You Love to See It: Revenge of the Sith

Space cruisers blast at each other point-blank like ships of the line. Clouds of fighters swirl, disintegrate, and reform amid the flurrying laser bolts and plasma shells as our heroes plummet straight into the maelstrom, looping around the vast hulls of dying warships and skimming the edges of explosions that gut city-sized expanses of armored plating. It’s a spectacle like nothing else Star Wars, or anything else for that matter, had done before, and it remains unequaled. As a sheer “throw stuff at the screen” extravaganza it shames the last decade and a half of calamitous, city-destroying superhero action, largely by virtue of George Lucas’s clear and concise knack for directing high-speed action. Here he takes the nail-biting tension of The Phantom Menace’s podracing sequence and lays it out in colorful cross-sections, creating a dazzling diorama of light and darkness.

The sense of motion during this sequence seems incredibly straightforward, but so much of it is about intelligent backgrounding, sound design, and scale. First we see a part of the engagement from above, ships gliding past and over one another at different elevations, and get a sense for its vertical depth, a rare piece of three-dimensional choreography. Then Obi-Wan and Anakin come onto the scene as we close in on a single star destroyer, the hull rushing by beneath their fighters imparting an instant sense of speed before they rocket out into empty space, the cityscape of Coruscant alive beneath them, the stars edging into the shot at the upper right corner. Right away we’re given multiple visually interesting points of reference to determine speed, distance, and depth. It makes it that much more claustrophobic when he dip inside the fighters’ cockpits, the sense of hurtling speed following us even when we can’t see it in action.

The entire sequence is so energetic. It launches a complicated, messy, sometimes half-cooked film so fast and so hard that there’s no time to hunt and pick for flaws. Lucas’s earnestness here, enacted on a huge scale by the standards of blockbusters at the time, is infectious, his direction simultaneously operatic and workmanlike. For all his shortcomings as a writer and director he had a nose for tension and grandeur and a track record of working with exceptionally skilled editors. The attack run on the Death Star in A New Hope, the aforementioned podracing sequence in The Phantom Menace; the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith synthesizes the laser focus of the former and the breakneck, hair-trigger chaos of the latter into something truly breathtaking.