USA

Wings (1927)

André Crous

Wings was the first film to receive a Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards, but just maybe the awards show was created especially to honour this remarkable World War I film.

WingsUSA
4.5*

Director:
William Wellman
Screenwriters:
Hope Loring
Louis D. Lighton
Director of Photography:
Harry Perry

Running time: 145 minutes

More than 90 years after it was first released, Wings continues to impress in large part thanks to the majesty of its aerial combat scenes. The film was directed by William Wellman, who turned 31 towards the end of production and had served as a fighter pilot in the French Foreign Legion during World War I a decade earlier. This experience in the air clearly came in very useful during the shoot, as the most exciting moments all take place high above the earth.

In staging and shooting his “dogfights”, Wellman anticipated what Steven Spielberg would do more than 40 years later in Duel: To impress upon the viewer how fast an object is moving, it needs a background against which its velocity can be made visible. In the case of planes, that means a clear blue sky won’t do, and Wellman allegedly waited days – sometimes weeks – for clouds to form. The results speak for themselves as the camera perfectly captures both the speed and the motion, from a soaring take-off to a tumble through the clouds.

We start somewhere in middle America, where the carefree Jack (played by the clean-cut Buddy Rogers), still very much a boy rather than a man, is the connecting tissue between two separate love triangles. His neighbour, Mary (Clara Bow), whom he considers a friend, likes him as more than just a friend. But he only has eyes for Sylvia, who, in turn, is in a secret relationship with the rich, soft-spoken and socially awkward David (Richard Arlen). When Jack and David heed the call to enlist in the army in 1917, they receive training as combat pilots and, before long, are sent off to the battlefields of Europe.

A title card informs us of the “mighty maelstrom of destruction” that the war turned into over its four years of combat, and the film depicts this apocalyptic vision with vivid scenes of violence. Mortality hits home for the two small-town boys at their training camp when an aviator they just met and will be sharing a tent with crashes overhead.

Wings is at its best during the action scenes, while the romance is as shallow as one would expect from a 1920s production. However, the virtuosity of Wellman and cameraman Harry Perry is not limited to the skies. The battle scenes are equally impressive as we can see and feel the enormity of events.

When the French town of Merval is bombed, one of the explosives hits a church, whose bell tower flies straight off and comes crashing down on an automobile. The trench warfare includes explosions all over that make it seem like the earth is opening up and swallowing the armed forces whole. At another point, as reserves are marching across the countryside, another explosion sends the men and their limbs flying over the fields. Elsewhere, a tank drives across soldiers as bombs go off and others are stabbed with rifles. It is all a ghastly sight but brings the horror of war home, even to a viewer a century later.

The film was recently restored to 145 mint-condition minutes that also include orange colouring to add emphasis for fire, including gunfire. One can easily see how it came to be that the Oscars handed out its first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture (then called the award “for Outstanding Picture”) to Wings, but given the scale of the achievement and, especially, its contemporaries, one might start wondering whether, perhaps, the Oscars were established because Wings simply had to receive its due recognition.

The serious drama on the battlefield is counterweighted, however, by the simplistic melodrama of the duelling romances. One particularly egregious scene takes place at a nightclub in Paris, which starts with a famous track-in across (and seemingly through) a series of tables and bar patrons and ends on Jack, who is already hammered. Mary, who is no wallflower and has already survived at least one major bombing raid in France while serving as a wartime ambulance driver, finds him there but almost immediately collapses into an emotional mess. All of this is quite in keeping with the roles assigned to male and female characters at the time but feels at odds with what appears to be an authentic portrayal of real life on the battlefield.

Although struggling with some overly theatrical acting, Wings more than makes up for its melodramatic lapses with stunningly rendered battles scenes both on land and in the air. From spectacular long shots that fill our field of vision with scenes of mayhem in motion to singular moments of grandeur, like the immolation of an airship depicted 10 years before the infamous Hindenburg disaster, this is a film that could reach its ambition because the art of filmmaking had come so far. This production would not have been possible again for a very long time, as the microphone would have greatly hindered the camera’s movements, and even today, it is worth reminding ourselves what was already possible without special effects in 1927.

Black Panther (2017)

André Crous

Not Ryan Coogler’s best work, but Black Panther’s mixture of big-budget special effects, intimate mythology and a yearning for what might have been is much needed.

Black PantherUSA
4*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriters:
Ryan Coogler
Joe Robert Cole
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 135 minutes

Oakland, California, is where the revolutionary Black Panther Party was born in 1966. It is also where Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose first two features – Fruitvale Station and Creed – are modern-day masterpieces, starts his superhero movie adaptation of the famous Marvel Comics character, in 1992, before moving to the present. But in a majestic, visually striking opening sequence, he tells the story of Wakanda, a nation hidden in the heart of Africa and endowed with limitless sources of the supermetal vibranium that have ensured the country’s financial survival and technological prowess despite its isolation.

The presentation of this history lesson calls to mind the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but the work of Coogler’s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is much more sophisticated, as we appear to swing through time in an unbroken take whilst time unspools in the valleys below. Connecting Wakanda with Oakland is also the job of the camera, as it eventually swoops into the opening scene over a basketball court and settles on a young boy, who looks up and sees a space ship hovering above his apartment block. The links that Cooger and Morrison establish between past and present, poverty and technology, are a continual source of wonder because it is unusual to see this level of care taken in constructing a superhero film.

The titular Black Panther, king of the Wakandans, is played by Chadwick Boseman. Also known as T’Challa, he is the son of the former King T’Chaka, portrayed by South African veteran actor John Kani, and South Africa features everywhere in Black Panther. Not only is Wakandan really the Xhosa language (Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue and the second-most widely spoken language in the country), but one of the story’s main villains, Ulysses Klaue, is a white South African whose speech drips with an Afrikaans accent. Finally, the name T’Chaka is, of course, an unmistakable reference to one of the greatest military leaders the world has ever seen: Shaka, king of the Zulus.

