In Defense of III

Every once in a while, I like to challenge myself. Normally, these challenges are simple, like getting an A+ in a pass/fail course, detecting the time dilation from moving sixty miles an hour, or staying continuously upright on a rollercoaster with six inversions. But today, I take on a writing challenge, and perhaps one more difficult than the previously mentioned baubles. I aim to defend Revenge of the Sith, which shall be affectionately referred to in this piece as ‘III’. It is a thankless task, and one that might end with me curled up in the fetal position in a dark corner of a room somewhere, whispering about CGI like it was the One Ring, or with a Montana-sized double chin where the alien parasite resides. Nevertheless, the task is at hand.


It should first be noted that, unlike my other movie reviews, this one will not be in a segmented style where I make note of those aspects of a film which possessed a particular interest regarding cinema, morality, pop culture, or me. III demands more of a narrative, because to understand my defense of III, you have to understand how we got there.


Before the first dollar was spent, III was perhaps the most thematically constrained movie of all time (this seems like hyperbole, but I challenge you to come up with a better example). It was neither the end nor the beginning of the story, it was not a happy ending, everyone knew what was going to happen, and everyone knew what had already happened. In general, I am of the opinion that the middle movie of a trilogy has the greatest narrative advantages. It doesn’t have to wrap anything up, and it doesn’t have to get anything going because all the characters were already established in the first movie. But in III’s case, the movie had both the disadvantages of being in the middle—you can’t really wrap things up, and you didn’t really get a chance to start them—with none of the advantages. III couldn’t leave you hanging like Empire Strikes Back, because there was no more movie coming. The creative loop was closing. At the same time, thanks to the putridity of what had come before it, III couldn’t really rely on the characters having been already set up. They weren’t. III had to be the first, second and third part of a trilogy almost entirely on its own, and it had to do it even while we already knew the ending.


Yet I would suggest that this last point is the saving grace of III, indeed, the whole reason I can’t just throw it in the trash-heap with II or the basically-pointless-heap with I. I do not believe that George Lucas really had his story planned out all that well back in 1976, when they were creating the first Star Wars. In fact, if you have read The Book, you know that he did not. Yet, looking back on it, if you had to tell this story again, this is how you would tell it. You would start in the middle, get to the end, and then work your way back to the beginning.


The Original Trilogy is a salvation story. It is a triumph. It is a bringing back from the dead. Particularly in V, the stark reality of Good vs. Evil, love vs. hate, sacrifice vs. selfishness, Rebellion vs. Empire comes alive. You know the stakes and you meet the characters and by the end of the trilogy, Luke converting Vader is the Right Thing. But you can’t, and were never going to be able to, truly love Vader/Anakin. You love Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, etc. And you cry when Anakin saves Luke and then dies, not so much because you know anything about him but because you know what it took the heroes to bring this about. They sacrificed, they lost arms, they got frozen, they got shot in the arm (conveniently, with the weakest blaster of all time…), they got cut in half by lightsabers, died in their old age practically alone on distant Dagobah, and their sacrifice brought down the Evil Empire.


The Prequel Trilogy, by contrast, is obviously the tragedy. And tragedies are always more tragic when you see what’s coming. You want to reach through the screen and twist somebody’s arm until they recognize what is so plainly obvious to you, the viewer. And in this case, Anakin’s eventual fall into evil is obvious because we, the viewers, already know it is going to happen. And this is where III shines.


Anakin’s descent into darkness, and the tragedy which follows, is easily the highpoint of the film. Aided by John Williams’ haunting score (say what you will about him copying other composers and even himself, his Star Wars music is always fantastic, and it is best in V and III), Anakin marches into the Jedi Temple and starts killing people left and right, and thousands of Jedi meet their deaths in a montage with more fatalities than your average Godfather sequence, you cannot possibly feel okay about this. You have seen this coming, and now it is happening, and you couldn’t stop it. The Jedi all die. The Republic dies. Anakin walks into a room full of children and turns his lightsaber on.

