Revenge of the Sith

Dale Peck reviews the new Star Wars flick and it's predecessors in the New York Observer:

There has not, in fact, been a good Star Wars movie since the first one. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi...are rote elaborations of a story arc that was pretty thin to start with. Like the prequels of the last six years, they were made primarily to gratify a marketing line and, possibly, their creator’s ego. Yet, although their props and characters...ultimately seemed to have been designed with toy stores firmly in mind, Empire and Jedi still managed to convey a sense of Mr. Lucas’ childlike thrall to all things gadgety and goofy...

But the real loss in the immediate sequels was the cantankerous sexual triangle of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia that had given Star Wars a recognizable and genuinely compelling psychological frisson.

I've long claimed that sex cures pretty much anything. My motto: "Sex: Better than snake oil!" It sure helps a bad movie.

Peck' comment about a sexual triangle brings to mind the far superior movie, Starship Troopers. Based loosely on a Robert Heinlein book of the same name, the movie essays to portray a fascist society from the fascists' perspective. I fault Director Paul Verhoeven's politics for his equating the Federation with the United States, but he did do an excellent job. Whethor his characters proclaim Carthage Must be Eliminated or Klendathu Delenda Est, his tracking of the Federation's response to the attack on Buenos Aires was an earily accurate foreshadowing of the American response to the al Queda attack on the US.

Like Casablanca, Star Wars is a myth of resistance to an oppressive government. But where the earlier film tempered stoicism with cynicism (or perhaps vice versa), positing the necessity of right action despite enormous personal cost, the original Star Wars trilogy promulgates the comforting illusion that righteous rebellion is always an ennobling act.

Certainly the generation which saw Casablanca in theaters would agree with his characterization of right action despite personal cost, but I suspect they would have seen that as enobling.That can be seen as the reason the movie was and still is so popular.

People who do stupid things and fail are called fools; people who do stupid things and succeed are called visionaries; the people who buy into this stupid binary are called consumers.

OK: It's a cute throw away line.