A StarWars Virgin

Which one's Darth Vader again..?
EMMA COWING

LIKE A WEBBED toe or a third nipple, the fact that until last week I had never seen any of the Star Wars movies is not something I usually like to advertise. "You’re kidding!" people would always say, incredulous, if I dropped it into conversation. "How could you not have seen any of them?" Well, for a number of reasons. Because I don’t like sci-fi, for one. Because I don’t go to the cinema much, is another. Because I’d rather spend two hours 11 minutes of my life alphabetising my sock drawer is a third, best-kept-to-myself response.

So, spending a significant part of the last seven days watching all six films in order to write this feature has been something of a mixed experience. I finally get those playground jokes about the Force being with us, and appreciate why a lightsaber is a really rather useful piece of equipment. I know the difference between Jabba the Hutt and Yoda, and have developed a woeful little crush on a fresh-faced Harrison Ford long consigned to the annals of movie legends.

What has made the venture remarkable however, is not my being a Star Wars virgin until the age of 27, but the fact that, thanks to a preview screening of Revenge of the Sith last week, I have become one of the first people in the world to watch the series in its true chronological order, Episodes I-VI, without seeing any of them before.

For the uninitiated, it goes like this. George Lucas devised a futuristic multi-parted movie epic about the battle between good and evil, but started the series in the middle with Star Wars Episode IV. The film was later subtitled A New Hope. The three movies made between 1977 and 1983 made up the second part of the series and left audiences gagging to find out the back-story to the characters they’d come to love so much. In 1999 Lucas released The Phantom Menace - Episode I and followed it up three years ago with Attack of the Clones. Revenge of the Sith, or Episode III - released today - completes the circle, adding the final pieces to the puzzle.

But will future generations be able to pick it up at the DVD store and happily watch the series from beginning to end? Do the plot threads work, does it all make sense, and most importantly, is it enjoyable to watch? Well, yes and no.

It doesn’t help that, as every Star Wars fan will tell you, The Phantom Menace is the bad apple in the barrel. It’s tedious, full of clunky dialogue and towards the end I was edging perilously close to that sock drawer. It’s not a good start and you have to be pretty determined to want to explore further. Fortunately for those who do, Attack of the Clones is much better. The acting improves, there are some truly spectacular action scenes and you start to feel a real affinity for the story, and its main protagonists. Revenge of the Sith, I’ll tell you now, is in a class of its own - but more on that later.

The problem is that for people like me, there are some fairly hefty teasers scattered throughout Episodes I-III. "Why do I get the feeling you’re going to be the death of me?" Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Anakin in Attack of the Clones and, while those clued up on the story will nod sagely and think "gosh, old Ben sure was predicting the future there," we uninitiated types are left wondering whether this is a thunking great spoiler, or just another poorly scripted joke. There’s also an awful lot of people standing round and talking gravely about the future. "One day, this may happen," they say, which means, "one day, this will absolutely, most definitely happen". It’s distracting and, while evidently meant to keep the insiders (ie those who’ve already seen the original trilogy of ‘sequels’) on side, for the likes of me it just feels a bit mean.

Another annoyance in Episodes I-III is the lack of introduction to a number of characters. Who on earth is this small green thing with the ears and the speech impediment that everyone’s so reverential to in The Phantom Menace? I honestly had no idea, and it’s only near the very end of the film, and then only fleetingly, that someone mentions the name Yoda. There’s also no real explanation of what "the Force" is - again it’s presumed knowledge - and I had to wait until Episode IV for Ben Kenobi to spell it all out. (although to be fair, I’d kind of picked it up by then). It’s certainly possible to watch all three prequels without knowing the back story but, ultimately, it’s a bit like reading the page of a book with a corner ripped off. You get the gist of what’s going on, but you can’t help but feel there’s something missing. As you might imagine though, it’s the transition from Revenge of the Sith to A New Hope that’s the acid test. Having left the cinema that morning with the births of Luke, Leia and Darth Vader fresh in my mind, the £80 million worth of CGI special effects still sparkling in my retinas, it was with some trepidation that I settled down on my sofa to watch A New Hope. The outlook was good, at first. There were C3PO and R2D2 getting up to their old tricks, here was Darth Vader looking all mean and nasty - every inch the evil overlord the Revenge of the Sith sets you up to believe he is - and hey, here was Obi-Wan Kenobi! OK, he was called Ben now, and one couldn’t avoid the fact that he was Alec Guinness, not Ewan McGregor, but still, it was good to see him again.

The shift to 1970s effects are less of a problem than you might think too; after all, they’re not that bad. What was far more distracting were the plot holes. I cringed every time Luke eyed up Leia (his sister, though he doesn’t know it yet) and I was amazed that Obi didn’t recognise R2D2 after all they’d been through together.

There was no explanation of why Leia was a Princess. Integral characters in the first three episodes, such as Darth Sidious and Qui-Gon Jinn, seemed to have been forgotten completely and, by the end, I felt no further along in the actual Star Wars story. Instead, it felt like a rehash - albeit a better scripted one - of Anakin Skywalker’s early years in The Phantom Menace.

I held out more hope for The Empire Strikes Back, which people had told me was by far the best in the series. Nuh-uh. The whole "Luke, I am your Father" stuff is drawn out for roughly the time it takes an oak tree to grow to full maturity - intensely frustrating since, well, I already knew that, and it seems unbelievable that Darth Vader took so long to work the paternity out in the first place. After all, Luke does share the same surname as him. Chewbacca - for my money 100 times more annoying than Jar Jar Binks - has an irritatingly large role, and the initial scenes portraying Yoda as a foodgrabbing, incomprehensible pest don’t fit with the Yoda of the first three movies.

The thing is - and you knew I would get to it eventually - that I loved Revenge of the Sith. For my money it was by far the best film in the series. Brilliantly acted, amazingly shot, the true heart of the story in every sense. I wept buckets when Padmé died, and writhed in torment when Anakin lost his limbs. And this, ultimately, is the series’s problem. If you watch Episodes I-III first, your heart belongs to these three movies and their main protagonists. Luke? Leia? Han Solo? Who cares? I didn’t, and though I watched on through Ewoks, Han and Leia’s love affair and Jabba the Hutt with a detached interest, I was forever thinking of the wee boy Ani who grew up to become the man behind that big black mask, and the beautiful young senator he had once loved. By the end of Return of the Jedi, the only character’s fate I was interested in was Darth Vader’s.

Future generations will, of course, be able to watch the series in any order they choose, and will no doubt gain enjoyment from Lucas’s epic no matter which episode they watch first. Ultimately though, what Lucas has created is two spectacular, if flawed, trilogies. Bear that in mind and even the most hardened novice will find themselves falling for the story set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...