Mormons love Star Wars. This has been repeatedly established. In fact, we love it so much that we criticize it, but (like the Church itself) we do so only because we love it, and want it to be better, just as God loves us and wants us to be better. Here then is an alternate-universe take on the Star Wars prequel trilogy, also featuring in the grand finale to our latest book-length message in a bottle, Reviews for Non-Existent Movies by Eric Goulden Kimball, available here!
(Read previous excerpts here and here.)
Review: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Remastered for BluRay, Episode I: The Dark Side of the Force/Episode II: Clone Wars Rising/Episode III: The Fall of the Jedi, a Retrospective
Just in time for the long-awaited re-release of the original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy on BluRay, comes 20th Century Fox’s announcement that George Lucas’s well-regarded Prequel trilogy is now receiving the BluRay remaster treatment as well. This new, companion boxset has not yet garnered the quite the same level of buzz and excitement, and understandably so, given how there are no “Special Editions” for them to mercifully override in the popular imagination. (Besides, most fans already own and watch the expanded Director’s Cuts as religiously as they do Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarillon tetralogy, or The Wachowskis’ Matrix Pentalogy.)
But it is well-worth worth meditating for a minute on just what a miracle those Prequels really are—how beautifully they managed to strike a balance between telling its own story while also fleshing out one’s appreciation of the originals—because they just as easily could have been a complete catastrophe.
Travel back in time with me to the halcyon days of 1999 (in the heady post-impeachment world of the Gore Administration), when tickets lines were already forming around the block months in advance of Episode I. The hype was legendary (“irrational exuberance” anyone?), there had never been anything like it; yet deep down, even amongst the Star Wars faithful, we had to admit that in our deepest heart of hearts, there was simply no way these could possibly live up to our stratospheric expectations.
Not that it mattered; LucasFilm could’ve just slapped a 9-year-old baby Vader together with a racist Salamander-man and it still would’ve shattered box-office records. Seriously, how overwhelming must have been the temptation, you have to wonder, to make the entire trilogy center on Anakin’s predictable, pre-programmed turn to the Dark Side. Just lazily trot out ye oulde Campbellian Hero Cycle yet again and call it a night; this alternative universe prequel trilogy probably would’ve even featured him as a virgin birth/chosen one or what not. There would’ve been cheap callbacks and dull fan-service galore. He probably would’ve built C3PO. Yoda would have had a light-saber duel, there would’ve been a generic princess love-interest, and there would’ve been a final duel in a volcano like some sort of lower-tier Bond flick. Chewbacca would finally get his medal. Whatever. Fox was going to get our money, no matter whether we pretended to like them or not. It’s a small wonder that we didn’t have to.
Consider the delight we got instead, however: scenes that have now become as engraved into our cultural consciousness as Luke’s trench-run down the Death Star or Darth Vader’s “I am your father”. And most incredibly of all, as noted earlier, they stand on their own as impressively as they deepen our appreciation of the originals.
We recall in Empire Strikes Back, for example, when Yoda castigates Luke with “You are reckless,” to which Obi-wan’s spirit replies, “so was I, if you remember.” Episode I: The Dark Side of the Force, wastes no time emphasizing this fact. The wizened, wearied old wizard of Alec McGuiness is indeed portrayed as a wild sort of gun-slinger by an exuberant Ewan McGregor—all fiery and full of swagger—he is an engaging force of nature in and of himself, the personified promise of youth; nevertheless, us old-timers who watched the original in ’77 can already see how McGuiness will earn every single line on his face.
That recklessness comes to play in that explosive opening scene on Corsegan, where an impetuous young Obi-wan is being counseled in humility by a benign Master Yoda in the halls of power. As both the opening scroll and the Jedi Master inform us, clones from the frontiers of the outer-rim have been infiltrating the governments of many systems, fomenting discord and separatist movements, in a naked attempt by an unknown malefactor to break up the Galactic Republic. Only the Jedi with their Force powers have been able to detect them—but already the ancient order are being accused of over-reach, acting as judge, jury, and executioners. Yoda is advising a lighter touch to his young protégé, to work with the Senate and local governors, not in spite of them. (One wonders how much the film-makers were force-prophesying to the Jeb Bush administration against the dangers of invading Pakistan).
