On The Force Awakens, and a Timely Reminder that Star Wars Episode III Really Did Suck

Amidst all the rejoicing that Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't suck (even if it did feel more like a Star Wars highlight real than a stand-alone film, but more on that later), it may be helpful to remember what caused that palpable sense of relief to build up in the first place.

Last summer marked 10 years since some friends and I, on a lark, decided to attend a Monday midnight viewing of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at the dollar theater; all of us had already seen it, we fully knew what we were in for.  I guess we all just assumed that the prequel trilogy couldn't possibly disappoint us anymore, it's ability to hurt us was officially over--and thus to celebrate our liberation from its treachery, I suppose we thought we were just going to mock it all movie long, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, riffing on the scenes and on each other, and have a rollicking good time doing so.

Within 15 minutes, we all realized we'd made a terrible mistake.  Some movies aren't just so-bad-their-good, they're just plain bad, and actively resist your ability to make fun of them.  It wasn't a good-natured levity we were feeling while reliving this cinematic abortion, but a deep and abiding loathing for a film franchise that had burned so tirelessly through our last remaining shreds of goodwill.  It was with a profound disgust--with George Lucas, with Star Wars generally, and with ourselves for wasting one last dollar and 2 hours of our finite lives on them--that we exited that theater 'round 2am.  Duly chastened, we haven't rewatched the prequels since.

I bring this up because it has apparently become fashionable among some modern-day revisionists to claim that Revenge of the Sith was actually some sort of underappreciated blockbuster, its reputation unfairly dragged down by the two turds that preceded it, that in fact, though by no means perfect, it was still well paced and nuanced and "dark" enough to merit mention in the same breath as the original trilogy, to in fact even be considered better than Return of the Jedi--to which I can only say, NO.  Just, NO.   

Revenge of the Sith really is as bad as you remember.  Return of the Jedi ain't perfect either, but its worst parts--the mawkish cutesiness of the Ewoks--come nowhere close to plumbing the same depths of asinine idiocy as any of the prequels; while its best parts--Luke Skywalker's temptations to the Dark Side by the Emperor--are possessed of a feverish intensity and frightening plausibility that are utterly unparalleled by the contrived clumsiness of Revenge of the Sith.  For in Luke's rage-fueled final showdown with Vader, you are filled with a very real dread that Luke could actually turn; while in Anakin's final CGI battle with Obi Wan, you only tap your watch impatiently for Anakin to complete his preprogrammed costume change.

There's simply no rationalizing it: the Star Wars prequels were awful.  Never in film history has there been a greater disparity between expectation and execution--Lucas didn't just miss the target, but shot his own foot off.

Now, The Force Awakens, while easily better than the prequels (though talk about a low bar to clear!), still has some flaws: it was not only a predictable point-by-point rehash of the original Star Wars, but its two main story threads--the search for Luke Skywalker and the destruction of yet another Death Star--both oddly felt like afterthoughts of each other.  For in the original Star Wars, the Death Star is the single largest threat the liberty of the galaxy has ever faced, and all events and plot points continually relate directly back to its destruction.  But in The Force Awakens, the Star Killer's destruction is just another nostalgic box to check off, a weirdly beside-the-point side-quest in the search for Luke--which in turn felt largely inconsequential to the broader Star Killer plot.  I don't know whether or not to actually be impressed by how the movie's two main threads managed to feel weirdly beside the point (the point of course being to sell merchandise, not dramatize the archetypal struggle between life and death). 

Overall, the film felt less like a passion-project (like the first one was for a younger, more vivacious George Lucas, who suffered a full-on heart-attack to bring it to fruition), than a carefully calculated corporate marketing venture--which, given Disney, is exactly what The Force Awakens is.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed The Force Awakens, I liked it just fine, even as it still has not quite burrowed its way into my imagination like the originals did.  But I also fully get the great groundswell of joy that has greeted Episode VII as well: it's not just happiness but relief that another Star Wars has been made that doesn't completely suck!  In the dark days of the prequel trilogies, we could only dream of such basic competency!  With Revenge of the Sith still lingering like a bad taste in our mouth over a decade later, The Force Awakens has been a welcome draught indeed.