But just as Shaka’s heirs could never match his acumen for waging battle, T’Challa does not do well in a comparison with his father, T’Chaka. This much is evident in his pitiful display of brawn shortly before his investiture: What is expected to be a coronation turns out to be something much more uncertain, as four of Wakanda’s tribes agree to T’Challa’s status as the new sovereign, but one tribe rejects him. This tribe, the Jabari, re-appears after centuries in hiding and have had no part in Wakanda’s development as an ultra-modern civilisation filled with technology that goes far beyond anything else on Earth, never mind the rest of the African continent. They are sceptical of the Wakandans’ talk of unity, particularly when they are themselves hiding out from the rest of the world.

This uneasy unity, of being one while being many, is an issue South Africa has sought for decades to address, even dubbing itself the Rainbow Nation. But for all the utopian idealism such metaphors inspire, it takes hard work for peace to be sustainable, and the tension is evident in Black Panther, too. Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who is a Wakandan spy in Nigeria and helps to save a group of women from an unnamed terrorist group (clearly Boko Haram), continually pushes T’Challa to share Wakanda’s knowledge and riches with the less-developed world instead of hoarding it for itself.

The same thread runs through the film’s most complex vein, as its powerful male characters struggle to decide whether to help the world’s vulnerable or to turn inward and be selfish with the endless vibranium resources. While T’Challa is reluctant to find a solution, the arrival of Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a US war veteran and covert operations specialist who knows how to bring down a foreign government, forces him to face reality.

Although he is clearly the villain, Killmonger’s past (he grew up an orphan), justified feelings of betrayal (his father, N’Jobu, was T’Challa’s uncle, and he was killed by his own brother, King T’Chaka) and sense of purpose (he wants to use Wakanda’s technology to give power to the world’s disadvantaged black populations), not to mention his extraordinary good looks, all make him a complex character whom we empathise with even as we root for his enemies.

Such complexity is a welcome change from the standard big-budget and superhero fare. But it’s a shame T’Challa isn’t seen to be struggling with this issue more seriously. In fact, the ruler of the world’s most technologically advanced nation is surprisingly ill-prepared for the throne and the duties that come with it.

Just like Eddie Murphy’s Akeem Joffer in Coming to America, T’Challa seems to have skipped any and all discussions in the royal household about the road to being a king. His friendly demeanour endears him to most of his people, but he is clearly uncomfortable as regent, and his decision to change Wakanda’s approach to the outside world, well-intentioned though it may be, seems to be made without him realising how difficult it will be.

One of the film’s first scenes take place at the “Museum of Great Britain”, which houses artefacts looted by the British Empire over the centuries. There is a nagging question throughout as to whether things will change for Wakanda once it opens up to the world and its riches are discovered. Will it suffer the fate of fellow African countries whose resources have been plundered through outside meddling? Or will its mixture of tradition and advanced technology (not unlike a religious superpower such as the United States) protect it against the onslaught of an aggressive globalisation?

Although by far one of the best superhero films out there, Black Panther nonetheless never veers too far from the well-beaten path of its predecessors, and the good inevitably triumphs over the bad without much of a scuffle. The film raises many issues that will require a thorough probing in a sequel, however, and if these issues are addressed head-on and in keeping with the rules of the real world instead of those of superhero fiction, it will easily clear the bar set by this first instalment.

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)

André Crous

Different than any of its siblings in the canon, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi takes some real chances but seems hesitant to do so and never really manages to soar.

The Last JediUSA
3.5*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 150 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)

“The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.

Only General Leia Organa’s band of RESISTANCE fighters stand against the rising tyranny, certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight.

But the Resistance has been exposed. As the First Order speeds toward the Rebel base, the brave heroes mount a desperate escape….“

The Last Jedi is unlike any of its predecessors in the Star Wars canon. Not only does it deploy a different visual grammar (except for the limited use of the perfunctory, obligatory wipes that this fictional world’s creator, George Lucas, borrowed from Akira Kurosawa), but it takes the storytelling in a new direction altogether. This refreshing take on a universe that has been with us for four decades infuses it with a new kind of energy but also sets the instalment up as the odd one out.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s previous film, Looper, proved time-travel films could both entertain us and take seriously the existential consequences of their time-hopping characters’ actions. In Episode VIII, he flips the script to bring the Star Wars franchise up to speed with present-day trends while retaining enough of its old charm to make us feel right at home.

After The Force Awakens, which was widely viewed as a safe reboot of the original Star Wars film, speculation was rife that this second film in the third trilogy would be similar to the second film in the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back. That was a mouth-watering proposition. The 1980 film is historically the most ambitious of all the films in the series precisely because it takes unexpected risks that pay off in spades. But while The Last Jedi tips its hat in the direction of Episode V, in particular with the reappearance of the AT-ATs, it struggles much more than its counterpart to overcome its position as the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end of a trilogy.

It is always a struggle to fit all the characters’ storylines into a particular instalment while keeping to a normal running time and allowing things to breathe. The Empire Strikes Back alternated between the storylines of two significant groups – Luke, Yoda and R2-D2 and Leia, Han, Chewbacca and C-3PO – and added sporadic glimpses of Darth Vader and the Emperor. By contrast, The Last Jedi divides its narrative into at least three different parts spread out across the universe.

An early skirmish between the First Order and the Resistance produces a pyrrhic victory for the rebels: The former suffers material damage, but many of the Resistance fighters are killed in the process, and because Poe defies Leia’s orders to stand down in the heat of battle, he is demoted for insubordination. Leia and the rebels escape but are somehow tracked through hyperspace by their technologically superior enemy. With fuel supplies running low, Poe sends Finn and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, a maintenance worker whose sister died in the opening fight, to the Monte Carlo of the universe, the ultra-rich city of Canto Bight. Their mission is to find a codebreaker who could get them onto the First Order’s main dreadnought, the Supremacy, and help them deactivate its hyperspace tracker. This part of the story, which features many important characters all too briefly, is the worst developed and executed of the entire film.

Continuing from the previous episode’s cliffhanger on a rocky island on the remote planet of Ahch-To, a major part of the plot involves Rey and Luke, the two characters in the film who are the most adept at using the Force. Luke, having lived the life of a hermit since Ben Solo (now Kylo Ren) turned to the dark side, has shut himself off from the Force and refuses to engage with Rey, who pleads for guidance in the ways of the Jedi. Over time, he realises it would be better for her to know than not to know, but what he sees in her frightens him… and us.

