Elizabeth Sandifer

It is damning with faint praise to say that “George Lucas done right” is a task perfectly suited to J.J. Abrams’s abilities, which is of course why it’s such a fun thing to assert. It’s not quite true, for reasons we’ll get to, but there’s more truth to it than not, and for the most part the truth is more revealing. Certainly it’s very obviously the logic Disney applied in hiring Abrams for the job of making Star Wars into a viable property again, and their benign cynicism is on the whole easy to understand. The prequels had made Return of the Jedi a better end to the saga in more ways than one, their famous awfulness drying up the bulk of the cultural goodwill the franchise had while muddying the question of what Star Wars should look like post-1983 with a host of unsatisfying answers that nevertheless needed to be considered.

Abrams, in this context, was an eminently safe pair of hands. He’d already rebooted Star Trek with an aesthetic that could uncharitably be summarized as “wishing it was Star Wars,” and with Super 8 had shown himself a skilled practitioner of 1970s nostalgia. More broadly, he was a director who could solve both of Disney’s immediate problems. On the one hand, he was fluent and respected enough in geek culture to keep rabid Star Wars fans on board. Such fans make up a negligible share of the audience for a major tentpole film, but are vocal and engaged enough that losing them creates a significant marketing problem. On the other hand, he was actually capable of making films that people liked and wanted to see.

I noted when I reviewed the film that Abrams was decidedly more interested in making a good Star Wars film than he was in making a good film. This is indisputably true. The Force Awakens works because it is a well-executed Star Wars film. Abrams strikes an intelligent balance between the obligatory wipes and stylistic tics that define the saga and more dynamic, lively moments. Much of this is little stuff – the shuddering, darkly lit shots of Storm Troopers in their shuttles, for instance, or the cut from Finn’s helmet to Rey in her goggles – that hardly merits praise, but there’s still a form of sophistication to it that Lucas simply wasn’t invested in. And these are mixed, in the early sequences, with teasing shots of ruined Star Wars iconography: a crashed Star Destroyer, or a fallen AT-AT. There’s a cheeky, illicit thrill – a child getting to play with the grown-up toys, and yet rising to the occasion so that their exuberance is tempered with real technical nous. Abrams is awed by the material, but not overawed.

This is, in the end, because Abrams is a joyless cynic interested only in appearances and iconography. Abrams is, throughout the film, singularly interested in making sure everything looks good. Over and over again the tone the film reaches for is “here’s a classic Star Wars moment… but it looks good, no?”…

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The standard line about the original trilogy is that Return of the Jedi is its weak link. It will surprise nobody to learn that I’m suspicious of this logic, which is at its heart rooted in an aesthetic that says that big reveals like Vader being Luke’s father are good and Ewoks are bad, but it’s nevertheless worth recognizing that Return of the Jedi is the one film in the original trilogy that’s markedly improved by the presence of the prequels. This isn’t a new observation – it’s at the heart of the famous Machete Order, which suggests putting the prequels between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and which basically prompted this entire series with its argument for why you should skip The Phantom Menace while doing this, which was the immediate cause of my remarking that prequel criticism was generally worse than the prequels themselves.

The problem that Return of the Jedi has on its own merits is Luke’s constant assertion that there’s still good in Darth Vader, a claim that not only lacks justification in the films but is actively unjustified by the sheer degree that Darth Vader is an ostentatious force of pure evil badassery. As we’ve discussed at length, it’s not that the claim that there’s some good in him is particularly justified by the prequels either, but at least the line is uttered by Padme in Revenge of the Sith, and more to the point, the prequels put significant effort into making Anakin an actual character. It’s difficult to actually imagine the Darth Vader of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back making an abrupt face turn, but while it’s still a bit out of left field, it’s perfectly possible to imagine the Anakin Skywalker of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the SIth doing it. (I mean, hell, he’s so fickle in Revenge of the Sith that it’s basically possible to imagine him doing anything.)

More broadly, the relationship between Luke and Vader is, in the original trilogy, a pure abstraction – it matters entirely because of the basic ideological valences of fathers and sons. Indeed, the fact that it literally only matters because of patriarchy goes a long way towards explaining the weirdly outre status of Leia within this relationship, with her involvement a somewhat disposable third movie reveal in which she gets played as the fool, getting a piece of information the audience already knows and that has no actual bearing on the plot. But as a conclusion to the entire Lucas-governed saga it’s a far deeper relationship, and that gives the film new weight, a fact reflected in Lucas’s decision to replace Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen in the final scene. (Honestly not a bad decision, though he probably should have replaced Alec Guinness with Ewan MacGregor in this and The Empire Strikes Back to set it up better.)

