Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  KENJI OATES

  (actor, “Saessee Tiin,” Revenge of the Sith)

  I think the prequels were really a new style of movie, and maybe those people weren’t ready for it. If you think about what made the original Star Wars movies so popular, the gritty, Wild West reality of it, with busted-up, broken spaceships, etc., you can see how the completely unreal, shiny, almost cartoony quality of the prequels could rub old fans the wrong way. I actually quite like the cartoony look, and the absolute freedom it gives the director to make the world look exactly as they like. The story that was being told would not be possible using any other method, so I think perhaps people’s real argument is that they didn’t like the style of the CGI, not that it was used.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  When I go out and talk about Lucas and Star Wars, I always get asked about the prequels. I think people desperately want me to shit on them and there are times when I want to, but my response is usually that they’re not made for me. I have my Star Wars. I’m an original trilogy guy and the prequels are not made for me. I’m not going to tell some seven-year-old something different. Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart said, “My son told me The Phantom Menace is his favorite Star Wars movie. I had to explain to him he was wrong.” You really try not to do that. Let them have their Star Wars. At the same time, I’m trying to figure out if Lucas deserves credit for not providing fan service, though he may be—for instance, for the most part, a lack of Jar Jar Binks—in Attack of the Clones. I feel like he sort of rights the ship by the time he gets to Revenge of the Sith … but I find that film unwatchable.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Anakin’s story adds to the saga significantly. It adds weight and tragedy to the saga in a more explicit way. For instance, the betrayal and execution of the Jedi makes palpable the Emperor’s evil in a way that is less cartoon-like than the “evil” we see in the original trilogy. The prequel, for all the fan gibes about trade routes and blockades, is a political story about a ruthless dictator’s rise to power, and the good man at his side who, basically, loses his soul to serve him. The prequel trilogy “rhymes” with the original trilogy, but also deepens it in many ways.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Science fiction is a literary medium. It’s a medium that depends on creating worlds in your imagination. The audience is half the process. In film, it doesn’t work like that. You have to create the impression or illusion that it’s the real deal. Otherwise, it won’t work and people are more sophisticated, so you really have to be pretty good at it. It used to be King Kong where he moved and everyone said, “Wow, that’s great.” Unfortunately, we live in a very different world now and the art form has become very sophisticated. The demands of what is credible and what is not credible are much more difficult.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  The trilogy is Lucas putting everything up on-screen and those are the moments where you’re like, “Oh, this is Lucas’s weakness as a writer.” If you go back and read those early first drafts of Star Wars—it’s the prequels. Lucas spent all his time world-building. He’s giving us every backstory, every motivation. You read those first drafts of what becomes Star Wars and, my God, every character has to have their entire backstory told. You’ve got to know everybody. It’s what he loves to do and, again, that’s when you need somebody like Gary Kurtz or Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. People who can say, “This is boring. You need something funny here.” He needed an angel on his shoulder.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I made these films, because I like to make movies. I wanted to finish this. I had been very frustrated before when I made the first series, because I had an imagination that created a kind of world that I could never get on film; it was just technically impossible. I was stuck with creatures in rubber masks that couldn’t move very fast, and it was very hard to direct a movie and tell the story that I wanted to tell. I was stuck with environments that were extremely limited in what I could do. Part of coming back, one was to finish the story. I kind of like working in the Star Wars world, because I put in so much time and energy to create it. But part of it was that it was a chance to make it more the way it was in my mind when I created it.

  When I finished Star Wars, I figured that was it. And once I finished Return of the Jedi, I never really expected to go back and turn the backstory into a movie. But as time went on, I realized that being an icon of evil so overwhelmed the Darth Vader character that the idea he is actually a tragic character kind of got overwhelmed. So by going back and telling Darth Vader’s story, telling the whole story right from the beginning, I was able to get the full range of all the things that were going on and how everything fit together.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  I believe, in light of the lackluster Disney trilogy, the prequels are being re-assessed by all generations. Although the prequels are uneven, they do feel original and as if there is a direction or plan behind them, which is something many fans do appreciate. The sequel trilogy, by comparison, is scattershot, lacking direction and inspiration, despite the presence of some great characters and performers. So in that sense, I think the prequels are finally being assessed for what they are (flawed but intriguing movies from the mind of Star Wars’ creator) rather than what they are not (adventures that continue in the exact same spirit as the original trilogy). Also, my son grew up with the prequels, and like many of his generation, they are his favorite of the Star Wars films—although he is thirteen, he dislikes the Disney trilogy vehemently. This is very much a generational thing. Those who grew up with Star Wars seem to have rejected the prequels for being different and for being aimed at younger audiences. But those fans should be asked a question now: Would they rather have the prequels, with their creator’s integrity and vision behind everything, or would they rather continue to see the wholesale strip-mining of the saga at the hands of a big corporation that doesn’t really understand the magic of these films?

