Its Star Wars season again and I'm preparing for the temptation to see the newest film, The Last Jedi. I found the last film to be offensive, dumb, cheap and somewhat boring, but its surely an important and popular piece of 2010's Hollywood populism/propaganda. But its attracted or given voice to a kind of anti-intellectual casual movie fan who has to hate George Lucas' prequels as the only defense of the Disney continuations. It irks me to no end because I have a soft spot for those films and I genuinely think Episode 3 is George Lucas' finest hour, an actual masterpiece to prove his genius. And we know genius is understood too late... because most people aren't geniuses... or else they would enjoy the work of another genius.
Episode 3 works on a conceptual level as THE only companion piece to the original Star Wars genesis (Episode 4) actually directed by the guy who understands it enough to have created it. This prequel was actually conceived along with the original concept that would become what we all know as the Star Wars mythos. Granted Episodes 1 & 2 are inferior and less essential, but they were engineered that way; to be prequels to the prequel, not standalone hit films like Empire or Jedi. Lucas seems inspired with Episode 3 as becoming a testement that prequels can be superior to sequels. Whether you prefer Empire to Sith is moot because one is objectively more accepted without much kickback. This is about Lucas making a Star Wars spin-off he can embrace as HIS and not a work of studio committee.
Now Episodes 5&6 were the most commercial and successful until the Disney reboots, but they are vastly divergent from the style, tone and overarching themes of Lucas' first film. What Star Wars started as was a post-modern kids film based on bygone sci-fi serials, a bizarrely refreshing blend of childish American fantasy and academic British-inspired theater. It quickly evolved into a more cold, realism-based soap opera set in space and an outrageous campy merchandised FX reel. Those were two extreme sides of Lucas' creation, but not a pure mix of both. But to match them Episode 1 is a queasy yet ambitious experiment in style trying to reclaim the series from "Jedi" back into a violent, mature kid's film & Episode 2 is more of a teenage soap opera/popcorn adventure film like "Empire". And with "Sith", Lucas reboots his series back to the politically serious, technically dazzling, spiritually questing allegory for modern morality during wartime.
Lucas has always been recognized more for his technical invention and know-how than his commercial flair or legit artistic talents, because he has always shared credit with his crew more than Hitchcock. But why is the latter considered an auteur but the former is not? Its because Lucas is even bigger fan of radical experimentation and expects more intellectual understanding from his audience. He doesn't care if the film isn't understood or doesn't make a ton of new fans, having created the comic books, video games, cartoons, etc. to serve his immature fanbase. The films are for connoisseurs of classic cinema, not casual sci-fi fans. Surely audiences in the 2000s expected a showcase of sexual innuendo, slapstick jokes & good triumphing over evil. But Lucas refuses to retread, while still cleverly throwing the nostalgia critics a bone.
"Sith" allows Lucas to identify himself as a director fully and the previous films as warm up's. Here is a showcase of George Lucas the abstract visualist, the "pop art" lover, the political theater deconstructionist, the social progressive, the hippie nerd, the digital animator, the narrative editor with non-narrative editing influences, the Buddhist sympathizer, the Democratic Socialist, the critic of bad Y2K culture. All of that artistic impression, lamely dismissed as hollow stylistic masturbation, is really contextualizing Lucas' own worldview of his created universe. Fans still seem confused as to what Lucas was saying in the prequels because they refused to understand the clear language and sentiment in them.
But with this climax of his 2nd trilogy and really a puzzle piece that legitimizes FIVE previous films, Lucas goes for a new level of closure and cyclical completion. We finally see the maturation in legendary figures and clarity in what a young George Lucas initially wanted in Empire & Jedi. In many ways this film is a deconstruction of Star Wars for his haters as much as his fans. The film is packed with allegories to politics & spirituality that are timeless and have become relevant again. While Hollywood was asking very mild and sometimes flawed philosophical questions in Lord of the Rings & Harry Potter films, Star Wars was exploring new levels of mass-media communication. Something so mainstream and accepted as Star Wars is used to confront horrible social conflicts and looming global fears that have unfortunately become more pressing.
And Ep 3 succeeds in becoming a kind of coping device for the Post-9/11 American atmosphere. Lucas gives valuable backstory and motivation to The Jedi & The Sith, placeholders for any binary conflict you want by asking the essential question of all morality, "Am I my brother's keeper?" This has divided religions, political parties, artistic movements, families, races & communities and (I assume most urgently to Lucas) futurists. Lucas gives a very well-versed and elegantly boiled down perspective on human conflict by presenting "Light" and "Dark" as choices both valid emotionally and rationalized socially, much more nuance than is given in Star Wars films before or since. And he still offers a positive beam of hope to remind us that there's a meaning for all of the suffering. Thats GREAT drama.
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