Yet in a scene that will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the rash impetuousness of youth, Obi-wan suddenly tunes out Frank Oz’s welcome and melodious voice, as he fixates on a minor government official who nodded as he walked them by. The scene has been memed to death ever since, but the suddenness with which Obi-wan suddenly draws his light-saber and strikes down the man is both shocking in its ruthlessness and galling in its bloodiness. Who is this murderous man? Can this be the same measured Obi-wan we all remember from the A New Hope? Is Obi-wan himself a clone?
The suspense hangs in the air for just a beat, the horror on Yoda’s face standing in for all of us—when straight-way the clone leaps back to his feet, revealing himself not to be a clone at all, but the holographic disguise of Darth Maul. Before anyone else can breathe, he ignites his signature dual light-saber, blocks the blasters of a pair of officers of the peace, and smashes his way through the glass into the hover-car traffic below. Obi-wan leaps after him. Soon we get our gravity-defying acrobatics across the city as Obi-Wan pursues him on foot, on hover-cars, onto X-Wings, and into outer-space, culminating in the crash-landing on Tatooine where Obi-Wan hires a field-guide in his manhunt in the form of a jovial, teenaged young farmhand—a gentle giant with a heart of gold—named Anakin Skywalker. By film’s end, affable Anakin has been taken under Obi-Wan’s wing as a Jedi apprentice on their way to saving Corsegan from direct assault by Clone War separatists.
The action escalates in such a satisfying crescendo that by the climax, the viewer will almost have forgotten that half a beat there are the beginning, wherein we were invited to truly contemplate the possibility that Obi-Wan is not only a clone, but worse, a cold-blooded killer. This alternative reading still has currency in many corners of the internet; like Return of the Jedi-is-just-all-a-fevered-dream-in-frozen-Han-Solo’s-head, there is an entire fan-theory that Obi-wan really was a clone all along, unwittingly playing his pre-programed part to destabilize the entire galaxy and give rise to the Empire.
And here’s the thing: unlike the Han Solo-dream-state theory, the Prequel trilogy actually allows for this very real possibility! Oh, not explicitly, there’s never any great pull-back-the-curtain reveal that Obi-Wan was an unwitting pawn of the Emperor all along; but here’s the genius stroke, such a reveal was never needed! This is an Obi-Wan who makes mistakes, who miscalculates; Obi-Wan never had to be the manipulated by the Empire, his own arrogance and recklessness helped them along—in ways unconscious and unstated, even to himself—without even realizing it. The most important leitmotif of Episode I is that not only that the Republic and the Jedi were destined to fail, but maybe they deserved to. Don’t get me wrong, the Empire and Sith is never painted as anything less than dastardly and vicious (the moral universe of Star Wars remains very simplistic); but the Republic is often little more than the lesser of two evils. Suddenly fans who had been quietly bugged for years at the way Obi-Wan’s force-ghost tells Luke, “I told the truth, from a certain point of view”, now realize that Obi-Wan had been engaging in precisely this kind of slippery, morally-grey logic his entire, compromised life. The unspoken assumption of the title The Dark Side of the Force is that Obi-Wan was actually the one under its influence all along.
The subtext becomes text in Episode II, Clone Wars Rising. The Clone Wars are in full swing, and in the barn-burning opener, Anakin and Obi-Wan are flying in on their Republic X-Wings in a daring raid against Clone War separatists. We recall from A New Hope when Obi-Wan tells Luke that his father Anakin was “a great pilot, and a good friend,” and now we get to see it firsthand. It is a resounding victory for the good-guys—in fact, it almost feels too easy, too bullying—which is why it is a genuine horror to watch a Republic star-destroyer blow up a retreating civilian escort. We are supposed to be horrified; we see it on the faces of Obi-Wan and Anaken, too; without them having to say it, we know, this is not who they thought they were, nor who they wanted to be or associated with (considering that the infamous Tehran and Abu Ghraib torture photos were still months away from being released at this point, the sequence now feels almost prophetic). These were the shades of grey that Star Wars had been missing. It also creates a space to explain how exactly the jovial, fun-seeking Anakin turned to the Dark Side.
