Star Wars on Trial (47 page)

Well, Your Honor, there can be no denying the power of Kenobi's final words. As even Mr. Brin will have to admit, the very essence of luck is based on the chaotic, random nature of reality-which is quite possibly the most fundamental aspect of what we call reality-its very randomness and unpredictability. But to a master Jedi like Kenobi, who has learned to access the programming that defines the simulation he is in, there is no longer any such thing as luck-every aspect of the simulated reality is defined by the program. Kenobi is stating in stark, all-too-apparent words that the world must be a simulation-that being the only possible consequence of a world without luck-and of course using this so-elegant metaphor to let us, the viewers, know that our own world is exactly such a place. Any further examples would be redundant, and I don't wish to take any more of the Court's time on Mr. Brin's ridiculous stance. In fact, if I might add-

DROID JUDGE: You may not!

DAVID BRIN: That was very clever, but does not disprove the charge.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: What charge? You never made a charge-

DROID JUDGE: Order! Gentlebeings, restrain yourselves. Whether charges have been made or disproved must be left to the jury. Moving on-

DAVID BRIN: Your Honor, I'd like to call another witness.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Objection! One witness per charge!

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, you were allowed three witnesses on charge #3-!

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Is it my fault you bent the rules?

DROID JUDGE: I will grant the Prosecution another witness on this charge.

DAVID BRIN: Thank you, Your Honor. My next witness will demonstrate that Star Wars is more like almost anything else than it is like science fiction. I call science fiction writer Bruce Bethke.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Objection!

DROID JUDGE: On what grounds?

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Bethke's my witness. He can't testify for both of us. What, is the Prosecution gonna' stick a crappy goatee on him and pretend this is Bruce Bethke from the Mirror Universe? Or that a "transporter-beam accident" split him into his "light half" and "dark half"? Because-excuse the rivulets of sarcasm streaming from my chin-we all know that's what would happen in real science fiction....

DAVID BRIN: Your Honor, we are trying each charge separately. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a person of Mr. Bethke's caliber to serve as a Defense witness on one charge and as a witness for the Prosecution on another!

DROID JUDGE: Agreed. In the interests of justice, Mr. Bethke can retake the stand.

HERE IS A DEFINING MOMENT in Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it takes place quite early in the film. No, it's not the moment when Anakin Skywalker gives in to his anger, his pain and his desire to emulate Russell Crowe in Gladiator by using two lightsabers to slice off Count Dooku's head, only to then spend almost an entire thirty seconds afterward agonizing over the morality of beheading helpless prisoners. Rather, the scene I'm thinking of begins about another minute after that, when General Grievous's flagship takes a solid hit in the vitals and begins to plunge toward the surface of Coruscant, and R2-D2, the Jedi starfighters and pretty much everything else that isn't lashed down begins to fall toward the bow of the ship. During this scene, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Palpatine get to take some pratfalls and do some light heroics in an elevator shaft, as the direction of "down" undergoes several rapid changes-

But think this through with me. They are onboard a spacecraft. In orbit. Meaning, in free-fall in a vacuum, as will become evident three minutes later, when General Grievous is blown out the window by explosive decompression and does not immediately plummet to his doom. And yet, for the sake of the action sequence in the elevator, R2-D2 and everything else within the ship briefly behaves as if they have looked down, suddenly noticed the presence of gravity and gone rushing headlong toward that great big round planetthingy down there, in hopes that it will be their friend.

As I said, this is a defining moment. And what, precisely, does it define?

Well, if you still haven't guessed after watching Episodes I and II, what this scene is telling you to do is to take your mind off the hook. Don't just suspend your disbelief, pay it off and send it home for the day. Buy yourself a jumbo bucket of popcorn, kick back and enjoy the ride, and don't even bother trying to make sense of anything else that you might see or hear in the next 120 minutes. You have entered a world where style and spectacle trump physics and sense; where it's perfectly logical for space battleships to have keels and superstructures and trade broadsides at point-blank range; where of course the great starships float serenely through the void, accompanied by the throaty purring sound of dirigible engines. You have entered a place in the universe of fiction where combat spacecraft have wings and engage in swirling space dogfights like swarms of Hellcats and Zeros, where flak bursts and missiles leave smoky black trails through the vacuum and damaged pieces of ships fly away in nonexistent slipstreams, and where gravity works, but only when it's funny.

That's right, Jake. You're in Toontown now. And to be specific, you're in the charming little ethnic 'hood commonly called anime.

The original three Star Wars movies have often been described as a fantasy trilogy that borrows heavily from Japanese samurai movies. By now, this idea should not come as a surprise to anyone: even George Lucas admits the story line for the original Star Wars was strongly influenced by Akira Kurosawa's 1958 historical adventure, The Hidden Fortress. Live-action samurai-film themes and tropes abound in Lucas's original three movies, along with an abundance of simple visual styling cues such as the oversized helmets of the Death Star's crew in A New Hope, Lando Calrissian's boar's-tusk mask in Return of the Jedi, the grotesque face masks on the elaborate but apparently worthless body armor of the imperial stormtroopers (hey, even an Ewok can take one of these guys out), and Darth Vader's gravity-defying and wire-assisted sword fighting moves throughout the entire series. For that matter the basic setup of the original movie should seem completely familiar to anyone who's watched enough oriental action movies, or at least a few episodes of Tenchi Muyo or InuYasha. To wit: a restless young boy comes into possession of a magical sword, learns that he is actually the son of a great warrior and goes off with his aged sensei to confront an ancient evil and fulfill his terrible destiny.

Then again: from the critic's point of view, one of the truly wonderful things about the Star Wars universe is that the territory is so sprawling and borrows from so many sources that it's possible to find just about anything here, if you look hard enough. For example, the story of the original movie can also be summarized as, "A restless young boy chafes at life on the dusty old family farm, until he meets a wizard and is swept away to a wondrous land where he meets some munchkins, a tin man, a cowardly lion and Harrison Ford as the scarecrow."

When considering the latest three installments in the series, though, the comparison breaks down. Episodes I through III are undeniably big, bold and beautiful. They look and sound incredible and are like watching a century's worth of fantastic art suddenly spring to life. But while The Phantom Menace borrows plot devices from Kurosawa again, Anakin Skywalker is no Taketori Washizu, and Revenge of the Sith is no Throne of Blood. There is something missing in these later movies, and it's something important: a soul, a heart, a human factor, a je ne sail quoi.

I first began to suspect what the answer was while watching Attach of the Clones. Specifically, I was watching the arena scene on Geonosis and thinking of Ray Harryhausen. In the midst of admiring the intricate and fantastic architecture of the arena, and mentally comparing the set, the rampaging beasts and the army of skeletal droids to similar scenes in earlier movies, it suddenly stuck me: none of this is real.

Not Real real, of course; that would be ridiculous. But not even "real" in the sense of being a miniature set with animated models. The entire thing-the arena, the Geonosians, the monsters, the droids and even most of the "human" characters-were all just CGI creations, perhaps adapted from scans of physical models, but with no objective existence anywhere except inside the memory of Industrial Light and Magic's animation rendering system. I was not watching a movie. I was watching the biggest, best, most expensive and most beautiful cartoon ever made.