Jason F.C. Clarke

The acronym for Revenge of the Sith is “ROTS.” I just wanted to point that out.

So I saw Lucas’s latest tour de Force. For the record, I hadn’t planned to see it for at least a few weeks, being entirely unenthusiastic about the prospect. But as it turned out, my girlfriend was seeing it (not necessarily voluntarily) with the rest of her lab at grad school on opening day; and since I would have found it annoying for her to have seen the film and me not to, I decided to get it over with.

My conclusion? The line I’ve been giving people is, “I don’t like the storyline Lucas went with for the prequels, but if they’d all been like this movie, I wouldn’t hate him so much.” Faint praise, I know. The dialogue is painful–Lucas’s ear isn’t tin, it’s titanium. Several scenes–in particular, anything between star-crossed lovers Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman)–consist entirely of the worst, hoariest cliches in the book.

But there are a number of exciting scenes, and I enjoyed Ian McDiarmid’s hammy-but-effective portrayal of Palpatine, the chancellor and Sith Lord who would be Emperor. But before he can get there, he has to seduce Anakin to the Dark Side, which he does in fairly unconvincing fashion (but for that, I blame the writing and portrayal of Anakin, rather than anything to do with Palpatine).

I’m just glad this whole prequel mess is over. Now, if the united Star Wars Nation can just convince Darth Lucas to release a “Star Wars Classic Edition” DVD set, consisting of the same versions of the original films as seen in the pre-Special Edition VHS set that came out around 1995-6 (or the laserdiscs from the same era), I’ll be all set.

Personally, I’ve always felt that Lucas made a number of wrong decisions from the very beginning. First, the prequels have no Han Solo character. Han was the most human character in the prequels, the Everyman who had no supernatural powers (a la Luke) and wasn’t royalty (a la Leia). He was easy to identify with, and was played by Harrison Ford, an actor with a gift for playing a regular guy in strange worlds. But most of the major characters in the prequels are Jedi–that is, sorcerers and superheroes–so we can hardly identify with them.

Worse, the ostensible protagonist of the films is Anakin Skywalker, a character who, as we know ahead of time, will grow up to be an intergalactic Hitler. I think this was a big mistake. It would have been much wiser to make Obi-Wan Kenobi the hero of the films, and use Anakin as a buddy-turned-antagonist. The prequels should have been about Obi-Wan’s failure, not Palpatine’s boring political machinations and Anakin’s predictable, yet still unconvincing seduction to the Dark Side.

Then there’s Yoda. In the original films, Yoda serves as the archetype of the wise old master, the hermit who lives out in the middle of nowhere. The idea with that sort of character is this: if your instructors have taught you all they can, but think you show promise of more, they send you off to the 900-year-old hermit.

Fine. But what Lucas is asking me to believe is that at the spring chicken age of 880, the Aged Master isn’t out on the mountaintop, but serving as Dumbledore in the School for the Force-Sensitive. I don’t buy it–enjoyable as the Yoda fighting scenes were, I don’t buy it.

Worse, the prequels are loaded with coincidences. It seems everyone in the universe has met R2D2 and C-3PO, despite Kenobi’s line in Star Wars that he doesn’t “recall ever owning a droid” (a line that is now yet another lie, or at the very least, a misleading truth–he knows who Artoo and Threepio are, unless he’s had his memory wiped as well). Oh, and…

(spoiler warning)

…Chewbacca’s met Yoda. Right.

(end spoiler)

As I’ve gotten older, I have to admit I’ve become a bit less enamoured of Star Wars as a whole, including the original films. Back in 1999, science fiction author David Brin wrote an article called “Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists” which I think makes some pretty good points (though, to be fair, I’m not as fond of his Lord of the Rings critique).

Star Wars has been called “science fantasy”–but it’s mostly just fantasy. As several reviewers have pointed out, we’re dealing with a civilization that can cross galaxies in days, but apparently doesn’t possess ultrasound technology. For all its galactic politics and incredible technology, the world of the Republic is no more evolved than that of ancient Rome–and no more morally complex than a Saturday morning cartoon.

That’s fine for a series of fun movies intended to evoke the spirit of the old matinee serials (and you’ll note no one ever harps on the Indiana Jones movies). But for something that has grown to such enormous, bloated cultural significance as the Star Wars franchise, even a fan like me has to admit it’s a bit disconcerting.

In college, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf–or more specifically, on what happens to the narrative structure of the poem when it is adapted as Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, and then when that novel is adapted into the film The 13th Warrior.

The 13th Warrior was a huge flop, and so far, Troy, King Arthur, Alexander, and Kingdom of Heaven haven’t exactly been doing gangbusters. Of the huge sword-wielding epics, only Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings have warranted this slavish studio attention to these sort of films.

