4. The Dark Side
Though an emancipated slave who becomes a pillar of the community undergoes a tragic fall induced by seeking the power to save those he loves sounds like the basis for a particularly dark six hours of cinema, Trilogy IIs touch is feather light. It treats its gritty core like an embarrassing relative in a comedy of manners, hustling them from room to room to avoid any slights to the family namea terrible error in judgement, because it entails undervaluing that dishevelled rogue with the eight fingers on one hand (three of them Scotch). The best scene in Trilogy II is the massacre of the Tusken Raiders because it successfully conveys the emotional truth of a characters predicament. Though there are other moments of genuine sentiment, by and large it isnt a part of the production. This is the central flaw of Trilogy II and the reason for its critical failure. If George Lucas had pinned its (perhaps
his) heart to its sleeve, all else would have been forgiven. But to make a six hour long tragedy go down like mashed potatoes is a miscalculation of the highest orderthat it could even work, for one thing, but more pertinently, that the audience wanted something soft and bland to begin with. It was as if Lucas developed the idea that we'd choke on anything grittier; that Generation Ys tiny heads would explode in their seats if they saw something as confronting as the two smoking corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. But in fact it was what
everyone wantedwhether they could conceptualise it or not: we wanted to
care. And its impossible to care about a film which doesnt allow us to engage with human struggle; which filters out the characters plight to the extent that we can no longer empathise. Certainly it involves riskmaking people feel strongly about something risks provoking a strong negative reaction. But its a risk that all good art takes. And that's precisely what Trilogy I is.