Too bad Lucas didn't seem to care about telling the story

Rating: 3/10 (22 May 2005)

Star Wars has always been good because it is a story of mythological proportions, filled with potential for analogy and interpretation. The last two of Lucas's films have severely disappointed most audiences in this regard, pandering to children with unnecessary silliness while attempting to capture teenage and older audiences with technical mastery -- forgetting that it was the story as much as the special effects that gave the trilogy its magic. The Revenge of the Sith, while having some of the best potential of the three in terms of plot, with loads of political scheming and important characters pitted against each other and undergoing personal transformation, fails to pay attention to the story itself. Lucas neglects storytelling in order to play with on-screen digital wizardry. The effect is often dazzling, but dazzling like a psychedelic light show: fabulous moving shapes and flashes, but with no meaning. The characters are reduced to hollow husks, such that the blurring between human and machine that has always been at the heart of Star Wars symbolism matters little to us, characters are cartoon images of themselves and they dissolve like the 1 and 0s they are made up of when they are killed off. Lucas is so eager to show us the myriad worlds he has conjured up that he doesn't really give us a chance to see them, their names come and go so quickly that they fade from memory and blur into one another. While Tattouine and Endor were sources of inspiration for my childhood imagination, I have trouble believing that any but the Lava planet (whatever it was called) will stick with this generation. And the efficacy of that planet partly stemmed from its reminiscence of Mordor. Ultimately, this is why the Lord of the Rings so easily dominated what should have been an equally legendary set of films, because those films used special effects to aid the telling of a story. Lucas gave his computer toys precedence and produced something that is sadly kind of boring.