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May 6, 2005

Looking Forward to Star Wars Act III

Here’s a review from Variety for those who didn’t like I and II. It looks like Revenge of the Sith will be really cool.

For me, I’ve always been willing to give Lucas a little more slack. While I was somewhat disappointed by I, unlike most of my friends, I just said “it feels like the first third of a movie”. After II I said, “it feels like I’ve now watched two-thirds of a movie”.

In other words, it seems to me that the reason I and II were so weak is because they’re really one 6-hour long movie. Traditional 3 active dramatic structure generally follows this structure:

To quote from here:

In the first act, get your hero up a tree. In the second act, throw progressively bigger rocks at him and force him further up the tree. Then in the third act, let him climb down or shake him out of the tree.

Act I Exposition: The first act has to establish the characters. So in the Phantom Menace, we meet Anakin as a little boy, we meet Padme as a young girl, and we hear about the prophecies about someone “restoring balance to the Force”. We also meet the Chancellor, and of course, the infamous Jar-Jar Binks. In this movie, though Anakin is still young, we see the character traits that make him great yet flawed. In Western literature drama is created when events overtake our hero, exposing his tragic flaw. This narrative structure has been common to theatre since the Ancient Greeks. Much like Oedipus ignored the Greek Chorus, we see Anakin ignoring again and again the advice of others. Typically, Act I is only 25% of the total length. I think one of the problems with Phantom Menace was that it felt padded, I think that Lucas had to pad this movie a bit. Cut down to an hour, I think this movie might have been better.

Act II Development: In the theatre, Act II is usually twice as long as Act I or Act III. Here, Lucas is again constrained by the fact that his vision was too long to fit into one movie. A lot happens in this movie, and I suspect that when I see the third movie I’ll fund a good chunk of Act II plot development ends up being part of the third movie. Anyways, in this movie, we start to see all the elements start to come together for Anakin. The Republic is corrupt and obviously a large collection of factions. Meanwhile, the Sith are behind the scenes actively working to bring down the Empire, and as everyone knows, the Chancellor is the head Sith. Having seen the other movies, we see the clones, the supposed saviors of the Empire for what they really are: Imperial Stormtroopers. We also see evidence of Anakin’s tragic flaw, but in this case, it leads to what should be a happy ending: Anakin marries Padme. Jar Jar Binks shows up again here, and it is he who proposes giving the Chancellor emergency powers, when Padme is busy elsewhere. Perhaps we are supposed to dislike Jar Jar, for he is the ignorance that leads to evil.

Act III Climax: Of course, I haven’t seen the movie yet, but we know what happens don’t we? Anakin is corrupted by the Emperor to the dark side, and becomes Darth Vader in the process. One doesn’t have to be a dark lord of the Sith to see how that can happen: Anakin’s vulnerabilities are his stubbornness and his love for Padme.

So in most plays, the first 75% of the play is just to setup the final 25%, Star Wars is no different, the first two movies were just to setup this one. So I’m looking forward to the third movie, and if its any good, I probably will get all 3 on DVD when they come out. Maybe if I edit all three movies into one really long movie (cutting about half of the first movie) others can see what I see.

This isn’t the first movie I’ve had this experience with, Back to the Future parts 2 and 3 were one long movie, the 2nd and 3rd of the original Star Wars movies also seem like one long movie, and the Matrix sequel was one long movie as well.

Back to the Future is really still 2 separate movies, it seems more like an old movie serial in that each movie seems like a TV episode. I think that’s why that movie hangs together so well.

The 2nd and 3rd (now 5th and 6th) of the original Star Wars movies leveraged off the 1st movie as Act I, allowing the Empire Strikes Back to function as the plot development movie. If you just watch Empire, its really not that good of a movie. If you watch all 3 at one sitting however, despite the fact that the first movie seems more self-contained, they can loosely function as one long movie.

The Matrix sequel splits 3 acts into two movies, so consequently it ends up being a much better movie viewed as one continuous piece then either piece separately. There’s no climax in the second movie, and no exposition in the third movie. Viewed together, the whole Matrix sequel as one long comes out as a better movie.

It’s important to remember though that we’re talking about the 3rd movie in a 6 part series. Taken as a whole, Star Wars is really the history of Darth Vader: prophesied to restore balance to the Force, it is really Darth Vader who destroys the Emperor, not Luke Skywalker. Perhaps I shouldn’t edit the first 3 movies into one, perhaps I should edit all 6 movies into one.

P.S. To my liberal friends: It took Bush 2 to get rid of Saddam…

Posted by the at May 6, 2005 9:19 AM

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Comments

Posted by: dean bonzani at May 8, 2005 6:26 PM

Posted by: Opinionated Bastard at May 9, 2005 10:25 AM