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  I think all the prequels will have their day. They all have flaws—people have examined those flaws ad-nauseam—but I don’t think as many people have gone and looked for positives. I’ve never understood why the things with the Senate bothered people. I’ve just never understood that at all. What’s wrong with having a scene in the Senate? I don’t get why that’s a bad thing. Even in Episode IV, they talk about how is the Emperor going to rule. There were politics. Even in the very first one.

  RAY MORTON

  The prequels are ultimately a very mixed bag. They told a story that perhaps didn’t need to be told. Maybe we really didn’t need to know where Darth Vader came from—maybe it would have been better to have just let him be that dark, mysterious figure who emerged from the smoke way back in Star Wars to scare the living daylights out of us. If the story did need to be told, perhaps it should have been only one movie—a single tightly constructed tale rather than three largely episodic tales weighed down with a lot of irrelevant filler. And certainly the trilogy could have been better written and (in some places) better acted.

  GLEN OLIVER

  Were the prequels disappointing? They were imbalanced, and ill-considered in a number of ways, but they were on the way to creating a reasonably interesting framework for the three-feature trajectory. This is especially true if you factor in The Clone Wars TV series, which was a largely more successful undertaking both conceptually and narratively. At the end of the day, though, I think what most hamstrung the prequels is that their heart simply doesn’t beat correctly. They represent a warm and tragic story, often told robotically and coldly.

  Many performances are stilted, directing is often stagey and muted, the scripts are abrasively clunky at times, and poor John Williams works his ass off to enliven material which is often doggedly tepid, and sometimes even turgid, at best. The prequels felt extravagant and excessive in many regards, while also feeling underbaked and sloppily conceived in other ways. When weighed as a three-picture cycle, there’s probably enough genuinely inspired material between the three pictu
res to equal one rather good movie. On the whole, however, they ring as spotty. Their broader contribution to filmmaking technologies and crafting, however, are without dispute.

  RAY MORTON

  But for all the negatives, there is no doubt that Revenge of the Sith concludes the prequel trilogy exactly where it should conclude: with Owen and Beru cradling an infant Luke Skywalker as they gaze at those twin setting suns, leaving them and us looking forward with (a new?) hope toward Episode IV.

  GLEN OLIVER

  One area in which the prequels truly do shine is imagination: the technologies, some planetary environments, some of the creature work, the weapons of warfare—all felt unfettered, and that is fun to behold. The “universe” and world-building often feel quite reasonable and were sometimes even interesting and provocative. Sadly, these contributions are frequently not supported by story or performances.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  The story is ultimately a discussion about how fragile democracy is and how democracies sometimes get turned over to tyrants with applause. We should always be vigilant as citizens to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have to look inside ourselves and see what kind of a person we are. Are we a good person or an evil person? We all have both of those components in us and we can choose to be more evil than good. And if that happens, we should look at ourselves and think, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I harming others? Am I doing this for selfish reasons? Am I only concerned about myself or am I compassionate and caring about other people?”

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  It’s about a lack of options. Anakin is at a crossroads in his life and in this last film all of his frustrations and anxieties are becoming too much, and he’s looking for other avenues, so the dark side seems appealing to him. And it doesn’t seem that dark, you know? That’s sort of the point, that good people turning bad don’t necessarily know it.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  There are a number of interesting factors about Sith that relate directly to America in the 2000s (the time the prequels were made and released). In The Phantom Menace audiences witnessed precisely how the Emperor began his ascent, chipping away at democracy a piece at a time (in doing so, functioning as an unseen or phantom menace). A Dark Lord and his allies, using the technicalities of the law, removed the Supreme Chancellor (Valorum) from office, consequently gaining power for themselves. They did so by claiming that the Senate’s bureaucracy had swelled to unmanageable and nonfunctional levels—an antigovernment argument—and that Valorum himself was a weak man beset by scandal. The antidote was a self-described “strong leader,” someone who could rally the Senate and get it to work again, someone, for instance, such as Palpatine. In real life, of course, George W. Bush ascended to the presidency promising to restore “honesty and integrity” to the White House after the scandal-plagued Clinton. And after the attacks of 9/11, terrified Americans willingly accepted a massive new surveillance state with the passage of the Patriot Act. And Bush had this to say to the World on November 6, 2001, about the War on Terror, “You are either with us or against us.” In May 2005, George Lucas explicitly put the following words into Anakin Skywalker’s mouth: “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” And Obi-Wan’s rebuttal? “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

  SAMUEL L. JACKSON

  Star Wars is still a classic story of good versus evil and that’s always been a common theme of a lot of films. George has put it in a pretty fantastic place that people kind of imagined, but your imagination gets overloaded by watching what he’s done. You place yourself in that particular situation. And you’re amazed by all of the creatures and people that show up. And very seldom do you think about the politics of the galaxy and the ramifications that the films have in terms of what’s really going on around us. George started over forty years ago; the world has changed so drastically since then and it’s still essentially the same story. So it kind of lets you know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  * * *