Now there are no less than two Beowulf films coming out this year. One, which supposedly comes out in October, I hadn’t heard anything about until today. Beowulf and Grendel stars Gerard Butler and Sarah Polley, so it isn’t necessarily going to be a B-film. From the photos and information on the site, it looks like it could be good. On the other hand, after a look through the site’s discussion forums, it looks like there may have been some significant changes to the story, so we’ll see. Having tried my hand at adaptating literary works to film, I have sympathy for the screenwriter.

It also seems there’s some question whether the film will even be released in the U.S.–here’s hoping. It may only get a limited release, but fortunately, I live in Boston, so there’s a good chance it will play here.

But that’s not all. Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman are also working on a script for a Beowulf film, currently scheduled for release in 2007. There are a lot of rumors floating around on the Internet, so I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t, but allegedly the film will be animated.

Beowulf’s been having a pretty good run lately. I’m very fond of the “HBO Animated Epic” version of the story–a half-hour animated short that features Joseph Fiennes and Derek Jacobi as voices, among others.

I still may try my hand at some Beowulf-related writing, someday. Technically, I already have–but good luck tracking that down.

As for all these other films–why did Lord of the Rings and Gladiator succeed where the others failed? Well, in the case of Gladiator, I think Russell Crowe–an actor at the height of his popularity–helped an awful lot. Also, the story, while not exactly Shakespeare, had a lot of visceral, entertaining aspects–it was essentially the modern equivalent of watching real gladiatorial combat.

As for Lord of the Rings, well, I think those films are their own deal entirely. They’re well-made films with a great cast; they deserve their acclaim without need for talking about trends or audience psychology.

As for Troy and King Arthur–I think these films did themselves a disservice by neglecting the mythological or supernatural elements of the stories they were based on. Excalibur did well in 1981, so it’s not as if audiences don’t want to watch Arthurian films. As for Troy, I think avoiding the mythological elements was a bit cowardly on the part of the filmmakers. They wanted to make one of those sword-and-sandal epics from the fifties and sixties, and that’s exactly what they did–made a sword-and-sandal epic from the fifties and sixties. Being honest to the supernatural element, or finding an interesting and compelling way of making those elements work and be relevant to modern viewers, would have made for a braver and more contemporary adaptation. Just my two cents.

Progress continues on “Advanced Operators.” I’ve got three or four other stories pounding at the door of my mind, demanding to be written, but AO is filling up the creative room, floor to ceiling, door to window, like an overfed shoggoth. Nothing else gets written until this beast is finished.

But Jack Sheed wants in, let me tell you.

I’m still going back and adding scenes, plot points and character development to AO (how much of the language of fiction writing has been replaced by that of film?–or perhaps they’re both in debt to drama). Thus, making forward progress has been difficult. But now I have only one major aspect of the plot to figure out, and once that’s done, the rest of the story should (in theory) unfold fairly easily.

In other news, finally decided on a screenplay for my screenwriting class. I’m going to do an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.” The story has been filmed before, as a 1970 teen horror flick starring Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee. But that movie has little in common with Lovecraft’s story other than a few names.

I’m sure there are many screenplays out there based on “Dunwich”–independent filmmakers love him, for some reason–but I’m going to write my own anyway. My plan is to do it Lovecraft-by-way-of-Hammer Films (similar to Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow). The protagonist will be, in true Lovecraftian fashion, a middle-aged scholar. Perhaps, after Guillermo Del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness comes out (and I sincerely hope he sets it in the thirties), Lovecraft will become a hot property in Hollywood, as Stephen King was in the eighties and Jane Austen in the early nineties.

As usual, I’ve already envisioned a movie trailer. I tend to enjoy movie trailers as much as (if not more than) the films they advertise A few of my favorites are the trailer for Sleepy Hollow and the teaser trailers for Gladiator and Star Trek: First Contact. The latter two benefited greatly from music borrowed from other (better) films–Basil Poledouris’s soundtrack for Conan the Barbarian and James Horner’s soundtrack for The Wrath of Khan, respectively (for my trailer, I’d swipe the music from Sleepy Hollow).

In my trailer, we see a montage of brief, bizarre images from the story, such as a huge man in a trenchcoat trying to check out a book at a library, a meadow with a great swath of crushed grass, and a close-up of a worried-looking man in front of a crumbling rustic house on a misty New England morning. At the end of the trailer the screen goes dark, and we hear the climactic dialogue of the story: an unearthly voice crying “F-f-f-father!” followed by (in a horrific roar) “YOG-SOTHOTH!” Then, in thin orange letters, the words “YOG-SOTHOTH IS THE GATE” fade in and out, followed by “YOG-SOTHOTH IS THE KEY”; and then the date the movie comes out.

In class, we have to “pitch” the story, as we would to a group of producers. Since one of the scenes in Lovecraft’s story takes place at Harvard’s Widener Library, where I’ve worked for nearly eight years, I began my pitch by describing the scene as if I’d actually witnessed it. It worked well enough–though when I got to the part about the guy dissolving into a ichorous mass of putrescence, with tentacles visible beneath his coat, everyone became a bit incredulous.