III accomplishes this feat of tragedy despite the fact that the set-up was unmitigatedly terrible. Though often castigated for the wrong reasons, I does basically nothing to shepherd the Anakin story along. The only important part of the story is that he loves his mother. Surely, that could have been accomplished in less time than an entire movie. II, although it gives Anakin his love interest, makes him such a whiny brat, and completely aloof from Obi-Wan, that III had to spend an hour artificially—and, of course, badly—attempting to brainwash us into believing that Anakin and Obi-Wan like each other. Sure. Suuuure they do.

While the crapitude of II was entirely George Lucas’ fault, if we take II’s crapitude as a given, I’m not sure what else he could have done to save III, then what he did: throw away the first half of the movie trying to pretend I and II never happened, and then hit us with the big emotional guns, bring in the swelling music, and roll curtains. In some sense, Order 66 was the prequels. The Prequel Trilogy was the Fall to the Original’s Salvation, and Order 66 was the Fall in a nutshell. Everything goes wrong at once. Anakin lets everyone down at once. Vader’s selfishness tears a galaxy asunder, and it does so not only with the score haunting us, but with the memory of the Original Trilogy crystallizing in front of us. The Vader/Anakin pain and suffering which will be released in VI's emotional finale looms large over everything.

In a reversal of the Original Trilogy, Anakin does exactly what Luke did not do. In V, Luke, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to Cloud City to save his friends, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. Luke gets in over his head, and finds himself down an arm. But he doesn’t take that last step toward Hell; he would rather die than do that. Similarly, Anakin, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to the Chancellor’s office in an attempt to save his wife, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. He gets in over his head, but instead of refusing that final step toward evil, he chooses himself over others, and Mace Windu ends up down a hand. Order 66 follows, and the tragedy ensues.

The weaknesses of III are copious, but I think they all stem from elsewhere. Anakin’s sudden reversal is often criticized as being too quick, and unbelievable. I think this is not the result of Anakin being too quick to change, but too slow. The transformation seems weird because it is an odd time to do something so dumb. Oh, now you decide to turn on the Jedi? Now you decide that they’re all evil? I and II spent so much time trying to make Anakin a fear-ridden, angsty, wreck of a human being that his “Fall” ends up seeming too much in character. A fall should be a FALL, all caps. The strangely crappy personal interactions between Anakin and Obi-Wan, Anakin and Palpatine—these are also products of the fact that III is too late to be doing this. The first two movies should have been making Anakin out to be the Wonder Boy who can do no wrong, feared by bad guys, admired by good guys, and lusted after by Palpatine. Instead, the first two movies did… none of that.

The signature awful moment of III, Vader’s comical “NOOOOOO!!!” near the end, is also a product of bad preparation. We never believed in Anakin and Padme’s love for each other, because it was, for lack of a better term, stupid. How could Padme be surprised by anything this guy does? She knows him better than us and even we know he’s a puerile loose cannon who would just as well wipe out a camp of sentient beings if he felt like it or if the script called for it. And she’s surprised when he goes Sith crazy…? Meanwhile, Anakin’s “love” for Padme is completely disingenuous. He even uses words like “intoxicating” to describe his attitude towards her. Padme to him is a drug to quench his appetite for companionship, and a spectator for his braggadocio. After killing Jedi kids, it seems like “finding a new muse” wouldn’t be that big a deal to him. So, to make us think that Vader really cares about her, we get the gratuitous scream. Notice how Leia didn’t need to scream when Han got frozen because… ummm… we believed that she loved him?

Again, though, these faults are faults that III was saddled with, and did not entirely overcome. They aren’t of III’s own making. Even then, for at least a few minutes, during Order 66, III did overcome them. Darth Vader is a tragedy. The horrors that the Original heroes will one day sacrifice life and limb for are the result of a deep, dark shadow cast by this terrible moment. If III can do that, even with all its failings, and even while having to make up for all the failings of I and II, it is doing something right. I think it does. I think the helplessness and inevitability (and did I mention the score?) make the purge of the Jedi about as well done as it could have been.

Of course, III did a lot wrong. A non-exhaustive list: Natalie Portman’s "acting." That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Yoda and Sidious. General Greivous. That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Palpatine and Mace Windu. The completely pointless Kashyyk battle. That ridiculous scene where Palpatine kills three Jedi without any of them so much as bothering to resist. (I think the moral here is: don’t give Palpatine a lightsaber).

