Soon at a multiplex not so far, far away, very, very close,a space odyssey more than 30 years in the making will draw to a close.
On Thursday, the much-hyped, much anticipated final chapter of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy to “Star Wars” invades thousands of screens in a global release.
“Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith” answers the thorny question of why young, gifted Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker walked away from the light and became the heavy-breathing, evil-Empire-building Darth Vader that we know and revile. It also reveals how Anakin and Padmé’s twins and future rebel leaders Luke and Leia were separated at birth, and how Jedi Masters Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi fled into exile.
That, however, is not the saga concerning us here.
Instead, we are tangling with a basic tension that has been around since the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison helped launch motion pictures. As applied to “Star Wars,” the question is: How did George Lucas, a promising teller of visual stories, become an obsessed techno-geek whose greatest contribution to film may not be the stories he put onscreen but the empire of elaborate and exciting moviemaking tools he built?
How is it that this peer of Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese has revolutionized filmmaking, but not necessarily added to the art of storytelling?
And what sort of revolution is it if it doesn’t move us emotionally?
“Episode III” revisits and perhaps begins to answer with some clarity our key question: What exactly is George Lucas’ moviemaking legacy?
Lucas exhibited either hubris or a penchant for perfectionism – maybe both – when he rereleased the original “Star Wars” trilogy with newly digitized characters he was unable to pull off in the late ’70s and ’80s. From a critical standpoint, the additions seemed to diminish what was memorable and moving about a bunch of quirky rebels taking on an insidious superpower.
Spielberg didn’t revise “Jaws” with a digital shark. Why? Because Lucas’ friend and sometime collaborator always has said that shooting around his mechanical star’s limitations was what made the film so frightening. And no one has gone back to “The Wizard of Oz” and tweaked those freaky flying monkeys.
In his push to “give filmmakers absolute control of the image, from the moment it’s conceived in the screening room of the mind till the night it’s shown in a theaters” – as one tech-scribe put it in 1999 – Lucas seemed to lose sight of what true storytelling vision entails. The lure of CG created realms – of the magic that strings of code can create – that were just too seductive.
Give the man credit, though. With “Star Wars,” Lucas has provided us an allegory that addresses his – and cinema’s – journey between the light and the dark side of his art.
“Graffiti” was on the wall
For the sake of a neat argument, it would be nice to pretend that 1973’s “American Graffiti” was George Lucas’ first film. That delicious slice of American pie followed two California guys (Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss) the night before they head for college “back East.”
But that bright gem of storytelling craft wasn’t his debut. Lucas’ first feature was an expanded version of his University of California student film, “THX 1138.” Named for a worker drone (played by Robert Duvall), the spare 1971 sci-fi flick tells the story of THX 1138, who discovers, with the help of a fellow drone, love and rebelliousness in a locked-down society.
It turns out that Lucas has been a tech and gizmo geek from the get-go. Even “American Graffiti” gazes long and lovingly at hot-rod after hot-rod cruising the streets of Modesto, Calif., Lucas’ hometown. The seeds of his pleasure and folly were there from the start.
For those who celebrate story as a force of good, Lucas made it easy to consider him a traitor to the cause. With “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones,” he seemed to have embraced the dark side.
While “Revenge of the Sith” works beautifully with the original trilogy, Episodes I and II remain mediocre affairs gussied up with loads of digital effects crafted at Lucas’ maverick company, Industrial Light & Magic.
Yet he is on to something. Hard-wired into cinema history is a rich tension between dreams and the machines that make them possible, between art and industry.
While most of us never watch those Oscars doled out to the tech wizards of sound and image, the Academy will never stop giving them out. Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic has won 14 Oscars for best visual effects and been nominated for another 20. That doesn’t begin to address his contributions from editing to 3-D graphics to elevating audio standards in theaters.
Those achievements are fundamental to our moviegoing experience. The problem comes when they usurp the lead role.
In “Revenge of the Sith,” poor Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Anakin with believable heartbreak, “You were the Chosen One, the one who was supposed to bring balance to the Force.”
You can almost hear critics posing that same plea to Lucas.
Lucas is “a pioneer”
There is a universe in which Lucas is consistently hailed as a force for good.
“No director has fast-forwarded filmdom into the 21st century as far as George Lucas has,” proclaimed Wired magazine in 1997 on the eve of the release of the f/x-doctored “Star Wars.” Now Lucas graces the May cover of the award- winning tech-culture magazine.
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, addressed “why Lucas belongs on our cover and why we put so much weight behind him.”
“George Lucas has three big pluses in our book,” Anderson said by phone from San Francisco. “He’s a pioneer in the technology of filmmaking. Everything from Pixar to the games industry owes a huge debt of gratitude toward the technical and conceptual innovation of Lucas.
“‘Star Wars’ blew our mind as a culture and a generation,” he said. “Not just about what filmmaking could be but also the notion of a beautifully realized science-fiction universe that was fully fleshed out.
“And he has explored every aspect of the ‘Star Wars’ universe in other media. The fact that you can live in the ‘Star Wars’ universe in almost any way you want.”
Remember the hullabaloo about virtual reality? The prophecy that scads of us would don visors and enter software-constructed spaces turned out to be hullabaloney.
Yet one can argue that the universes Lucas created have done just that. His invention of worlds filled with the indelible characters of Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke and Leia, Darth Vader and more is not a minor legacy. It’s no small matter that Lucas proved with the first trilogy that movies remain light- years ahead of other technologies in delivering alternative realities.
When you see “Revenge of the Sith,” don’t expect a clean, clear triumph of cinema’s light over its darkness. But there has has been much needed recalibration. Balance in the universe of technology and story has been restored.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