Fascinatingly, it’s not the final light-saber duels or X-wing dog-fights that have stuck in the public imagination all these years, but the subdued moment when Darth Maul oh so casually pulls up a chair by Anakin during his stake-out in a diner. Now, there were apparently earlier character designs wherein Darth Maul was presented as a one-dimensional demonic figure, complete with devil-horns and red-and-black makeup and such. How much more intriguing, then, that Lucas actually remembered that when Yoda said “The dark side isn’t more powerful, only more seductive”, which means that the dark side really does need to be seductive!
It is a suave, charming, debonair Sith Lord who casually pulls up a chair across from Anakin—and perhaps most diabolically, the way he prevents this encounter from degenerating into a duel is that Maul appeals to Anakin’s innate sense of decency. “You do not wish to ruin these fine people’s meal, nor do I,” he begins, and in that moment Anakin’s sense of fair-play has been used against him, as he takes his hand surreptitiously off his saber.
In retrospect, the moment is particularly illuminating of the strengths of the prequel trilogy; because if a child watching them for the first time didn’t know any better, they might assume that hot-headed Obi-Wan is the one who would be targeted for seduction to the Dark Side. But Palpatine knows better: it is often not in our viciousness but often in our very goodness that evil appeals to us. In soothing words that us old-timers can already hear being spoken by Darth Vader years later in Empire, Darth Maul asks Anakin’s help in “ending this wasteful war”—but with this key difference: whereas Darth Vader wields his rhetoric like he wields the force, as a blunt instrument, Darth Maul uses his words like he does his light-saber, with a grace and surgical-precision that belies its fundamental viciousness. “You hear of wars and rumors of wars, but do not see what is knocking at your doors,” he intones in the now famous monologue that was legendary right from its first appearance in the trailers, “The Separatists assault Corsegan, and the Republic responds by massacring civilians at Hanna. You tell yourself that you must embrace the lesser of two evils, perhaps even become a monster to defeat monsters, but deep down you’re too descent to believe it, aren’t you. Instead, you are forced to face the fact that maybe you aren’t really fighting for the good guys at all. Oh, and don’t blame it all on the clones either, I know you’re far too decent for that, either. What, did you think the Clones planted the seeds of discord within the Republic? How easy it was, since that discord was already there from the beginning! The most simple of clones barely nudged them and soon the whole galaxy was plunged into chaos.
“Obi-Wan has taught you well, but he has still failed to impart unto you this one all-important lesson: There is no Dark Side of the Force, there is no Light Side of the Force, there is only the Force. Do you desire a better, more descent galaxy? Then you will have to force it.”
Anakin of course resists his overtures, but we already know that he is tempted; not just because we know what he becomes by Episode IV, but because we are almost persuaded as well (they almost came verbatim out of Washington D.C. in the lead-up to the invasion of Iran).
It is fitting, too, that Yoda provides the perfect counter-point. I mentioned earlier that there’s an alternative-history train-wreck of a Prequel series wherein Yoda has a fan-mandated light-saber duel—and we have to assume, I think, that such a battle was even story-boarded, that the execs at Fox cajoled, threatened, demanded, and begged for such a scene. Give credit to Lucas, then, that he understood that Yoda does not make sense as a fighter. “The Force is a powerful ally in battle,” he chuckles to Obi-Wan during a training session early in Episode II, “but greater still when there is no battle at all.”
(On a side-note, I can’t help but hear young Obi-Wan’s flippant, “That may be all well and good, but I’ll still take a good blaster any day,” a direct echo of Han Solo’s response to Kenobi in A New Hope. In that moment, you recognize that not only can Obi-Wan smile at Han because he was once just like him, but you can recognize that Han Solo has the same potential for wizened redemption that Obi-Wan once had; again, the genius of the film isn’t just in how it tells a great story on its own, but fleshes out our appreciation of the originals).