I think my defense of III, then, is that it has the soul of what the Prequels were supposed to be, even in spite of all the multitudinous failings. The grandeur, the epic catastrophe, the horrible pit that develops in your stomach—ever so briefly, this all happens. It could very well be a testament to the Original Trilogy’s greatness. Maybe it is our leftover sense of wonder at what we know comes next that imbues III with tragedy. Maybe it is really a faint shadow of what III could have been that makes what III was worth watching. I’m not sure I would argue with that.

Until he turns his lightsaber on. Then I am utterly convinced that for at least twenty minutes, the alien parasite in his chin fell asleep, and George Lucas remembered how to make a movie.

~Right Thumb~

Prometheus, Alien, and the Wonder of Not Knowing

Spoiler Warning: If you have not yet seen Prometheus (or, for that matter, Alien, Aliens, Dark City or Contact) and desire to view it at some point in the future, I probably would not read this.



Prometheus is grand science fiction in the strain of Blade Runner, Alien, Solaris, Dark City, etc. It just isn’t as good. It is a worthwhile viewing experience, however, if for no other reason than the fact that Prometheus, in being not-great-but-merely-very-good, casts into sharp view those qualities which made the previous greats, Greats. Prometheus wants to ask grand questions, but it answers too many of its own questions. It wants to be fulfilling, but in satiating too much of our curiosity, it leaves one just a bit empty. And while the 70’s sci-fi look of the film—a science fiction mise-en-scene which no one has improved upon in the decades since—makes you feel like you are watching great science fiction, I came to the end with one overarching though: I want to watch Alien again, because, wow, Alien was amazing.

Prometheus starts off on completely the wrong foot. Even while watching the opening scene, I was horrified by its brutal opacity. As an alien spacecraft leaves the atmosphere, some humanoid creature, on a planet that looks very much like Earth, dissolves himself into the water using some strange liquid, and we see his DNA shred itself to pieces, leading to the inescapable conclusions that life on Earth was begun by an alien race. Mind you, this is the first scene. Already, I know more than I want to know. Already, I know that the crew of the Prometheus will find some origin point of this alien race, and that they will discover that they did, indeed, create humanity. At this point, the entire movie was practically ruined, in the first scene. The only thing that kept my interest piqued was the belief that Ridley Scott must have something up his sleeve. Surely he would not show us that, and then simply follow through with it? Surely, there is something about this scene that we do not understand?

There wasn’t. The twist was that, in fact, that the Engineers—the human scientists’ term for this proto-human race—are now trying to kill us. Thankfully, the movie refrains from telling us why this proto-human species is now determined to undo that which they started, but this is about the only thing the movie refrains from answering for us. The movie ends with the following things basically known: this species created us, they then wanted to destroy us, and to do so they engineered a black goo which mutates living things into horrendous monsters, and eventually one of these mutations will turn into the Alien we were all frightened by 33 years ago. The only thing left to the imagination is why this race of beings wants to kill us.

Now, for a moment, I will ignore the damage that this movie does to Alien’s original ideas. The fact that the Alien was actually bread to destroy us, specifically, is quite a let-down. It smacks of the same Everything-Is-About-Us science fiction that I normally ascribe to lesser sci-fi artists than Ridley Scott. Much more frightening was the idea that the Alien race was simply out there. It evolved, much like we did, except that it was a nearly perfect killing machine, and we just happened to run into it, and we just happened killed in the process, unless we happened to be Sigourney Weaver. Numerous other such mysteries and concepts were ruined as well.

But I ignore these because Prometheus can stand on its own terms, and it is its own terms which I believe are continually weakened by its lack of restraint. Think of the climactic suicide crash between the Prometheus and the alien vessel. In the film, this is a triumphant moment of good triumphing over evil—or at the very least, of humanity triumphing over someone else. It is also bland and predictable. Imagine, if you will, if we really were not sure what the proto-humans’ plans were, if we were not sure that this was a weapon meant to destroy us, and if we really were not sure what “this” was in the first place. The dramatic tension and existential questions involved in that hypothetical scene would have dwarfed the actual scene. Should we ram it? Should we not? Is it our business? Can we take it upon ourselves to assume evil intentions when they are not manifestly proved? Do we want to die for a pointless cause?