But it’s worth interrogating why this should be the case. After all, it’s not obvious that the solution to an undercooked finale is to go back and add more stuff before it while not actually changing anything about the finale itself save for swapping out “Lapti Nek” for “Jedi Rocks.”…

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Ring theory – essentially the best read on the interrelationships between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy to date – is based around nested correspondences among the films. The fringes of this, which pair Return of the Jedi with The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith with A New Hope, are an inherently tricky business, with its interpretations standing in opposition to the more intuitive approach of reading The Phantom Menace and A New Hope as roughly analogous. But the middle, in which Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back are read as fundamentally related films, is a rock solid bit of interpretation that pays considerable and rewarding dividends.

The most obvious similarity is structural: both films spend their middle sections alternating between two roughly equally weighted storylines, to the point where they very clearly have two protagonists, in this case Luke and Han. This is most interesting in terms of Han, whose upgrade to co-lead serves as confirmation of his moral centrality to whatever the saga is doing in this second trilogy. And in this regard, the most interesting thing about The Empire Strikes Back is its ending, with Han encased in carbonite. Sure, it’s not the only massive misfortune to befall our heroes by the end, what with Luke being maimed and all, but he’s already got a proesthetic by the end. The change that has consequences and that provides the direct hook going into Return of the Jedi is Han being taken off the board. After all, our case for Han’s centrality to A New Hope was rooted in a willfully silly reading of it in contrast to the prequel trilogy. In terms of the film’s own concerns, Han is a secondary character introduced well into a film that’s almost entirely about Luke’s journey. Here, however, his removal from the narrative is a deforming crisis.

Which brings us to the big difference between Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back. Where Attack of the Clones was liberated by its status as the middle portion of a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back is constrained by it, and especially by the fact that it has to be the middle part of a trilogy whose first part was made under a completely different mythology and without the assumption that it would be part of a trilogy. We’ll come to the biggest consequence of this in good time, but for now I want to look at the ways in which this means the film has to set up a new status quo without it seeming like setup, which is the lengthy opening on Hoth, the primary narrative purpose of which is to quickly reconfigure the relationship among the principal characters so that Han/Leia is a more obvious ship than Luke/Leia and reaffirming Han’s loyalty by having him abandon his plans to leave in order to rescue Luke. (Arguably this makes Han/Luke the most reasonable ship of all, but never mind.) This mostly gets hidden behind what’s admittedly the best action sequence of the original trilogy, but it’s still flagrantly what Hoth is there for.…

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Coming at A New Hope off of the prequel trilogy, what jumps out first and foremost is how much smaller and more intimate a story it is. No small part of this is because of the twenty-eight year backwards jump in film technology, which isn’t something that can be erased even by Lucas’s extensive efforts to tinker with the original trilogy. Which I suppose are a digression worth getting into at this point.

Obviously the special editions are easy to get cranky at. Hell, I’m on record making fun of the “redo old special effects for the DVD release” approach when it comes to Doctor Who. And the scholar in me is unsurprisingly appalled by Lucas’s active efforts to suppress the original theatrical versions of his films, to the point of denying film festivals focused on the 1970s permission to screen an original print. But these days there are multiple gorgeous reconstructions of the theatrical version up on BitTorrent for people who care, and while that doesn’t invalidate the understandable frustrations of people who spent decades wanting to watch the movie of their childhoods and not a CGI-ed over mess where Greedo shoots first and there are a bunch of cavorting aliens around Mos Eisley, it at least makes them a somewhat easier pill to swallow.

But the bigger difference between the special editions and replacing a dodgy puppet snake with a dodgy CGI snake in Doctor Who is that if you’re watching Doctor Who for its visual spectacle you have already fucked up. Whereas Star Wars has always been about raw visual spectacle in a way that makes the original trilogy’s aging into a problem for them. Without wanting to get into a (desperately tedious) debate about the superiority of traditional special effects vs CGI, it’s on a basic level understandable that Lucas would want a reaction to A New Hope other than “well that’s dated.” A uniform style of special effects across the saga is an entirely sensible desire when the saga is going to be presented as a single unit. So long as the actual historical objects are preserved in some fashion – and I’m fine with that fashion being BitTorrent – I can at least see the sense of trying to give a six-part film series a unified design.

No, the problem is simply that, as I said, you can’t actually bridge that gap. Lucas can and did narrow it, and it’s certainly less jarring to watch the special edition of A New Hope after Revenge of the Sith than it is to watch one of the restored theatrical versions, but at the end of the day A New Hope feels like a fundamentally different kind of object from any of the prequel films. It follows only a handful of characters, never moving wider than those caught in the immediate consequences of Leia’s ejecting R2-D2 and C-3PO onto Tatooine to find Obi-Wan. To its original 1977 audience, this basically appeared to be a film about a single space station.…

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With Revenge of the Sith, our approach runs into trouble. A constant tension in reading both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones was the fact that they were, in pragmatic reality, designed to be watched by people who had already seen the original trilogy. In practice both films were designed – with more intelligence than Lucas usually gets credit for – to still communicate their main ideas to an unspoiled audience. Indeed, in both cases you can plausibly argue that an unspoiled reading produces a clearer account of the films, revealing a more coherent (if still exceedingly unorthodox) logic for both.