The pay-off comes off in the finale, as our heroes are surrounded and cornered by enemy infantry. Our heroes ready their light-sabers in order to fight their way desperately to their escape-craft at the other end of the bay. We in the audience even sense and fear that Anakin is about to unleash his anger and hatred against the clones—his Jedi fiancée Amadilla and his mentor Obi-Wan are both injured and trapped there beside him, and he cannot let anything happen to them, after all—that this is how he quite understandably unleashes his hatred and turns to the Dark Side. But then Master Yoda raises his arms and repeats once more “The Force is a powerful ally in battle, but greater still when there is not battle at all,” and a Force-bubble appears over them. In some of the most gorgeous cinematography of the series, the blaster onslaught strikes the Force-bubble like rain water on a window, melting peacefully all around them. Even Darth Maul, as he unleashes Force lightning from his finger-tips, sees the full force and fury of the Dark Side melt like splashing water before Yoda’s serenity. Cautiously pacing forward amidst John Williams’ swelling score, we watch each of the other Jedi turn off their light-sabers, one by one (Anakin last of all, in an intriguingly understated detail), till they board their cruiser, just moments before the self-destruct takes out the entire Star Destroyer.
The moment is filled with equal measures reassurance and melancholy—sadness because we older viewers still know that both Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side has merely been delayed, not avoided. But also reassurance, that the Light side was still stronger after all. A lesser film would probably have had Amadilla get cancer or a Force prophecy that she would die in childbirth or some such, and Anakin would cut a deal with the devil or some such to avoid it. Much more satisfying is this sense that Anakin turned because he was such a decent man, not in spite of it.
(On another personal note: I know I can’t have been the only one who, attending an anti-war protest after the film debut, actively wondered if I was not turning into the very viciousness I claimed to be opposing—just as the U.S. was turning into a monster to battle monsters; or more precisely, was becoming a monster to create monsters. A lesser-film would’ve just made it a blunt allegory for Jeb Bush’s insipid, “you’re either for me or against me”).
After the highs of Episodes I and II, Episode III: The Fall of the Jedialmost feels like a fait accompli, even a come-down. We learn that the Republic is not conquered by the Empire but merely transforms into it (the parallels to the U.S. Police State imposed by the short-lived military coup were almost too obvious for commentary; but then, sometimes real life is too obvious generally). Anakin unleashes his anger and hatred on Darth Maul when he threatens to seduce his wife to the Dark Side—essentially making the inverse choice as Luke in Return of the Jedi—thereby turning to the Dark Side himself. The Separatists become the Rebel Alliance. The Jedi are slaughtered as traitors when they waver in their allegiances too. And Obi-Wan, now war-weary and humbled by all he has been through, must defeat Anakin in mortal combat while Corsegan is bombarded under heavy orbital assault. It all felt so perfunctory, so predictable, save that at this point everything that happens has flowed so inevitably from the events of the previous two films that we don’t begrudge the inevitable tying up of loose ends as it bridges A New Hope.
Yet the plot is almost incidental; the real revelation all along is that this trilogy has not been about the Skywalkers at all, but about the humbling of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here is a man who has just watched his arrogance and recklessness help facilitate the fall of the Jedi Order and the collapse of the Galactic Republic. How does one grapple with that weight on his shoulders? How can he adequately atone for such catastrophic blunders? Is it any wonder he goes into self-imposed exile? When he drops off baby Luke with Owen Skywalker, and the latter tearfully demands of a faltering Obi-Wan what has happened to his brother—“You Jedi bastard, what happened to my brother!”—we in fact feel it just of him to demand that he leave and never greet his family against. The original trilogy thus becomes not just about the redemption of the Skywalker family, but of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Rare is the film series that ensconces itself into pop-culture as thoroughly as the original Star Wars trilogy has; even rarer is the film series that makes you look into yourself. On both our best days and our worst days we are as humbled and arrogant as Obi-Wan, as good-natured and vicious as Anakin. What makes us good also makes us vicious; what makes us beautiful also makes us ugly; what makes us strong also makes us weak. For giving us these much needed reminders, the Prequel trilogy deserves as much respect as the originals.