As another example, we turn to the tomb/sanctuary/giant head room. One of the panels on the wall very much—very much—resembled the Alien from the original Alien. Maybe I just saw something that wasn’t there. But it certainly seemed to share many characteristics. When I first saw this, I thought it was awesome. What was the proto-human species’ experience with the Alien? Why did they have a panel devoted to it? Had they been wiped out by this Alien species? Where did the Alien come from and how did it sneak up on such an advanced civilization? Where were they now? Or maybe the proto-humans created the Alien, and it got out of control? Or maybe the Alien was actually a more ancient species, and it created proto-humans before evolving—or devolving—into a more primal, vicious form?

The questions were endless, and the imaginative possibilities seemed boundless. The holograms showing the proto-humans running from… something… were haunting, terrifying, awe-inspiring, and so forth. Was it the Alien they were running from? If so, why? How did it get there? What in the blazes were they doing here? What was going on?!

Prometheus releases the vast majority of this tension by explicitly telling you 95% of what happened. In the end, we have a banal and uninteresting history of a biological weapon gone wrong. That is nothing new, and that is nothing particularly interesting. The original Alien was not such a success because of all the answers it provided. It was a success because of all the answers it did not provide.

Indeed, the original Alien’s success can entirely be chalked up to what we did not know, what we did not see, and what we could only guess about. This is true both in the high-minded, existential, What is our place in the universe? sense, and it was also true in the “Sweet mother of all things holy what is around the corner?!?!” sense. Alien was scary because you didn’t often see the Alien. It was meaningful because it didn’t answer the questions. They found a crashed extraterrestrial ship, with some sort of “Space Jockey” on board, whose stomach seemed to have exploded. You never discover who the ship belonged to, who the space jockey was, or, later on, what the Alien was doing there, how it survived, where it came from, etc. The universe seemed huge. It seemed nearly infinite. It seemed like there might have been a trillion possible answers because, in a universe as big as that, there were a trillion different possible answers.

The best science fiction has always understood this. Dark City, for instance, leaves you guessing for much of the movie. When you finally discover the truth about the city, you are still left wondering—why? Why this space-city? Why did they do it here? And what exactly were the Strangers doing? We are given hints, but never answers. Where did they come from? Why choose us?

Even the action oriented science fiction films understand this, on a more tactile level. Aliens, otherwise known as James Cameron’s original Ode To Stuff Getting Blown Up (Because of Evil Corporations), was an ultra-intense, paranoid movie where you never feel comfortable and the action means much more than simply numbing one’s mind. And it accomplishes this not through a blunt, “How many bad guys can we kill at once” attitude, but rather through a lot of sleight-of-hand artistry. Think of the scene where the auto-machine guns are defending the installation. We know they have a limited amount of ammo. We know they are tearing the aliens to pieces, for at least a bit. But we see nothing. We only hear. We hear the rapid fire bangs of the guns, for minutes on end, and then, all at once, the noise stops. And then we are terrified. It was not guns firing and aliens dying that was scary. It was silence. Because the guns are down, and our time was up.

Contact, a science fiction film that could have been so much more, suffers from the same problem Prometheus does. It wants to answer questions. So instead of a thoughtful, novel story about communicating with an alien race that is light years away, the movie develops a deus ex machina, Time-Space Portal Machine whereby Jodie Foster can meet the alien, who explains everything to her. What. A. Letdown.
Now, I know why movies do this. I think back to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which a lot of people really didn’t like. They didn’t like it because they didn’t think the aliens made any sense, they didn’t like it because their purpose was never explained, they didn’t like it because the ending came out of nowhere. But it was superb. It was superb because it didn’t just answer every trivial, or non-trivial, question we could throw at it. It hinted at possible explanations, as science fiction will often do, but it never drew us an outline. That lets you ponder. That lets you cogitate. That lets you sink into images and possibilities. In short, that is great science fiction.