  During a THX 1138 retrospective prior to its release on Blu-ray at the annual Telluride Film Festival, Lucas mused on the nature of politics in the prequels with moderator Elvis Mitchell, confirming that they were indeed intended as a rebuke of the Bush administration and, specifically, Dick Cheney. “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the Emperor,” Lucas famously remarked.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Clearly, George Lucas crafted Revenge of the Sith as a direct rebuke to the path America took post-9/11. Those who whine that there is no political message in Star Wars are, well, blind to the evidence. What remains clever and artistic about Lucas’s metaphor is not merely that it is timely (and frightening), but that Lucas tells his story on two parallel tracks. First, in terms of the Republic, and second in personal, individual terms. Anakin travels the same path personally that the Republic citizenry undergoes on a wide scale. Anakin too is “terrorized,” or rather, the victim of a terrible attack. Not by the Separatists, but by the Sand People on Tatooine. They kill his mother. That loss hurts him deeply, and he pursues his revenge against the agents who hurt him. But then Anakin begins experiencing visions that he will also lose his beloved wife. So, like the Republic itself, Anakin willingly exchanges freedom and liberty for safety and security. He surrenders his ideals and turns to the dark side because he fears more “attack”; he fears the loss of his family. He does not heed Yoda’s warning that “fear of loss is a path to the dark side.” Again, in the 2000s-era America, the government launched a preemptive war against Iraq because it feared America would suffer a second 9/11, or terrorist attack. It gave up our values to prevent experiencing such a terrible hurt again. Anything was justified—including torture—in the name of safety and security.

  RAY MORTON

  In the years since the release of the Star Wars prequels, admittedly a much less creatively successful set of films than the original trilogy, it has become fashionable in some areas of movie fandom (the “George Lucas raped my childhood” crowd) to deride Lucas’s talents and minimize his contributions to the success of the original movies. This line of thinking posits that Lucas had a few good ideas, but that his execution of them was weak, clumsy, or just plain bad, and that the real credit for the series’ success belongs more to Lucas’s more talented collaborators—Gary Kurtz, Marcia Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck, Lawrence Kasdan, Irvin Kershner, John Williams, etc.—who more often than not saved Lucas from his own worst creative impulses.

  KYLE NEWMAN

  I wrote a good article in Star Wars Insider defending the prequels, and we did a panel, too, at Star Wars Celebration where we defend the prequels—not so much defend the prequels, but we talk about the saga as a whole and how all the episodes work together and how they enhance each other. If you sit down and revisit them, you find that there are these rhythmic patterns and story patterns in the structure, and it’s really deep and really smart, so they’re better films than people give them credit for.

  RAY MORTON

  Giving more credit to Lucas’s collaborators is a truly bizarre notion—one that demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of so many things: film history, Lucas’s accomplishments, the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the role of the director, and the way the movie business works. Lucas’s collaborators made vital contributions to the original trilogy; that has never been disputed, least of all by Lucas himself. But George Lucas was the prime mover of the initial Star Wars films. To think anything else is simply bonkers and anyone who continues to perpetuate this idea needs to be seriously slapped upside the head.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  The first chapter is basically how Anakin becomes a Jedi, and I wanted to see him as an angelic little kid. The Phantom Menace is really about setting everything up. How does he meet Padmé? What are the basic politics of the Republic? How does he become a Jedi? All those things are set up, which is what usually happens in a first act. So that’s the story. When I went to do the prequels, everybody said, “Oh, great, he’s going to do th
e prequels! Oh boy, more Star Wars!” and all that kind of stuff. But then I said, “The first one is about a nine-year-old boy, and it does not have Darth Vader in it.” Everybody said, “Oh my God, this is going to destroy the franchise. It’s going to be terrible. You can’t do this.”

  People were telling Rick, “You’ve got to stop him. You’ve got to change it. We need to see Darth Vader killing everybody.” And I said, “That’s not the story. I’m telling a story. It’s not a marketing piece. Let’s remember where we are here.” I didn’t fight to get my freedom in order to do what the studios would do. Because I’m sure if Episode I had been made at a studio, they would have said, “You’re not shooting that picture. We’re going to do a sequel with Darth Vader, the same thing you did before, only it’ll be…”

  That’s what I worked very hard for—so I wouldn’t have to do that. And, at that point, everybody was concerned. Nobody really worries about what people are going to think of the movie, but everybody worries about whether it’s going to make money. And there was a chance, at that point, that I could have lost everything. The Phantom Menace could have not made much money. So many sequels have died off and Episode I was after a sixteen-year hiatus. That’s why it got overhyped: everybody was extremely concerned that it wasn’t going to work and that nobody would see a movie about a little boy. But I did The Phantom Menace the way I thought I should do it. I made that movie because I wanted to tell that story, not because I wanted to make a sequel.