The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : The end of the Star Wars saga

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Monday, May 30, 2005

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The end of the Star Wars saga

The force is still with him. More than a quarter of a century after he made the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas has ended his six-film space epic with an intergalactic bang. The Revenge of the Sith, which opened to packed houses and largely favourable reviews round the world, wraps up the saga set in Lucas' world of fantasy. It is a place awash with heroic jedi knights, nasty droids, adversarial clones, alien creatures, and droll robots; that is constantly plagued by imperial intrigue and the threat of war; that reverberates with the sound of dogfights between spaceships and dazzles with the flash of lightsabres. The Revenge is considerably more sinister and morally complex than its predecessors. Thanks to the lukewarm reception The Phantom Menace and The Attack of the Clones received in 1999 and 2002, the film maker seems to have understood that special computerised effects and edge-of-the-seat action are no substitute for a good story. The film chronicles the slow and agonised transformation of Anakin Skywalker, an essentially honourable but tormented jedi knight, into the malevolent Darth Vader. The Revenge may be the last in the series but it is the third in the saga that began with the making of Episodes IV (A New Hope), V (The Empire Strikes Back) and VI (Return of the Jedi) before the Director turned his attention to making three prequels.

What place does Lucas have in cinematic history? Aesthetically, none at all. The flaws in the series are all too evident: the wooden characters, the inane one-liners, the clunky uninspired dialogue, the unabashed pandering to pop culture, the undemanding and escapist nature of the narrative ("science fiction without the science"). In cinematic terms, Star Wars is a caricature of The Lord of the Rings — a series nourished and sustained by a narrative based on the work of a great writer of formidable imagination and intellect, J.R.R. Tolkein. Lucas' contribution to popular cinema must be assessed in other ways, technically and commercially. If A New Hope (1977) changed the face of Hollywood, it is in the sense Lucas, through computerised special effects, showed that films could be made in an entirely different manner. A number of successful films, notably Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Matrix, owe a direct debt to Lucas' first Star Wars film. The huge cult following for the early films in the series also changed the manner in which Hollywood films were financed; they attracted the interest of Wall Street and helped alter the profile of investors in cinema. Star Wars has been the most commercially successful series in the history of cinema — earning more than $ 3.5 billion at the box office and more than $ 9 million in the merchandising industry it spawned. The release of The Revenge is a milestone as it marks the end of a series that constantly pushed the cinematic envelope in terms of sound, stunts, and special effects.

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