Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  The final two minutes of the film consist of a dialogue-free visual sequence showing the clone army heading off to war and the wedding of Anakin and Padmé. The clone army sequence features the first full presentation of “The Imperial March” in the prequel trilogy, something Williams had been intending to save for the appearance of Darth Vader. His original scoring of this moment in the film has no reference to that famous theme at all, relying instead on a variation of music associated with Count Dooku and the clones. But apparently, when they recorded the cue, Lucas was surprised not to hear “The Imperial March,” and so Williams rewrote the sequence in his hotel room after work and then recorded the new version as an insert. A small snippet of Williams’s original version can be heard in the music video for “Across the Stars” in the final moments of the piece.

  Themes that make a return appearance in this film include the Main Theme, the Force Theme, and Yoda’s Theme, as well as the aforementioned “Imperial March.” Shmi’s Theme makes two haunting reappearances in the score, first when Anakin discusses the nightmares he’s been having about her with Obi-Wan, and then again when he is reunited with his mother in the Tusken camp. Surprisingly, considering how strongly the score for The Phantom Menace relied on it, Anakin’s Theme only appears once, when he sees Padmé again for the first time in ten years. Also, the Emperor’s Theme is only heard once, at the end of the film, in the single scene explicitly featuring Darth Sidious. The Trade Federation march is heard during the reveal of the clone army on Kamino, which is a curious choice, since the clones are, at least on the surface, the enemies of the Trade Federation. I suspect that placement was at the direction of Lucas. Interestingly, Jar Jar’s theme is nowhere to be heard … Of course, lots of other themes are reused in the edited battle music for reel 6, but none of that was actually composed for this film.

  * * *

  Attack of the Clones, produced for $115 million and cumulatively grossing $654 million, was released on May 16, 2002. It was considered by some as being superior to The Phantom Menace but was also greeted by mixed reviews.

  RAY MORTON

  The script has a number of issues. The nature of the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin isn’t clear. At one point, Anakin tells Obi-Wan that he is the closest thing Anakin has to a father. However, we never see any example of that allegedly close relationship—mostly we see Obi-Wan criticize and correct Anakin and Anakin resents Obi-Wan and push[es] back against his instruction. So, it’s not clear where these two really stand with one another. Also, Anakin is shown to have a close relationship with Palpatine—he goes to the Chancellor with his problems and Palpatine encourages Anakin and predicts great things for him. This relationship seems to be more of a father/son relationship than the one Anakin has with Obi-Wan. How did this relationship develop? Isn’t it unusual that the leader of the entire galaxy has time to chit-chat with a lowly apprentice on a regular basis? Is Obi-Wan aware of this relationship? (He does not seem to be.) If he is aware, what does he think of it—is he fine with it? Is he jealous? Is he concerned that someone else has this much influence over his Padawan? None of this is clear.

  The love scenes between Anakin and Padmé are really, really terrible. Really. They are the Jar Jar Binks of this movie. The notion that someone as smart and capable and experienced as Padmé would entrust her position in the Senate to a dopey character like Jar Jar is simply not believable. And the notion that this same dopey character is permitted to make a proposal that ultimately brings down the Republic is so ludicrous and unbelievable that one almost suspects Lucas was deliberately trolling the audience by including it. There’s an odd, pervy vibe to some of the material in this script—Padmé getting the hots for a man whom she first met when he was a nine-year-old boy; Anakin’s constant leering at and suggestive remarks to Padmé; Klieg Lars buying an enslaved woman and then marrying her. It’s all just a bit … yucky.

  As was the case with The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones contains a number of prequel elements. Meeting the Lars family at the old moisture farm is a reasonable enough nod to the original trilogy, although the entire group seems passive when it comes to rescuing Shmi, a woman they all profess to love. In Episode I, the notion that Threepio was created on Tatooine was ridiculous. In Clones, the notion that he is still there and is working as some kind of farmer is equally ludicrous. And the fact that he is working on the very same farm he will return to in the future stretches credulity to the breaking point. It also raises the question of why Owen doesn’t recognize Threepio when he turns up again years later—just how many fussy English butler droids does a backwater moisture farmer on Tatooine run into in the course of his life?

  * * *

  Indeed, Lucas’s idea that the stormtroopers we saw in the original trilogy and Boba Fett are all clones of the same guy is certainly novel, but it somehow makes them all retroactively less interesting. In a sense, this makes the Star Wars universe feel significantly smaller.

  RAY MORTON

  The backstory relating to the ordering of the clone army from the facility on Kamino is confusing, mostly because it involves a character (the late Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas) we have never met and events we have never witnessed. We’re never really sure if Sifo-Dyas was a real person or if he was just Palpatine in disguise (the script hints at both), and so when Obi-Wan and the Kaminoans are discussing it all, we never get a clear understanding of what they’re talking about. Along the same lines, it’s hard for us to figure out what Dooku is doing, because none of the action involving the Separatist movement is shown on-screen. Instead, the characters just talk about it, and since they’re talking about things we never see, it’s hard to follow (movies are a visual medium—if you want people to get it, you’ve gotta show, not tell). We eventually learn that it was Nute Gunray from the Trade Federation that invaded Naboo in Menace who put the hit on Padmé, but we never learn why. We assume it was in revenge for repelling the invasion and having him arrested all those years ago, but this is never stated for sure. And so the incident that kicks off the movie remains vague.

