All The Little Live Things' Jamie Tolagson confirms my belief that Revenge of The Sith is best described as, "Two and a half hours of my life that I'll never have back":

"I've struggled for years to articulate a few of the ideas you've thrown out so casually in your post. Especially the last bit about these sorts of entertainments being the first step for many kids in becoming interested in the structure of things like art, storytelling, music, whatever.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a worse place for kids to start their education in these things then the new Star Wars films.

My main problem with the new films is not their almost impossibly awful writing, acting and effects (baffling given the scale of the moviemaking machine Lucas has at his disposal). What bothers me is their almost complete lack of atmosphere, something I rarely hear critics commenting on. The films seem to take place in a virtual world devoid of natural light sources. The light source for most scenes seems to be, well, nothing. Everything seems modelled in 3 evenly lit dimensions, even the actors. Nothing is half seen, no background is (perish the thought!) out of focus. Nothing is alluded to. Everything is perfectly present, perfectly lighted. Everything is there, nothing left out, and therefore there is nothing left for the audience to do. Lucas has said that the making of the original films was a frustrating experience for him, because he couldn't make things look exactly how he wanted them to look. I guess it's never occured to him that letting the audience fill in some of his blanks was part of the power of those films.

I like the fact that artists can never quite make things look exactly how they want. I don't think perfection is a very stimulating state, for artist or viewer. The new films seem to prove this.

There are some wonderfully naturalistic, moody moments in the original films. Luke staring yearningly at the twin suns of his home planet, the lens of the camera zoomed in to the point of distortion on the suns, atmospheric haze distorting them as they drop below the horizon. John Williams' score is particularly beautiful here, and the imagery feels more like 'Lawrence of Arabia' then 'Buck Rogers.'

Luke, Ben and the droids cruising Mos Eisley in the landspeeder, everything covered in an authentic (because real) coating of dust and wear. A strong sense of a not too friendly place that has existed for a very long time (Ruined, incidentally, in the re-release, by the inclusion of several newish looking droids that look as out of place as a couple of G5 computers sitting in a thrift shop).

Yoda lifting Luke's fighter from the swamp, then expressing his doubt over Luke's faith in the force. A great scene, drenched in atmosphere and feeling. Yoda's facial expressions utterly convincing, even though he is only (gasp) a lowly puppet. Lucas seems especially proud of the fact that Yoda is now a computer character, not a puppet, but I would challenge anyone to find a scene with Yoda in the new films where he seems as real and believable as in this scene.

Luke fighting his way through the snow drifts of Hoth, half-hallucinating a vision of Ben that transforms into Han astride a snow beast. A scene so minimal and moody that the new Lucas would shriek in horror.

There is no silence in the new films. No moments of rest. No time to contemplate anything that is happening. You were right when you said the films are cultural phenomenons and therefore somewhat beyond criticism. The difference is, the original series was also a series of films. Good or bad films is up for debate, but they were films and could be discussed as such.

I believe people want to see things that were filmed. I don't care that Yoda is a muppet in the original films, because I know that a muppet exists, and that at one point in time a camera was aimed at that muppet and human beings worked that muppet and made some sort of magic happen with it.

Perhaps that is part of what we marvelled at in the original films, the fact that human beings were making something magical happen with puppets, props and toy models. Those tools are gone now, made passe by the advent of CGI, which, to my eyes looks like what it is: a graphic simulation of something that never happened. One could say that the original films effects never happened either, but that's not true. They did happen. Almost every effect that you see in those films happened at one time in real space, in the world we live in. The X-wings were filmed flying through that trench, and that trench existed. The ships were models, and the trench was only about twenty feet long, but that's not the point. I believe that human beings sense the difference between things that happened and things that did not. So when I say the new films lack atmosphere, I mean it in both senses of the word."
- posted by cjb @ 10:14 AM