There is a mind bridge that is also a narrative bridge linking Ahch-To with the Supremacy. For the first time since Episode V, Star Wars uses faux raccords (literally, “fake cuts”) to have two characters – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren – interact with each other even though are not physically in the same space. This link, or Force connection, which allows them to grow uncomfortably close, is ultimately revealed to be Snoke’s doing to lure Rey into a trap, but it also exposes Kylo’s vulnerable side, when he tells Rey how he came to feel betrayed by Luke. In the theatrical version, these faux raccords took the form of very short dissolves, but they are near-impossible to spot on the home entertainment versions.

With Leia incapacitated, the remaining Resistance cruiser, the Raddus, has only 18 hours of fuel left. It is commandeered by the purple-haired Vice Admiral Holdo, whose leadership Poe and many of his allies onboard call into question because she is so calm amid imminent disaster. But they (and we, the viewers) have limited information, which leads to people like Poe, well-intentioned though he may be, drawing faulty conclusions and going out over their skis.

The film’s most impressive moment of visual flair occurs on Canto Bight, when the rowdy interior of the casino is presented in a way that, with a striking, seemingly impossible, forward tracking shot, pays homage to the most famous William Wellman’s Wings. But many other moments stand out for their awe-inspiring capacity. Some are nostalgic, like Luke meeting R2-D2 again and being shown Leia’s emergency hologram message from Episode IV, now as relevant as then, or Kylo Ren’s decision to kill Snoke, which is followed by a masterfully crafted lightsaber fight. What the hologram also does is create a parallel between Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who, when we meet him in Episode IV, had been hiding out for years before being called on to help the Resistance once again and teach a young fighter about the Force.

Although Finn still seems too easily flabbergasted by revelations, John Boyega is generally better than he was in Episode VII. Yoda’s appearance could easily have become sentimental, but the old rascal is as insightful and as naughty as ever. But Domhnall Gleeson’s toadyish portrayal of First Order General Hux is just beyond awful, and it’s a real pity the character will continue to stick around for another episode.

The worst of the screenplay’s inventions, however, is the Porgs. Unlike the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi or even the Gungans of The Phantom Menace (groups that actually provided assistance to the main characters), the penguin-like Porgs on Ahch-To may be the most pointless creations across the first eight Star Wars episodes. In fact, they appear to serve no other purpose than as an otherworldly cuteness – one that has no bearing on the film but will be easily marketable as toys to younger viewers outside the movie theatre.

And who is the titular “last Jedi”? Luke firmly states (while seemingly looking straight at us) that it will not be him. Leia is still alive, but, as shown by the parallel cut to the Force being used to lift a pile of stones, it is Rey who assumes the mantle and is expected to continue the tradition of the Jedi Order, which at long last is also called a religion. We even glimpse the sacred Jedi texts in her possession on board the Millennium Falcon – presumably with Yoda’s consent.

The most important question that this particular instalment poses is also the one whose answer remains the most elusive: Can we really trust that Rey will remain as steadfast in her desire to remain on the side of the good as she believes? Or is she as likely to be tempted by the power of the dark side as Kylo Ren’s grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, was?

More than any of its predecessors, Episode VIII is interested in shading its characters. A persistent ambiguity about the central characters fills us with hope and fear – a perfect manifestation of the “balance” so often cited as fundamental to life with the Force. Kylo Ren is far from evil, while Rey’s seeming inexperience, perhaps even naïveté, leads us to believe she may be snatched up by the dark side. We also learn that Luke’s very understandable fears led to the destruction of a Jedi training camp (a parallel to Anakin’s killing of the Jedi younglings in Revenge of the Sith) and the rise of a Kylo Ren enamoured of Darth Vader.

Further compounding our uncertainty is Supreme Leader Snoke’s revelation that Rey and Ren, whose names differ by a single letter, did not really see into each other’s past and future when they touched but only saw what Snoke made them see. Thus, Rey’s confidence that Ren could be turned is based on planted evidence, and in turn, Ren’s vision of Rey’s parents is a similarly manufactured piece of fiction. In a scene on Ahch-To, Rey is confronted with an image that seems to suggest she was born not from any two individuals but from herself – a transcendental peculiarity not unlike Anakin’s midichlorian-orchestrated conception.

Our own alliances are in flux because of the uncertainty regarding Rey and Ren’s intentions and their abilities to withstand the temptations of the darkness and the light. The film concludes on a compassionate note that emphasises the bright future of the Resistance but is really just bizarre to watch in the context of all the other instalments because it chooses a peripheral character to convey its message. In the end, we all know that balance means both good and bad will prevail in some form, and Episode IX is likely to have a few nasty surprises up its sleeve.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

André Crous

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness. 

BlacKkKlansmanUSA
4*

Director:
Spike Lee
Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel
David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin

Running time: 135 minutes

America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.

And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.

Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.

Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).

But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.

At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.

Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

André Crous

The Celluloid Closet, a ground-breaking documentary released in 1995, reveals many of the queerest moments from the first 100 years of the cinematic art form.

The Celluloid ClosetUSA
5*

Directors:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Jeffrey Friedman
Director of Photography:
Nancy Schreiber

Running time: 105 minutes

Just like the people they portray, films with LGBT characters have always been around. In 1995, at the 100-year mark of the birth of cinema, an expansive documentary rounded up a century of (mostly, but not always, implicitly) homosexual or queer characters and narrative trends to show how, even in the darkest days of the moralistic Hollywood Production “Hays” Code, the closet door was often ajar.

Based on the exhaustive overview provided by Vito Russo’s 1981 landmark book of the same name, The Celluloid Closet was made by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, two openly gay documentary filmmakers who had already won Academy Awards for tackling subjects close to LGBT viewers’ lives in The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Their 1995 documentary features a treasure trove of film clips, as well as interviews with numerous industry professionals who talk about how they perceived certain movies while they were growing up, how they had to work within and around the Code and what the challenges were in producing an authentic representation of gay life. Among the best-known interviewees are playwright Armistead Maupin, actor-director Harvey Fierstein and writer-provocateur Quentin Crisp, with mainstream actors like Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg and Susan Sarandon (all of whom portrayed gay characters during their careers) also contributing their impressions.

