Ruminations on the Prequel Trilogy (No Spoilers)
Well, this is it! The end of an era. I have seen the final Star Wars movie!
Both my girlfriend Jen and I fit into the standard meme running around: big fans of the original trilogy, but the first two prequels, despite the occasional great moment, left us cold. The question on everyone’s lips: would the third one be any good?
The answer is, fortunately, yes!
Jen’s first comment after seeing the movie is unprintable in a family publication (it begins with “Holy” and ends with “and a half!”), but I agree with the sentiment. Lucas has finally made the prequel that we’ve been waiting to see since 1983.
Not that it’s perfect. The main problems are the same as the other two prequels, starting off with the pacing. The editing is so relentlessly geared to moving things forward that there’s no time for things to build. New menaces appear out of nowhere: BAM! It’s another battle droid! BAM! It’s Count Dooku! BAM! More battle droids! And General Grievous! It’s like a video game rather than a movie, throwing dozens of killer robots at our hero so he can progress to the next level. There’s almost no time to make an emotional connection with the action going on.
The second is, of course, the dialogue. It’s bad, but worse than that, Lucas hired too many of the wrong actors to carry it off. Hayden Christiansen can be a great actor, but he’s a very naturalistic one and unsuited to the epic tone of the series. Lucas’ screenplays are a bit like Shakespeare in that respect. Anyone who’s seen Kenneth Branaugh’s later Shakespearean films can see proof that not every great actor can handle the Bard. Jack Lemmon, great in so many movies, is completely out of his depth as Marcellus in Hamlet, and the same is true too often with Hayden Christiansen. Watch any scene he has with Ian McDiarmid. Same kind of dialogue, but McDiarmid makes it come alive, chewing the scenery for all its worth, while Christiansen, keeping it real, comes off as a sullen teenager. What the prequels needed was someone larger-than-life and classically-trained as Anakin, like a young Peter O’Toole or Orson Welles.
Which brings me to my final point: that the prequel trilogy ultimately fails because Lucas figured out too late in the game how to tell Anakin’s story. The original trilogy worked because it was telling a simple story, the hero’s journey, using a simple genre, aping the Flash Gordon serials with their fast-paced banter and cliffhanger adventures. But the prequel trilogy is a much more complex work, trying to be a Shakespearean tragedy (Wagnerian, even!) and many of the simplistic elements of the “cliffhanger” genre don’t quite mesh well. The progression from Episode I to Episode III isn’t so much Lucas trying new ways of bringing the story across, but rather stripping down things that didn’t work bit by bit (like the slapstick antics of Jar Jar after Episode I).
That he finally got things so right bodes well for the TV series and almost makes me wish that he could go back and remake the first two prequels into what they could have been knowing what he knows now (knowing how much Lucas likes to change things, who knows? Maybe that's what he's planning...). But until that happens, or some far-future filmmaker remakes the movies, the STAR WARS series is what it is: three great movies, one good one, and two not-so-good. Which is a pretty good average, all things considered.
Both my girlfriend Jen and I fit into the standard meme running around: big fans of the original trilogy, but the first two prequels, despite the occasional great moment, left us cold. The question on everyone’s lips: would the third one be any good?
The answer is, fortunately, yes!
Jen’s first comment after seeing the movie is unprintable in a family publication (it begins with “Holy” and ends with “and a half!”), but I agree with the sentiment. Lucas has finally made the prequel that we’ve been waiting to see since 1983.
Not that it’s perfect. The main problems are the same as the other two prequels, starting off with the pacing. The editing is so relentlessly geared to moving things forward that there’s no time for things to build. New menaces appear out of nowhere: BAM! It’s another battle droid! BAM! It’s Count Dooku! BAM! More battle droids! And General Grievous! It’s like a video game rather than a movie, throwing dozens of killer robots at our hero so he can progress to the next level. There’s almost no time to make an emotional connection with the action going on.
The second is, of course, the dialogue. It’s bad, but worse than that, Lucas hired too many of the wrong actors to carry it off. Hayden Christiansen can be a great actor, but he’s a very naturalistic one and unsuited to the epic tone of the series. Lucas’ screenplays are a bit like Shakespeare in that respect. Anyone who’s seen Kenneth Branaugh’s later Shakespearean films can see proof that not every great actor can handle the Bard. Jack Lemmon, great in so many movies, is completely out of his depth as Marcellus in Hamlet, and the same is true too often with Hayden Christiansen. Watch any scene he has with Ian McDiarmid. Same kind of dialogue, but McDiarmid makes it come alive, chewing the scenery for all its worth, while Christiansen, keeping it real, comes off as a sullen teenager. What the prequels needed was someone larger-than-life and classically-trained as Anakin, like a young Peter O’Toole or Orson Welles.
Which brings me to my final point: that the prequel trilogy ultimately fails because Lucas figured out too late in the game how to tell Anakin’s story. The original trilogy worked because it was telling a simple story, the hero’s journey, using a simple genre, aping the Flash Gordon serials with their fast-paced banter and cliffhanger adventures. But the prequel trilogy is a much more complex work, trying to be a Shakespearean tragedy (Wagnerian, even!) and many of the simplistic elements of the “cliffhanger” genre don’t quite mesh well. The progression from Episode I to Episode III isn’t so much Lucas trying new ways of bringing the story across, but rather stripping down things that didn’t work bit by bit (like the slapstick antics of Jar Jar after Episode I).
That he finally got things so right bodes well for the TV series and almost makes me wish that he could go back and remake the first two prequels into what they could have been knowing what he knows now (knowing how much Lucas likes to change things, who knows? Maybe that's what he's planning...). But until that happens, or some far-future filmmaker remakes the movies, the STAR WARS series is what it is: three great movies, one good one, and two not-so-good. Which is a pretty good average, all things considered.
posted by Michael at 3:24 PM
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