Prometheus could have been great. Perhaps most sadly, it could have been great with very little change. Remove the first scene. Remove the needless explication regarding The Purpose of the goo, and the intentions of the proto-humans. Maybe add a scene or two with a little more wonder and a little less analysis. It would not have been hard to maintain the beautiful look, capable action scenes and decent characters with a narrative that did more wondering and less talking. It would not have been hard, in other words, to create a movie that understood Alien’s strengths, and was faithful to its science-fiction wonder. This is probably the main reason Prometheus was disappointing. Despite its grand attempt, and despite being fifty times as intelligent as most summer movies—while still being eminently watchable—and despite its superlative effects and sets, the movie could have had the depth and solemnity of the original Alien, and the many great science fiction works before and after. It could have been poetry, and instead it was a physics equation.

Movie Review: Into Great Silence

This inaugural movie review shall begin with a disclaimer: We hardly ever stop a film, book or similar piece of media before it’s finished. It’s incredibly rare. It’s “good part of an Ayn Rand novel” rare. You might catch trichinosis it’s so rare.

But a recent movie-viewing proves that it is not in fact a philosophical impossibility (unlike the Ayn Rand bit). Some movies, we now realize, are so offensive, so lewd, so implacably irreverent, so disrespectful and smearing and destructive and corrupting and filthy that it’s simply a moral imperative that you press Stop—before Satan steals the remote and leaves you powerless to end the madness.

We refer to Philip Groning’s documentary Die GroBe Stille (Into Great Silence)*. It is a two-hour-forty-minute expose of what really goes on inside a Carthusian monastery in France. We expected a sort of visual meditation, a serene slice of art. And for the first fifty-odd minutes, this is indeed what we received. But as it continued, the film degenerated into a celebration of racism, military supremacy, crassness, disrespect towards elders, and senseless propaganda.

The spiraling descent into debauchery is sparked by none other than the abbot of the monastery himself, Dom Marie Pierre. For those of you who, like us, lack European sophistication, this translates roughly as “Bossman Mary Peter”. Now despite his position of leadership and respect within a community that supposedly endorses virtue, asceticism and Roman Catholic morals, he is filmed while feverishly at work on an IBM laptop.

That’s right. A monk on a computer.

Clearly not supposed to happen. IBM might as well stand for Internet Baptist Machine—it wouldn’t change how little such a device belongs in a Carthusian monastery.

From here on, the entire direction of the film shifts. We begin to discover the vicious racial politics that infest the monastery. The sole African-American** monk, clearly one of the few remaining sincere brothers, is forced to read aloud, singled out from the others. We also see that the abbey is not the peaceful, quiescent place we thought it to be. No, these monks have decided to use fancy technology, beyond mere Internet Baptist Machines. Microphones and… amplifiers… are used to further promote the nefarious schemes of Bossman Mary Peter.

Whereas the monks had in the first hour been diligently toiling in the garden, the kitchen, or devoutly praying, they now start talking. And not just talking, but talking about things that monks should not talk about. They complain about the sparse number of washbasins in their sanctuary. They castigate the members of a nearby Trappist monastery for their owning the apparently unreasonable total of six washbasins. They begin to plot a hostile takeover.

And then, as if we were not already onto these monks’ plans to land in Gehenna, one of the monks discusses his airplane flight! This alone is clearly enough to result in the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the destination reveals yet greater devilry. The monk has booked a flight to a place the subtitles labeled “Seoul”, clearly a misspelling of Sheol, Lucifer’s own lair***.

At this juncture, Two Thumbs Sideways could not handle the smut that was being displayed on the screen. As we frantically attempted to stop the movie (in spite of the devil’s own attempts to thwart us), we were once again visually assaulted with a horrifying scene. A forest (that undoubtedly stood between the Carthusians and Trappists) was framed. We knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these charlatans for monks were hiding a regiment of tanks. This regiment would soon go Fern Gully on this woodland tableau before razing the Trappist monastery to the ground in search of the five extra washbasins they so jealously desired.

If nothing else, after reaching their eternal hellfire, these conniving Carthusians will have very clean hands.

Small recompense for forcing two unassuming viewers to experience such a satanic, diabolical, fiendish vision.

-Two Thumbs Sideways-





* We at Two Thumbs Sideways apologize for the typographical inaccuracies in this sentence, which are due to our lack of a German keyboard and an all-around dearth of European sophistication.

** What an African-American is doing in France, we were never able to ascertain.

*** This is yet another incident that brings attention to the great paucity of qualified closed captioning professionals in modern society.