The opening clip crystallises the early years’ depiction of same-sex activity: In the 1934 film Wonder Bar, a man and woman are dancing at a ball when another man approaches to ask whether he can “cut in”. The woman moves towards him, assuming the request is directed towards her, only to be rebuffed when the two men grab each other’s hands and start dancing. A few steps behind them, singer Al Jolson’s eyes are big as plates. He throws a limp wrist into the air and exclaims, “Boys will be boys!”

But such tolerance, even if mocking or condescending in tone, was soon torpedoed by the Hays Code, which sought to clamp down on films’ generally permissive attitude with regard to sexuality – by then, big-name filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille had already made blockbuster films showing full-fledged (heterosexual) orgies. Starting in the early 1930s, the Code curtailed depictions of rape, abortion, sex perversion (i.e. any positive representation of LGBT life), prostitution, nudity, white slavery and the use of profanity, among others.

Thus, gay characters were driven into the background, their stories were made to look straight, or it was made clear that their lifestyle was abominable. And they were almost always killed off by the final act. But while some viewers were happy to see characters similar to themselves, the representation was terribly one-sided, even tragic.

For most of the 20th century, films consistently presented gay characters as outcasts who were to be made fun of, judged as degenerates or pitied for the miserable lives they lead. Generally speaking, the characters were trapped and unable or unwilling to effect change, which made them powerless and frequently led to them committing suicide or dying in various ways. In one eye-opening sequence, The Celluloid Closet shows us one death after another of these films’ gay characters: by gunshot, by stabbing, by hanging, by fire, by crossbow… even by having a tree fall on them.

Narrator Lily Tomlin correctly points out that “Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves.” When all you see of gay life is a one-dimensional depiction of melancholy ending in tragedy, there is inevitably an effect on all viewers irrespective of their sexuality. Of course, there are people identifying as one or more of the letters in LGBT who are sad or suicidal, just like their straight counterparts, but representations need to reflect the diversity of real life, which only comes from telling more stories and treating all characters as full human beings with real agency.

But even when characters, especially those based on real-life individuals, were mostly stripped of their sexuality, traces remained. Perhaps it is because many filmmakers remained committed to reflecting real life. Or perhaps the reason is that, throughout the filmmaking process, some screenwriters were gay, some directors were gay, some actors and actresses were gay, and so on, and they wanted to include part of themselves and what they knew in the product they were creating.

This is a documentary that adds depth and nuance to characters and narratives we thought we knew. We see how affection between men – approached with surprising sensitivity – was often there if we looked a little more closely. An excerpt from Their First Mistake, in which Laurel and Hardy share a bed, help each other take care of a baby and confess their bond to each other, makes this plain for all to see. So, too, does a scene from Wings, the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, which features two men stroking each other’s hair, with one planting a kiss on the other’s lips.

Cabaret scribe Jay Presson Allen laments the fact that the 1950s were an era of such “towering dullness” because the stories being told were all terribly safe and uninspiring, but the ever-irreverent Gore Vidal lets us in on a juicy gay angle in the biblical epic Ben-Hur, released in 1959, which he had a hand in writing.

It is said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. Films with LGBT characters or storylines provide sunlight by highlighting people and plots that are not as well-established as the decades of straight storylines, thus washing away the veneer of grime that had built up over decades of misrepresentation. And while this documentary certainly does not pretend that every classic film falls somewhere on the Kinsey scale, it does encourage us to examine them more critically and potentially to discover the rainbow in the black and white.

Although its focus is squarely on the U.S. film industry, The Celluloid Closet makes little mention of the broader historical context, namely that the advent of the modern gay rights movement (the 1969 Stonewall riots) coincided with the downfall of the dreadful Code, and that the subsequent AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s pushed LGBT stories out of the metaphorical closet and into the limelight.

It would be fascinating to see an updated account of LGBT representation in film, as a great deal has changed since 1995. The number of films built around gay characters who do not fold under pressure but stand up for themselves or, better yet, are simply part of a story other than their sexuality, has risen sharply over the past few years.

As witty and entertaining as it is informative, The Celluloid Closet remains the gold standard for information about and insight into the traces of homosexuality in films during the first 100 years of cinematic history. Over the ensuing quarter of a century, films like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Blue is the Warmest Colour and Moonlight would all make a big splash on the global circuit. Myriad more, from those of Sebastián Lelio, João Pedro Rodrigues, Marco Berger and Kimberly Peirce to the ones of Dee Rees, Todd Haynes, Xavier Dolan and Pedro Almodóvar, have already given a firm indication that the next 100 years will produce an infinitely greater variety of movies than before – in whatever way their storytellers choose.

Lady Bird (2017)

André Crous

On the verge of adulthood, 17-year-old Sacramento native Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson confronts the slow dawning of reality.

Lady BirdUSA
4*

Director:
Greta Gerwig
Screenwriter:
Greta Gerwig
Director of Photography:
Sam Levy

Running time: 95 minutes

Widely praised for its sensitive handling of a teenager’s coming of age, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is at its best when it advances our understanding of the titular main character’s parents – in particular, her hot-blooded but sometimes icily passive-aggressive mother, Marion (a stunning portrayal by Laurie Metcalf). Unusually, we gain a compassionate understanding of parents as people who, just like their children, are a volatile mixture of emotions and motivations.

“Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan), a name the 17-year-old Christine McPherson has recently adopted as part of a phase of rebelliousness that her mother looks upon with disdain, is growing restless with life in Sacramento, which she describes, with as much love as hate, as the “Midwest of California”. She wants to move far away for college, preferably the East Coast, where the Twin Towers had come down nearly a year earlier. But Marion’s continual insinuation that her daughter is too immature to cope with life on her own leads to many a bout of screaming, as well as a broken arm, with no clear winner.

The ups and downs of Lady Bird’s final year of high school include not only the boom and bust of losing her virginity and unexpected revelations about her love interest’s sexual awakening but also the consequences of her lies, well-intentioned though they might be.

The high school in question is Immaculate Heart, a co-ed Catholic school run by good-natured nuns who both provide spiritual guidance and make hilarious attempts at discipline (at the prom, one of them tells a couple they should dance six inches apart… “for the Holy Spirit!”). Lady Bird runs a very unconventional campaign for class president, and she and her best friend, Julie, snack on communion wafers when no one is watching. Then, one day, she signs up for the school play, and everything changes.

