Boo! Hiss! Yay!
At first glance, I hated it. How cheesy! How stupid!
Oh wait, I take that back; it’s probably the most perfect moment in the entire film. Perhaps in all six films.
I’m referring to the scene at the end of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith when the black-armored Darth Vader we all know and love is revealed for the first time. [extremely minor spoilers follow]
By “perfect”, I do not, mind you, necessarily mean “the best”, or “the most exciting”. Certainly not “most realistic”.
In a 1977 Rolling Stone interview, George Lucas said [emphasis mine]:
I was a real fan of Flash Gordon and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, this is something, this is a natural. One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, “Why?” What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts of [Stanley Kubrick's movie] 2001 and get on the romantic side of it.[...]
I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space.” I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself[...]. I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.
Now close your eyes and picture it: that long shot of the operating table rotating upright, with the eeee-vil Darth Sidious cackling and wringing his hands in malevolent glee, his unmoving Frankenstein creation newly resurrected and clamped to the table by the wrists and ankles. All that’s missing, truly, are a few tesla coils sparking in the background.
This is the very image of the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials that Lucas wanted to invoke. The only real competition in my mind is the moment in the original movie (that is, Chapter IV), when the dashing young hero fires a grappling hook into the rafters, grabs the beautiful princess in his strong arm, and swings across the bottomless chasm to safety — barely avoiding the approaching hordes of anonymous masked stormtroopers .
This is straight out of the 1930s and 40s. If ever Lucas truly nailed his intended invocation of the old-school high space fantasy adventures, these are the moments. One for the villian, one for the hero.
Perfect.
