The Dark Side

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 2002)

Spoilers herein.
A gifted young man studies under a master and has a natural advantage over him. He has some early success and is attracted to the dark side. Thereafter, he engages in huge projects peopled by relatively mindless clones. His motives are turgid, and though many people are swept up in his enterprise, he ultimately fails.
That's George Lucas, who stole much of the plot of Star Wars from the master filmmaker Kurosawa, even down to details of the storm trooper uniforms. But no one knew because Kurosawa's film was languishing in Japan. With a bunch of new effects plus some sophomoric Joseph Campbell mythology he was able to fake the first film. Knowing his limits, he assigned the writing and directing of the next two to others. They are by far the best of the five.
Then by some hubris, he takes full control. No one can tell him that he is comparatively talentless, and the result -- though expertly marketed -- is a dud. There's no soul to this project. As with `The Cell,' the effects are lavish but use all sorts of clashing metaphors and philosophies. You already know that the writing and acting completely stink. I'm very easy to please. Often, just youthful experimentation will do it if exuberant, like `Gummo.'
But I suppose that this project had so many people involved in every shot that they had to be imagined at the lowest common denominator. That means that no cinematic thrill appeared until the very end. But that last swordfight, especially the part before Yoda appears, is excellent. Shot on the same set as Moulin Rouge, and stealing the blocking from that film, and `Crouching Tiger.' The camera is a dancer, acting as the hidden master behind the drama. Oh if only the whole thing could have been so adventuresome with the camera!
Speaking of which, Ewan has been in three of my top ten films of the last decade. His two Lucas films are not among them. (Moulin Rouge!' `The Pillow Book' `Black Hawk Down').
Cat's eye comments follow:
Serious science fiction readers have been watching these recent episodes carefully. The formula for multi-installment epics is pretty rigid. Successive layers of conspiring power are revealed, and at the end is a surprise layer. The closer you get to the end, the more are the clues of what that layer is, and the game becomes one of detective work.
One can easily see where this is going. At the first layer is a conspiracy of politicians and merchants. Then we discover that they are mere tools of a larger battle between the Force and the `Dark Side.' Next we will discover another layer of what creates the Force and the Dark Side and are playing with them just as they play with `mere' beings. That force is machines. Notice these clues:
-- The Jedi clearly are blinded to obvious signs around them. This is because the force is controlled by machines -- nanotech machines in their bloodstream communicating with each other. This was introduced in the last episode.
-- A solar system cannot be ignored. It can be caused to disappear from the library's computers (by conspiring machines), but its gravity and mass are essential for navigation, and this would be done by computers. So the computers know about the cloner planet and keep that knowledge from humans. Also they inhibit the Jedi from reasoning clearly about it.
-- The battle in this episode is clearly thrown by the robots, though they are outnumbered. Consider: machines capable of designing and building other machines who ARE weapons and who can communicate directly with each other -- and these are against humans who communicate bluntly (through machines) and who must operate weapons.
-- Taking over of Skywalker includes making him part machine.
Prediction: next episode, we will discover the force is the result of emergent complex system behavior of nanomachines that comprise a massive distributed computer. They permeate the Jedi's blood and are manipulating events so that humans destroy each other while leaving a legacy of machines to populate the universe. Presumably in episodes seven or eight, we would have gotten even higher, something like Stars as pantranscendent beings.