She meets angel-faced Danny (Lucas Hedges in a role that is the polar opposite of his turn in Manchester by the Sea), who plays the lead, and this meeting leads to a relationship that gives her an opportunity to enlarge her social network, which eventually includes the wealthiest and the weirdest characters around, like Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), the black-haired, porcelain-complexioned quasi-intellectual but cute-as-a-button loner.

Lady Bird’s laugh-out-loud comedy is tightly wound to its insightful and always empathetic glimpses of the jitters just below the surface, as when Lady Bird’s parents find out she tells her friends she comes from the wrong side of the tracks, or when her father and brother meet accidentally while applying for the same job. But nothing comes close to the outwardly straightforward but emotionally intricate screenwriting gem that is the scene at a department store’s changing rooms, where Lady Bird is trying on a dress for prom:

LADY BIRD: I love it.

MARION: (unsure) Is it too pink? (beat) What?

LADY BIRD: Why can’t you say I look nice?

MARION: I thought you didn’t even care what I think.

LADY BIRD: I still want you to think I look good.

MARION: OK. I’m sorry, I was telling you the truth. You want me to lie?

LADY BIRD: No, I just wish… I just… I wish that you liked me.

MARION: Of course I love you.

LADY BIRD: But do you like me?

MARION: (hesitates) I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.

LADY BIRD: What if this is the best version?

This absolutely heartrending interaction – in a public space, no less – is simple but saturated with tension. Both mother and daughter face disappointment while simultaneously digging deep to be honest without hurting each other. They want to be independent but they also want to be accepted. They want to be themselves but don’t want to fall short of the other’s expectations of them. In other words, they accurately reflect flesh-and-blood human beings. And this depth is evident in many of the characters, including Lady Bird’s soft-spoken but ever-supporting father (played by Tracy Letts), her older brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and the latter’s girlfriend, Shelly (Marielle Scott). Miguel and Shelly’s studded faces belie their sensitivity over their own marginalisation, but the more they speak, despite their small roles, the more they creep into our hearts.

And yet, while the film makes a point of being situated in a rarely depicted locale (Sacramento) in an unusual year (the relatively recent 2002, which is just long enough ago for the music to sound both old and immediately recognisable and the fashion to look ridiculous because it’s dated but not yet retro), it doesn’t make much of its context: It’s good that Sactown gets some love, but we rarely get to see more than the Tower Bridge. And there is no obvious reason why the story is better told in 2002 than in 2016 or 2017, except that flip phones, which are all the rage on this timeline, now just look quaint. One giant blunder is the film’s soundtrack, which is ludicrously packed with “Best of…” tracks from 2002. There is no reason to remind us so aggressively that the film is set in that particular year. It’s not important – this is not American Graffiti. 

Luckily, Gerwig’s direction is flawless, and so is her sense of rhythm: She lets her camera take in an entire emotional realisation, for example, when Lady Bird realises Kyle has lied to her and goes from loving and cuddly to crestfallen, in an unbroken take. But she also recognises the value of cinematic synecdoche, as when one entire scene consists of a very brief shot, not even three seconds long, showing Lady Bird’s toe curled in the bathtub, which we can safely assume indicates a level of self-pleasuring that is self-evident in the context but does not need to be made any more explicit.

Anchored by Ronan’s and Metcalf’s superb performances as flawed but benevolent individuals, Lady Bird is an affectionate portrait of life as a senior whose goal is opaque and whose strategy for reaching it is never much more than a draft – a Plan A without a Plan B. The film is immanently watchable because it brims with optimism while never minimising the stumbles along the way. We get to see rare moments of joy shared by mother and daughter, even as they seem to be fighting non-stop throughout the story, and in the process, we are reminded that parents are people, and that life’s lessons only end when we die.

Looper (2012)

André Crous

Seriously pondering the conundrum of being killed by one’s future self, Rian Johnson’s Looper is almost unique in being both an intelligent and an entertaining time-travel film.

LooperUSA
4*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 120 minutes

Looper stands alone among a horde of wannabe-serious science-fiction films dealing with time travel; the inherent contradictions in the premise are taken seriously, but not so seriously that the audience gets lost in long-winded explanations. Besides, most viewers should be familiar with these contradictions already – for an insightful yet entertaining recap, go watch the Back to the Future trilogy again.

Director Rian Johnson’s film delivers on the promise he displayed in Brick, a neo-noir film replete with its own Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue, almost a language unto itself, though set in the present. That film, as does Looper, starred the ever-impressive Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high-school student who gets involved in the underworld when his girlfriend is killed.

The plot of Looper concerns the existential conundrum faced by a number of individuals in the present, which is 2044 in the state of Kansas: The title refers to those who carry out the job of killing people sent back from the future, where it is much more difficult to get rid of bodies.

Recently, however, the people sent back have been the Loopers themselves, 30 years older. This is called “closing the loop”. They arrive bound and gagged, and when the job is done, their present-day versions discover gold strapped around the bodies of their older (and now, late) selves, giving new meaning to the phrase “a golden handshake”.

In this way, the Loopers can live pleasant lives for the next 30 years while they wait to be sent back to the past and be killed by themselves.

Killing oneself is bad enough, but living with that guilt and yet building a life for three decades only to have it taken from you, even if you know it is coming closer every morning you open your eyes, is agony. The emotional turmoil is beautifully presented in a brief sequence that sees Gordon-Levitt turn into Bruce Willis, who is shot, in more ways than one, in a scene about a half-hour into the film.

Both actors play the role of Joe, and when, in the film’s most frequently presented reality, young Joe doesn’t kill old Joe, they are both in danger because news travels quickly between the present and the future, where the Rainmaker, a mystical figure who is closing all the loops and wielding ever-more power, is none too pleased by the way events are unfolding back in 2044.

For this reason, Joe makes it a priority to find the Rainmaker as a child and kill him, what with the latter’s being responsible for the death of a very important person in Joe’s life. It turns out there are three possibilities as to who the baby Rainmaker might be, and while old Joe goes off into the city to track down two of them, young Joe stays behind in rural Kansas to find the third one. Once the child is killed, old Joe should evaporate, as he would never have been sent back here in the first place, and the loop would remain open…

On a Kansan farm, young Joe finds Sara (Emily Blunt), who is raising her young boy, Cid, on her own. Cid seems rather precocious, and we quickly catch on to the likelihood this is the feared overlord of the future. Young Joe, despite himself, strikes up a friendship with Sara while old Joe continues his killing spree in the city, not knowing whether the execution of a young child will make things right or count for collateral damage.

The film itself doesn’t have many narrative possibilities here, but even though we know how things are likely to develop, the scenes on the farm with the young Joe and Cid the toddler have tension that keeps us from second-guessing the actions of the characters or the director.

But Johnson’s vision of the future is not bleak at all – as the wheat fields make abundantly clear – despite the ghastly poverty we are shown in some of the opening scenes. He presents us with a future that is very recognisable, and it even features the mild-mannered Jeff Daniels as the Loopers’ handler in the present.

Don’t discount the small details in the film, as many character traits, minor as they may seem, often have a role to play later on. Admittedly, there are questions to be asked about the wisdom of crime bosses in the future to send someone back only to be killed by their younger selves without any kind of supervision, given the very easily comprehensible moral dilemma. But such questions are negligible because Looper is tight enough to focus your attention in the moment.

Few films can balance a credible treatment of time travel with a narrative that is engaging and thrilling, and whatever you think about the deceptively closed ending, this one deserves great praise.

The Shape of Water (2017)

André Crous

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a stylish glimpse of an unusual love story set amid Cold War paranoia in Baltimore in 1962.

The Shape of WaterUSA
4*

Director:
Guillermo del Toro
Screenwriters:
Guillermo del Toro
Vanessa Taylor
Director of Photography:
Dan Laustsen

Running time: 120 minutes

The wonderful thing about fantasy films is that the bar of realism is set slightly lower than in most other stories. It’s not so much that the filmmaker can get away with more but that we relish the deviations from the strictures of reality, or realism, instead of criticising them. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is set in Baltimore in the early 1960s, in the midst of Cold War paranoia, with set design that is magnificent, rich in detail and full of colour, but the film is also indisputably a work of exuberant imagination.

We begin underwater inside an apartment filled with watery silence. A young woman is peacefully sleeping in mid-air (or, rather, mid-water) above a couch. At least, we tell ourselves she is only sleeping. The image is mesmerising, and it derives its power not from the visuals alone but also from the accompanying voiceover. The narrator, who will shortly reveal himself as the woman’s neighbour, Giles (Richard Jenkins), asks us, “If I spoke about it… if I did… what would I tell you?” By framing the story through this voice-over and emphasising the act of telling, the film firmly establishes itself as a (narrative) tale.

The woman is Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), and she works as a janitor at the government-run Occam Aerospace Research Center, whose main goal seems to be to beat the Soviets at this whole space thing, although the film is light on details. Her best friend, whom she has worked with for a decade, is the garrulous Zelda (Olivia Spencer), who spends most days speaking enough to carry entire conversations all on her own. She has to, not only because Elisa is quite shy but because she is mute, and she has lifelong scars on the side of her neck to prove it.

One day, a giant water-filled container arrives at the research centre, and the many-starred military officials mention something about it being one of the most sensitive shipments they have ever received. It turns out to be an amphibious humanoid – a fish-man – that has the shape and size of a man but is covered in scales and has nictitating membranes, like windshield wipers, instead of normal eyelids. Most importantly, it doesn’t speak, although it does squawk.

Thus, rather predictably, Elisa and the creature strike up a relationship. She plays him music and even feeds him the eggs she packed for lunch. He shows very little caution and is almost immediately taken with her. The feeling is mutual. In a beautiful scene delivered in sign language to her neighbour, Elisa explains that, for the first time, lack of speech is not a “lack” at all. But she is not the only one to take an interest in the creature: By virtue of their own status as outcasts or outsiders (the mute Elisa, the gay Giles, the black Zelda and the Russia-born Dr Hoffstetler), a number of people around her are drawn to and sympathise with this foreigner par excellence.

With respect to these outsiders, the film gently sketches their hopes and dreams, with the exception of Zelda, whose race and its limited value in 1962 Baltimore are only superficially and indirectly implied, for example when others engage in casual racism. The most egregious behaviour in this regard is that of Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon), an odious man who only washes his hands before using the bathroom and rapes his wife in a very icky scene that takes place in broad daylight. He is the menacing power figure who looks down on anyone who doesn’t look like him, whether they are women, blacks or scale-covered critters.

Del Toro’s light touches throughout the film ensure more than a passing guffaw. One of the most cited moments is bound to be Elisa’s recurring masturbation in the bathtub every morning, which alternates with shots of eggs boiling in hot water on the stove. And most scenes involving one of the centre’s highest-ranking scientists, Dr Robert Hoffstetler, are precariously balanced on a knife’s edge between seriousness and uproarious comedy thanks to the facial expressions of actor Michael Stuhlbarg. And whenever he meets with a foreign power, the passwords that are exchanged at the rendezvous have something Coen brothers-esque about them. 

The director is also particularly sly with his transitions, and one example is the cut from severed fingers being dropped into a bag to Corn Flakes poured from another bag for breakfast. The implicit connection grosses us out even as we acknowledge the purely abstract connection with a laugh.

Elisa and the Amphibian Man (played by Doug Jones), as the credits call him, grow closer and eventually engage in an obviously consensual moment of bestiality that will undoubtedly draw laughter at every screening. Their silent bond is unbreakable and beautiful, although an imaginary black-and-white song-and-dance number late in the film feels wholly out of place.

Something else that feels out of place is the amount of access that the low-ranking Elisa has to what is supposed to be the research centre’s prized possession. She visits her amphibious friend nearly every day without ever facing punishment for trespassing. Fantasy films loosen the restrictions on how we perceive their realism but not their credibility, particularly if the story is set in a real world–like environment. And these visits in The Shape of Water push plausibility beyond breaking point.

While the meaning of the title is not at all apparent, the visuals are stunning, and not since Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 Great Expectations has there been a film so focused on reminding us of the colour green. From the doors at the research centre and the punch clock time cards to Elisa’s dress, any number of items of furniture and, of course, the blueish shades of green in the water are ever-present and frame the tale as something out of the ordinary that vibrates vital energy.

