A Good, Florid, Crushing Review of a Star Wars Movie
Via Marginal Revolution I found a wonderfully scathing review of Revenge of the Sith in The New Yorker. It is a florid style, and communicates at least three things to us: 1. Revenge of the Sith is a silly movie. 2. Some names are well chosen and some are not, and skill at choosing is an indication of the worth of the story. 3. Striking sentences ought to be mixed with tamer ones, to extract their full effect. Too many punch lines in a row is like a drink of 180 proof whisky. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith…. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every single person watching the movie. Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse…. The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion…. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever… spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger?