles with that.

Another major problem is Lucas’s overreliance on special effects. Sure, the original trilogy films were effects heavy for their time but a lot of those effects were made possible through camera trickery and miniatures. Nowadays, CGI allows Lucas to create the worlds and creatures he’s always dreamed of. Some special effects look great initially but fail to impress when flesh-and-blood characters have to share the screen with them. Real actors just don’t seem to occupy the same space as the fake ones and that is a problem.

Overall this film is half-baked and that is almost to be expected. You can’t blame Lucas for presenting these stories as if audiences are not familiar with the original trilogy. Unless you have never seen the first three films, every piece of the plot to cause unrest in the galaxy is obvious and disguising Palpatine’s face feels annoying and unnecessary. You can’t fault Lucas for these details but you can fault him for all the bad ingredients he puts into this unsavory concoction. Well-written scripts matter, as do believable visual effects. Absent these, George Lucas looks like a kid displaying what he thinks is the world’s greatest sandcastle made from plastic molds. He’s working really hard with the technology at his fingertips but he fails to stretch himself and make anything truly creative.

RATING: 1.75 out of 5

SECOND HELPINGS: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Given the colossal expectations and hype leading up to this film’s release, is it any wonder that it rocked the box office but flopped in the eyes of millions, if not billions, of Star Wars fans? The original Star Wars came at just the right time to achieve such a dominant following. Home video devices were in their infancy, allowing one generation to share the joy of watching (and some could argue over-watching) Star Wars and its two sequels with younger siblings, cousins, children, and now even grandchildren. The magic of the original trilogy is practically ingrained in our cultural psyche, so how could George Lucas possibly make anything capable of satisfying legions of fans expecting greatness?

There are a lot of things that are wrong with The Phantom Menace and I think that the number of problems is why so many people think it is the worst of the prequels. I maintain that Episode II: Attack of the Clones is the worst but please don’t think I am sticking up for this film. It is certainly flawed and deserving of much of the criticism hurled at it.

First we tackle the filmmaking basics- Phantom Menace has poor writing and some terrible acting. While I appreciate George Lucas’s utilization of modern makeup and visual effects to incorporate more non-human species as main and supporting characters, some of these characters come across as half-baked and others just look like they are there to showcase cool effects. It had to be tricky to create characters for this trilogy because we already know who is in the original trilogy. Creating a set of dynamic and engrossing characters would be tough because audiences would have to deal with their deaths during this trilogy or we would feel gypped if they just disappeared after Episode III.

Unfortunately, we got the exact opposite of this problem. Ewan McGregor does fine as young Obi-Wan Kenobi, here finishing up his training to become a Jedi and not yet a master but we’re never concerned about him because he obviously needs to survive the new trilogy to be part of A New Hope. Jar Jar Binks seems positioned to be the prequels’ version of Chewbacca but he was so obnoxious that Lucas largely wrote him out of the next two to appease the fans. Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala is stiff and keeps mostly to the sidelines. The only new character of any quality here is Darth Maul and he gets chopped in half at the end.

The whole point of the prequel trilogy is to provide the backstory of how Anakin Skywalker transitions from pilot to Jedi to Darth Vader. With the main character being Anakin, audiences were understandably disappointed by Lucas’s decision to have Anakin be a child in the first film. God bless Jake Lloyd but his character comes across as whiny rather than streetwise thanks to a terrible script that holds back every member of the cast.

Then there are the finer details that drive nit-picky people like me crazy. Why is the technology in this film, only some 30 years before A New Hope, so much more advanced than what we saw in the original trilogy? Lucas was obviously held back by the technology of the late 70s and early 80s but there is a huge rift in consistency that breaks the suspension of disbelief. I just cannot believe that in 19 years from the end of Episode III to the start of A New Hope that technology across the galaxy, even that used by the Empire, would regress to the state it is in during the original films.

Some fans got really bent out of shape over Anakin being the builder of C-3PO. It does not make much sense to me either but you had to expect to see the droids in the prequels somehow. This brings to the fore the reality that was probably the hardest to accept with this film. Despite what people came to believe over the years about events in the Star Wars universe both before and after the original trilogy, Star Wars belongs to George Lucas(until Disney’s recent acquisition anyway) and whatever he says goes.

The Phantom Menace’s status as the ‘worst of the prequels’ is largely due to fan reaction to all the ways Lucas mucked up their understanding of the Star Wars universe. Maybe they wanted Anakin to be a Force-sensitive version of Han Solo, or they didn’t need the Force to be explained away by science, or they just really hated Jar Jar Binks. That doesn’t mean the entire film is bad.

I see a lot of potential in The Phantom Menace. Its script is underwritten and the CGI effects are far too numerous. It opens a huge can of worms with all the minor details, plot points, and retcons, all of which are easy to get caught up in complaining about. But there is some good stuff here too. I liked the podrace sequence, even if it was a ploy to sell a videogame, and Darth Maul makes for some intense lightsaber dueling.

Start with Anakin as an adult with a chip on his shoulder, maybe secretly running supplies past the blockade of Naboo, and you’re already halfway to a decent movie. I’ve got plenty of other suggestions but that’s all beside the point. What The Phantom Menace really shows is that, while George Lucas may be a really good idea guy, his early writing and directing success was either a fluke or he lost his touch pretty quickly. He should have listened to some of the criticism and brought in people to help make the next one better. He didn’t though, setting up the prequel trilogy to disappoint fans further.

ORIGINAL RATING: 2.25 out of 5

NEW RATING: 2.25 out of 5