That simply does not work for Revenge of the Sith. There’s no way around the fact that once Order 66 is activated, the film by and large stops being concerned with resolving the story that began with The Phantom Menace and turns its attention fully towards setting up A New Hope. The notion that what it’s doing might meaningfully be called storytelling limps along for a bit longer, its closing minutes don’t even pretend anymore. Yoda’s declaration that he will go into exile seems motivated by literally nothing save for lining up with The Empire Strikes Back – “oh, I failed in one combat with Darth Sidious, might as well give up and let him take over the galaxy.” Once Padme starts delivering her twins the film seems visibly impatient for her to finally die. And let’s not even start with the shoehorned in “Qui-Gon has discovered the secret to immortality” line, which seems to exist for no other reason than that Lucas fucked up two films earlier and forgot to have Qui-Gon’s body disappear.

No, actually, I changed my mind; let’s talk about that after all. After all, it cuts to the heart of the other very big problem this film has. It’s true that the sort of immortality Qui-Gon has obtained – a quasi-disembodied life inside the Force – is definitely not what Anakin is desperately seeking throughout the film and what ends up turning him to the dark side. Nevertheless, the primary plot of the movie is nominally “Anakin turns to the dark side because of his fears of Padme’s death,” and it’s specifically the fact that Palpatine says the dark side can save her that turns him, so the revelation that the Jedi have a form of immortality really ought to be treated as a weighty part of the plot instead of as a throwaway bit of continuity wank.

But this gets at what is probably Revenge of the Sith’s most fundamental problem: it’s structured and conceived as a classical tragedy about Anakin’s downfall. In some ways this is inevitable – at some point the story about a guy falling to the dark side was always going to revert into classically tragic structures. Apparently in revisions and editing the reasons for Anakin’s fall were steadily focused to their final form of being mostly about Padme, which is a fact that’s mostly striking for how sloppy it still is save for in the Darth Plagueis scene, which is notable first for being the bit of the film Tom Stoppard most obviously worked on and second for the name “Darth Plagueis,” which is very possibly the best thing in the entire saga.…

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Middle parts of trilogies are famously hard. Ironically, this fact largely benefits Attack of the Clones. Freed both from the obligation to try to be the first Star Wars movie in sixteen years and the obligation to portray long-mythologized events in a definitive way, it is allowed to simply reflect George Lucas’s vision in a fairly undiluted way. There are countless snarky sentences that follow well from that, but there’s enough that’s at least interesting in that vision to make Attack of the Clones a compelling experience. To praise with faint damnation, it’s a hot mess instead of merely a bad movie.

Where The Phantom Menace was structured around a single protagonist, Attack of the Clones splits its attention between two plots and protagonists. The first of these is relatively expected: The Phantom Menace fairly explicitly set up a progression from Qui-Gon to Obi-Wan such that, just on the basic sense of structure and the Jedi/padawan relationship, you’d expect the mantle to pass on to him. What’s less straightforwardly set up is the ascension of Anakin to the role of co-protagonist. Obi-Wan, after all, was firmly a supporting character, and given the estrangement in the way Anakin was presented in the first film it was entirely plausible that he would simply move to fill that role, with whatever story surrounded him playing out at a slight remove.

Once again we’re in a position where the practically intended audience (i.e. people buying tickets to a Star Wars movie in 2002) and the nominally intended “unspoiled” audience diverge, in that the actual audience recognizes the prequel trilogy as primarily a story about Anakin. But the difference between the positions isn’t as big as it might appear. After all, The Phantom Menace already trained the audience to maintain a certain degree of distance from protagonists, with Qui-Gon never really becoming an audience identification figure. So it’s entirely possible for Attack of the Clones to structurally elevate Anakin to the role of protagonist even as he remains a figure we warily observe instead of investing in. And indeed, for audience members who know that he’s eventually going to fall to the dark side, this is basically where the situation will naturally default.

Which brings us to Hayden Christensen. Like Jar Jar Binks, he is a near universally despised aspect of the prequels. This is certainly understandable, but the fact is that he does an excellent job of playing Anakin as the script presents him. It’s just that the script does not so much go for the default of audience suspicion towards Anakin as it does unambiguously making it clear that Anakin is an absolutely terrible person. Indeed, for all that it’s easy to see why Natalie Portman has a career and Hayden Christensen does not, in Attack of the Clones it’s largely Christensen who has the more successful time of it, simply because all he’s asked to do is to play an abusive and manipulative jerk who spouts fascist rhetoric and literally “m’ladies” his way through his efforts at getting into Padme’s pants, whereas Natalie Portman is given the flatly impossible job of convincingly falling in love with someone who is self-evidently human garbage.…

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