There is no question this is the most solid piece of filmmaking that Guillermo del Toro has ever delivered, and while it is much more mature than your average fantasy film, it has the kind of magic that transports the adult viewer to a wonderland most often associated with nostalgia for childhood.

Viewed at the Bratislava International Film Festival 2017

Interstellar (2014)

André Crous

Christopher Nolan’s big space epic tries to fly too close to the sun and fails to live up to expectations.

InterstellarUSA
3*

Director:
Christopher Nolan
Screenwriters:
Jonathan Nolan
Christopher Nolan
Director of Photography:
Hoyte van Hoytema

Running time: 170 minutes

Interstellar takes us farther than we’ve ever been before, but it doesn’t take the medium of film quite as far as this production’s marketing department would like to have us believe. Director Christopher Nolan breaks through the final frontier – not space, but time – and delivers a product that has a couple of moments of genius but is bloated and saddled with too much dialogue, not to mention a family drama right out of a freshman course on Steven Spielberg.

The film opens with an image we don’t yet understand: a close-up of a row of dusty book spines. This is followed by interviews with a few elderly individuals reminiscing about their childhood on farms, and then we get to see one of them: a cornfield stretching as far as the eye can see. Perhaps this is a sly wink at Superman’s early years on the Kent family farm in Smallville (an indication that great things lie ahead), but there are no firm geographical markers. That doesn’t matter, anyway, because the film has its sights set much farther afield than the United States.

Primarily a science-fiction film preoccupied with stars, planets, worm and black holes, Interstellar is built on the very credible premise that, one day in the near future, the Earth runs dry, for reasons not explicitly stated, and mankind has to start looking elsewhere for its continued survival. With the help of his scientifically curious daughter, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineer who is making a living as a farmer, locates the headquarters of NASA, which ceased operations a long time ago because the country no longer saw the need to invest in science and space exploration.

The agency asks him to go into space and find a suitable planet whither humanity can be transported or where he could restart civilisation with a few hundred fertilised eggs. He gamely takes up the challenge and is accompanied on the journey by Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of his former science teacher, while his own daughter throws a hissy fit because she cannot see the bigger picture and believes her father is abandoning her.

Compare this girl’s tantrums with the quiet determination of the budding scientist in Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 hit Contact, which incidentally also starred McConaughey, and it quickly becomes clear how little experience Nolan has directing children. The dialogue, in general, is also either overly explanatory or superfluous. In one scene, Cooper is told that the last thing people see before they die is their children’s faces, because it gives them a reason to hold on to life, and Nolan wastes no time in getting to us that point: Within five minutes, we have the scene we visualised just moments earlier, and the director doesn’t realise it would have been infinitely more powerful without the setup.

In one of its most effective tactics to speak to our emotions, Interstellar creates a time bomb: The exploration of space has to occur within a specific amount of time, lest Cooper never sees his children again because they would have aged too much. Here, at least, Nolan deploys the different time worlds of his film to great effect by adding a very human dimension to which the viewer can relate. However, why only one of Cooper’s children, and not both, is prioritised will leave many a viewer puzzled, especially when the daughter, Murphy, only has one bag of emotions.

What has been a major topic of discussion has been the film’s imagery, in particular the way in which a black hole is rendered, and Nolan and director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema certainly deserve kudos for their work in this regard. More than one-third of the film was shot on IMAX cameras, and when displayed on an IMAX screen, the size of the frame changes between widescreen (2.40:1) and IMAX’s full-screen (1.43:1) aspect ratios.

Following the example of his imaginative 2010 film Inception, Nolan continues to make visible his fascination with spherical images, as we see here in the wormhole scene and another interesting construction towards the end of the film. However, Nolan’s vision of space is melancholic, and we get nothing that can be compared to the beauty of a 2001: A Space Odyssey Stargate sequence.

On the contrary, the planets the crew finds are desolate, uninhabitable, inhospitable wastelands of nothingness, and it would be up to mankind to make these places home. That is a surprisingly arrogant perspective, but one to which the film constantly returns. If there is any beauty in space, we cannot see it, because Nolan keeps hitting us over the head with talk of man’s indomitable spirit to survive and to explore and to thrive wherever he goes or whatever he faces. This is all mighty close to humanist propaganda.

Furthermore, the story makes some enormous, unexplained jumps across narrative chasms. When Murphy spots tiny dunes on the floorboards in her room after a sandstorm, her father goes to work and finds the sequence corresponds to numbers in code. He somehow immediately realises the numbers refer to latitude and longitude coordinates, and he sets off to the mysterious location. How he makes this deduction, and with such certainty, especially after he had rejected Murphy’s apparently airy-fairy belief that there is a ghost in her room, is completely ignored by the screenplay.

Hans Zimmer’s score relies heavily on the sounds made by the organ, and at times the music is visceral and moving as it conveys a spiritual dimension equal to the grandeur and the mystery of the night sky. However, the silence that was so useful to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is often missing from or spoiled by Interstellar, and at one point Nolan makes the unforgivable mistake of invasively adding some of McConaughey’s dialogue to an otherwise deadly silent shot of the outside of his module floating in outer space.

A particularly annoying aspect of the heavy talk that permeates the film is on full display in a scene in which Dr. Brand gushes about the need for love, as a way of exonerating herself and explaining her selfish decision to pursue a less scientific approach to the mission, which may very well lead to the deaths of her entire crew. This scene is absolutely cringeworthy, even though Nolan is using it to anticipate and perhaps even justify Cooper’s own behaviour in the last act.

Interstellar is no Gravity, and it doesn’t come close to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening interviews remove all suspense from the story by implying it all ends well, and the soppy, uninvolving family angle damages our ability to empathise fully with all the main characters. This may very well be a novel perspective on our place in the universe and our shared ability to survive no matter what, but just because Nolan can literally bend light to suit his needs does not mean his work is done.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

André Crous

By the end of the origin trilogy, Star Wars had nowhere else to go but up, and George Lucas manages to complete Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to Darth Vader both believable and frightening.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the SithUSA
3.5*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriter:
George Lucas
Director of Photography:
David Tattersall

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Phantom Menace (Episode I)
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)
– The Last Jedi (Episode VIII)

“War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.
In a stunning move, the fiendish droid leader, General Grievous, has swept into the Republic capital and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine, leader of the Galactic Senate.
As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their valuable hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a desperate mission to rescue the captive Chancellor….”