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  (cohost, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)

  Lucas always had it in his mind that the ideal movie was around two hours long. James Cameron talks about it on the Aliens audio commentary, when discussing the studio-imposed deleted scenes for the film. Basically, before megaplexes, most theaters only had one or two screens—and if you kept a movie around two hours, you could have an additional showing a day. So, literally, to keep a movie around two hours could mean 20 percent of your box office. And Cameron just shrugs it off, “I totally understand.” But I’m like, “What are you talking about?!?! They cut out the most important scene in the movie!” Lucas always believed that logic wholeheartedly, but these movies needed to be longer, and he had the material to fill it. You read the scripts, storyboards, even deleted scenes—Lucas had no shortage of ideas. Every episode in the entire eight seasons (seven aired) of The Clone Wars was based on abandoned concepts for the prequels. Eight seasons. And it’s a shame we lost those. Even the deleted scenes for Episode II would’ve gone a long way to flesh out Padmé’s character, and the gradual fall of the Republic into Palpatine’s larger plan. Instead, whole subplots are reduced to one line. Fans pick up the intricacies through books, comics, and watching behind-the-scenes material, but for the general public a lot of these nuances are lost.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  Episode II ends with two paths, but you pretty much know which is going to be taken. They may go in different directions, but they are going to end up at the same place. If you do that successfully, you can’t wait to get to the third episode in terms of storytelling. If you care about Hayden and Natalie, then you really can’t wait. It’s like when you have been in a car crash or something like that, there is a moment that is quite extraordinary. If you have ever been in an out-of-control car, it’s absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. The senses, the experiences, the images that come to you; then there is a moment that you know
when you are going to hit the wall that becomes unbearable. That’s the painful, physical side of it in terms of life and living and things like that, I think that is the fun part about Episode II if you really like them.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  My hope was that Episode III wouldn’t be too intense for kids. It’s grimmer, but in a Star Wars context, which means it’s obviously not horrible. It may be emotionally more difficult, but I went there in The Empire Strikes Back. I was very nervous for kids about, “I am your father,” and then cutting Luke’s hand. I thought, “Have I gone over the line here?” I discussed it with people, basically many psychologists, and came to the conclusion that it was okay. I’ll probably be pushing the envelope a little on this one, but if kids see all six films, they will discover everything gets redeemed and everything is okay. Over the course of the six films, there are scary moments and it’s tough that I’ll have to end Episode III on a scary moment, but that is the story. There’s not much I can do about it. For parents, if a child does have a problem with the next one, there is hope in it—in the sense that there will be all these babies. So, a parent can say to a child—if the child hasn’t seen the other ones—“Don’t worry, the babies grow up and save their father.”

  RICK MCCALLUM

  You know what’s going to happen and it’s not good. He’s a nice boy. But you know, you see it at work, you see it every moment of your life. You see it when you go out driving, you see it in a movie. When you see someone who’s an awful person, you know he’s not awful all the time. There is somebody out there who loves him. It’s really interesting when you know somebody and you can’t help them. They have a destiny and they are going to do it and you want to shake them. Even if you can get to them, it still doesn’t help.

  NATALIE PORTMAN

  As an actor, when you know the end, it’s inevitably in your mind. But you try to keep it out, because as a human being in real life, you don’t know how or where things will end, and so to act that way you have to pretend like you don’t know, even though you have read the full script and know what will happen in Episode III—and even though you know that there are three stories that come after you stop.

  RAY MORTON

  The script has too many endings—there are two rescues (Jedi rescuing Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Anakin; Yoda and the clones rescuing the Jedi), an escape (Dooku from the arena), a chase (Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padmé chasing Dooku), two lightsaber duels (Obi-Wan and Anakin versus Dooku; Dooku versus Yoda), and another escape (Dooku from the duels). The climax just goes on and on and on until we’re completely exhausted.

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  Watching the finished film, I was blown away. Seeing my face in a Star Wars movie just made me very self-aware the whole time. It makes you realize what George created visually. You can read it on the page, but there’s nothing like seeing the detail on the screen. I had no idea what so much of it would look like. I remember when I first read the script, I was really excited. I thought the story had so much promise. There are more humanistic elements in this film, more human interaction. It’s far more dialogue-intensive, as it relates to building relationships—especially in terms of the scenes between Natalie and myself. The fight scenes put anything else you’ve seen in a Star Wars film to shame. And Ewan does a wonderful job of bringing Obi-Wan closer to Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan.

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  SITH HAPPENS: REVENGE OF THE SITH

  “I have waited a long time for this moment, my little green friend. At last, the Jedi are no more.”

  Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was the culmination of the trilogy and the final cinematic entry in George Lucas’s vision for the Skywalker Saga, providing the story that would theoretically tie all six films together by chronicling Anakin Skywalker’s full transformation into Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, and his final lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi. This alone promised that it would be the darkest entry in the first six films of the series.

  RAY MORTON

  (senior editor, Script magazine)

  Revenge of the Sith is the best movie in the prequel trilogy. This is because it’s the one that finally tells the story the trilogy set out to tell—the transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. This is what we’ve been waiting to see since this trio began and this makes it the most satisfying of the prequels as well. However, it’s also a movie with some significant issues.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  (producer, Revenge of the Sith)

  I’m not going to be defensive about it, because I know there’s a large group of people out there, especially hardcore fans, who don’t like the first and second films. To be honest, and it’s a very interesting thing, when George and I were starting to do Young Indy—which was really set up to be the template for the production techniques that we were going to use to make the new Star Wars movies—George began to tell me what Episode I would be like. He warned me, “We’re going to get killed for this, because this isn’t the film our hardcore base wants to see.” They wanted Episode III. And, as I’ve said, the story they wanted to see first is the third film we made.

  RAY MORTON

  In contrast to his last-minute scripting of Attack of the Clones, Lucas began working on the screenplay for Revenge of the Sith while Clones was still in production. His jumping-off point was a speech written for Obi-Wan in Return of the Jedi that was cut from the final release. In the speech, Obi-Wan tells Luke that after Anakin turned evil, Obi-Wan confronted him. They fought and Vader ended up falling into a “molten pit” and getting so horribly injured that he had to be permanently encased in a robotic life-support system that would keep what was left of him alive. Lucas knew this sequence would be the climax of the third movie and so constructed his narrative to move inexorably toward it.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  I think, deeply, that the fans hoped Episode II would be an extension or the start of Episode III, and they wanted Episode III to be even further down the line. But, at the same time, this was a story George wanted to tell for a long time. And it’s the saga of this family. He was particularly interested in creating a new audience that was young. Remember, however people want to rewrite history, that the first three films were pretty badly reviewed when they first came out. Everybody said the acting was appalling and wooden. Not much has changed, but there’s a whole other audience. There are kids who saw Episode I when they were eight or nine years old, who were then fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and that’s a very serious potent group of people who love Star Wars.

  This movie was never a tricky task, because we always knew what Episode III was going to be. For hardcore fans, it’s the film that everybody wanted Episode I to be and, at the same time, we knew that we had to, in a very brief time, set up everything that happens in Episodes IV, V, and VI. We also had to take the cumulative ideas from I and II, of where Anakin is and what he’s becoming, and figure out what pushes him to the dark side. The biggest problem was: How do we show Anakin’s turn dramatically in two hours? What’s the real reason for his transformation, that makes him do the turn? But it wasn’t a major thing we fretted over. It really is part of the overall structure that George had set out thirty years ago. We kind of knew where the film was going and what we needed to do.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, Revenge of the Sith)

  It would be a problem if I were following the market testing and all that sort of thing. On the first film they said, “Oh, you can’t do this, this is going to be a suicidal mission, you’re doing More American Graffiti.” My reaction is, “Great, I’m going to do More American Graffiti, I’m doing something that is basically against the marketing wishes of what you would normally do in a film like this.” I needed to tell a story and in the end, if you watch all six movies, that’s the way I see this. I see this as one movie in six parts, and if you see it from the beginning to the very end, where the father is redeemed by the children, it all works. But you have to accept the middle, and the
middle is pretty grim.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  Revenge of the Sith is total mayhem and destruction. And, of course, it’s a complete and utter and sad fall from grace for Anakin. That’s really the basics of what Episode III is about. The heart of the story is the downward spiral of Anakin—how people can be so blind to what it is they do and what effect it has on other people. But dark is good. Darkness is illuminating. Sometimes you have to go pitch black to be able to see anything. That’s what happens with Anakin. Because, remember, at the end of the day he does fulfill his destiny. At the end of the day he chooses the dark side, but he ultimately does redeem himself.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  It’s just the nature of the story. I knew where this was going all along, that in order to connect the story up, you have to go to a rather dark place, because in this one Anakin goes bad. As a result, everybody around him feels the tragedy and obviously IV, V, and VI are bringing him out of that tragedy.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  (author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)

  Since we know what will occur in the time period after this film is set, Revenge of the Sith feels like a grand, tragic opera, a near Godfather-style epic about the fall of a good man and a noble society. There is an epic, unstoppable sweep to the film that carries the audience away. In bringing about Anakin’s downfall, the film ties in visually and thematically with the beginning era of the saga, A New Hope. So, the film’s relentless drive makes it powerful (and indeed tragic), the theme (giving away ideals for security) speaks powerfully to the culture that produced this art, and Star Wars fans got to see everything tied up in a neat, if sad, package. The film’s final moments, with the return to Tatooine and the double suns, is tragic, nostalgic, and weirdly hopeful at the same time.