The Dark Side of Acting

The remainder of the family finally made the pilgrimage to see “Revenge of the Sith” tonight. The effects get better all the time, and the film is obviously a pivotal point in what is probably great film saga of my lifetime, but one wonders if there is a limit to how bad acting can get.

I try to intellectualize, and think that MAYBE if we didn’t know what was going to happen and have all our expectations built up for it, the acting wouldn’t seem so bad … but then I’m forced to conclude, nah, it would still be horrible. The moment of conversion to the dark side would seem to be worth a re-take or two, but I have to wonder if Lucas didn’t just let them stumble through it and hit the showers without ever bothering. At least I HOPE so, it would be an awful shame to be one of the actors and have given that “their best”.

Some ado has been made about the supposed “lines that sound like Bush” from the fledgling Darth Vader. One item is supposedly a little mix of “those that are not with us are against us”. However, Bush didn’t exactly invent that concept, one place to read it is Luke 11:23 “He that is not with me is against me”. I suppose I could try to put some meaning into Darth’s promises to “end the war”, “provide safety, and FREEDOM” … and some comments about “democracy”, but it seems like a stretch to me. The use of the term “freedom” did seem a bit odd for Darth, he never really struck me as that sort of “free and easy” kind of guy, but if the Lucas eye for acting will let some of the things pass that did, I would guess that dialog precision for characters isn’t something he wakes up at night over.

There are plenty of Evangelicals out there that get pretty excited over the whole “force thing” as being dangerous for kids to play with. It certainly has a bit of a Zen flavor with it on the “attachment is a bad thing” front, and “don’t become a control freak” … which of course Vader is hard to beat as en embodiment of. On the other hand though, it does seem to pretty starkly identify the concepts of good and evil, which is somewhat rare in the modern world. It also lets a vast amount of the secular world play with the idea that there MIGHT be “something more” than just matter and technology.

It seems to me that the answer on most of these things is “it’s only a movie after all”. The light saber fights were great, lots of special effects, and what had to happen happened … even if the acting did make that part rather painful at times. I remember sitting in the theatre and watching the first one in Eau Claire WI the summer of ’77 before my senior year of college. Not many movie tales play out over that much of our lives. Better acting would be nice, but I still tip my hat to the genius of George Lucas. Star Wars has become one of the shared experiences of nearly all Americans and most of the world, and on balance, it has been a pretty good force.