Lightyears ahead of the two episodes that preceded it, Episode III reinjects colour, real drama and genuine filmmaking flair into the franchise that wilted with Episode I and was beaten to a pulp and left out to dry with the release of Episode II. Besides rounding out a number of character transitions and neatly completing the trilogy, it also answers many of the big origin questions that have hung around for more than 20 years, since the release of the original trilogy in 1977–1983.

From the very first moment, this third instalment in the so-called “prequel trilogy” marks a forceful departure from its dreadful predecessor. It is as simple as an unbroken take, one that is not only visually impressive (it definitely is) but also dramatic in terms of the presentation of its content. Even the opening crawl, provided above, boldly proclaims the nature of the situation in no uncertain terms: “War!”

The elegant unbroken take starts with utter calm, however, as the usual beach of starlight stretches out across the dark skies in front of us. The camera pans downward, as it does nearly every time (the exception was Episode II, when it panned up, but then the film lost its nerve and cut away almost instantly), to the giant dagger-shaped form of a Republic attack cruiser floating in near silence in outer space. The scene is peaceful and calm, and in the background, we see the mighty planet of Coruscant with the blinding sun (dis)appearing behind its rim. Two tiny Jedi starfighters whizz towards is, and the camera follows them across the wing as they swoop around the front and down to reveal utter chaos below, where dozens of battleships are shooting at each other.

But this is only the beginning of the fun: The shot, which incorporates very mobile movements as the camera whooshes back and forth past obstacles and even through a cloud of fire, carries on until we spot R2D2 on the wing of a starfighter and immediately deduce this is Anakin’s. Without a moment of hesitation, the film cuts to Anakin’s face inside the cockpit. He is clearly enjoying himself, and for a change (given actor Hayden Christensen’s atrocious performance in Episode II) it is a pleasure to see him because he is fully engaged in the scene.

Anakin and his master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, are on their way to rescue Chancellor Palaptine, who has been kidnapped by Count Dooku, the leader of the separatists. And when they do, a mere 15 minutes into the film, the moment presents Anakin with a major quandary. Having been taunted throughout their fight, with Dooku nudging Anakin to come to the Dark Side, and having seen Obi-Wan injured in the fight with Dooku, Anakin eventually subdues him. He holds the two lightsabers – his own one, which is blue, and Dooku’s red one – in his hands and points them in the form of an X around his throat, trying to control his anger. He is filled with doubt and even says that killing an unarmed man would not be the Jedi way. Palpatine, shackled next to him, disagrees and urges Anakin to decapitate the shocked Dooku. Anakin follows through.

This is but the first of many powerful depictions of the internal turmoil that Anakin has to deal with throughout the development of this part of the story. The soft-spoken but serpentine Palpatine knows exactly how to play the game by gently dangling power in front of Anakin. He feels he deserves it by virtue of the chancellor of the Republic declaring it the right thing. And whenever he feels second-guessed or slighted by the Jedis, who can sense evil in Palpatine’s plans, he sides with the chancellor. But he is always genuinely conflicted as to where his loyalties should lie.

These scenes are riveting, even though we know that Anakin is fast on his way to becoming Darth Vader. This prequel trilogy was never about the destination, however: It was always about the journey, and thus the focus had to be on Anakin’s evolution, which in this episode is sharp and does not have the meandering qualities that made the first two instalments so exhausting.

In visual terms, this instalment leaves the previous two in the dust. Not only do we get the first glimpse of Padmé wearing her hair in the form of two bagel buns on either side of her head (as her daughter, Leia, did in the original trilogy), but the special effects are far superior to the mediocrity of the seemingly ever-present rear projection of Episode II, and the colour palette is colder but stronger: blacks, blues and purples seem to permeate the world this time around.

When Palpatine decides to appoint Anakin, who is not a Jedi master but merely an apprentice, to the Jedi Council (a decision that has major repercussions), they walk side by side inside the chancellor’s office, and shortly before the scene wipes to another location, the lighting makes them appear as two silhouettes – partners in darkness. It is a brief moment but speaks to a visual ingenuity that is unusual for Lucas.

With regard to the editing, Lucas also fashions two remarkable alternating sequences of lightsaber duels. The first contrasts the giant fight between Yoda and Palpatine after he has become the irrevocably evil Darth Sidious, first set inside the chancellor’s office and then in the middle of the Senate, and between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin, after he has gone to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader. The second, only a few scenes later, is an interesting juxtaposition of Padmé giving birth and Darth Vader being fitted with his black armour.

The humour in the film is also much better integrated and does not draw attention to itself, as such attempts failed miserably in the first two episodes. The duel between General Grievous, the commander of the separatists’ Droid Army, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is light-hearted and reminds us that not all fight scenes need to be equally sombre. As Kenobi, McGregor is excellent in bringing this sprightliness to the fight, even in the face of Grievous’s four lightsabers.

Unfortunately, a few awkward attempts at romantic dialogue remain, as in this exchange:

Anakin: You are so beautiful.
Padmé: It’s only because I’m so in love.
Anakin: No! It’s because I’m so in love with you…!

Poor Padmé also spends almost the entirety of the film locked up in her room on Coruscant, where she either waits in anguish for the return of her lover and father of her offspring or confronts him about putting up a wall between them out of fear.

The film regularly returns to the Prophecy, in which Qui-Gon Jinn had believed and which Obi-Wan also trusts, that Anakin will bring balance to the Force. However, while the Force will be brought back into balance thanks to Anakin, Yoda also points out that it is a “prophecy that misread could have been”, meaning the easiest explanation is not always the right one. Three more instalments await, and while Anakin is instrumental in returning balance, he will not do so alone, nor directly.

With the possible exception of Episode IV, this is likely the best Star Wars film that Lucas directed. Although still not far from laughable at many points, Christensen’s performance has improved, and we can hear his character’s frustration in his tired “Yes, master” whenever he is told to wait, to be patient, not to do what it is he feels entitled to do. He is racked with fear, confused and lost, looking for his place, but while the final scenes on the volcanic planet of Mustafar are too long and look rather uninteresting, the climax is exactly what we had been waiting for all along.