Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a 206-minute special-effects, eye-candy romp with wonderful but readily predictable crowd-pleasing plot developments.
Twenty-eight years-worth of loose ends are tied up neatly, if not a little surgically, but what the film lacks in suspense and subtlety it makes up for in gobsmacking audiovisual “wow” factor. Like it or lump it, this is space opera at its finest (happily rescued from category of space pantomime by the near complete deletion of Jar Jar Binks).
A long time ago in a university not so far away, one of my astrophysics tutors explained a flaw in George Lucas’s special-effects arsenal. He told me that he had measured the rotation rate of the galaxy seen in the background in the final scene of The Empire Strikes Back . After doing a few calculations, he had deduced that the planets in the rim of that galaxy, if it were real, would have to be travelling at nearly the speed of light.
Interesting and probably true, but noting this failure of attention to scientific accuracy seems a little overzealous when one considers that the same film opens with a guy called Luke Skywalker riding an arctic kangaroo over the surface of an ice planet shortly before being attacked by a killer alien yeti.
It is a simple feat to deconstruct science fiction from the safety of a job firmly grounded in science fact. Easy to be the sort of person who scoffs at the implausibility of faster-than-light travel or conveniently anthropomorphised aliens. Doubly so since, over the years, it has become fashionable to be cynical about the Star Wars franchise.
We congratulate ourselves on not buying into the cosmic hype and on being progressively less impressed with each new episode that flings itself upon the screens, and Episode III has been received no differently. Post-Cannes, there were acidic comments about the awkwardness of the dialogue and the quality of the acting, and as it hit London’s West End, there were further recriminations.
In the cinema, the seat next to me was occupied by a kid apparently on his own - no friends or family in tow. It was difficult to judge his age but he was young enough not to be self-conscious about going to get a booster cushion from the cinema ushers to help him see over the haircut of the guy in front or to repeatedly and excitedly ask us for the time as he waited for the lights to go down and for the curtains to part. He was young enough, too, to allow a low gasp of “wow” to escape as fleets of spacecraft filled the opening screen.
Now, if you’re the sort of person who hangs with the Cannes glitterati or indeed goes around pausing your DVD and holding rulers up to the TV, then this film is probably not for you. But if you’re anything like me, then look forward to joining the kids with the booster cushions and the dropped jaws in wide-eyed appreciation.
Kevin Fong is a physiology lecturer at University College London and co-director of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.