I watched the last part of the Star Wars prequel trilogy on DVD last night. Very satisfying in a number of ways (plotting and dialogue not included, although Palpatine/Sidious was really a star turn). John Williams’ score contained a number of quite blatant steals from Arvo Part, and at least one leitmotif that either he nicked from Sigur Ros, or they nicked from him. It also reminded me a bit of Schoenberg’s second symphony in places, although to be honest a lot of film music does that.

The best things about the film were its sound-world, complete with all the whizzes and chirps and zwips and fwangs that made the original Star Wars sound so different, and its visual design which again maintains a high degree of continuity with the original trilogy - you see Obi Wan piloting a proto-Tie fighter, the table on which Darth Vader is assembled looks like the kind of table you’d find on board an Imperial destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back, and so on. To a very large extent, the film trades on aural and visual nostalgia, but it also riffs on established sonic and visual material in highly inventive ways.

If one were to attempt a psychoanalytico-ideological reading of the film, it would probably have to be in the style of the late Alphonse von Worden - which is to say that the whole thing is arguably a tissue of genocidalist apologetics, however much it may gesture towards an identification of the “war on terror” with Palpatine/Sidious’s power-grab. The Jedi and Sith alike cut literal swathes through scores of robots and clone warriors - the main offensive uses of the Force seem to be a) delivering explosive payloads into the heart of enemy spaceships and installations (or, in the case of General Grievous, into the hearts of enemies in person), and b) hacking people to bits. Lucas has a serious thing about amputation - one worries about the contents of his hard drive. Bodies are routinely chopped up, thrown about, electrocuted and consumed in blazing explosions. The survivors - or what little survives of them - are reconstructed piecemeal as machines; which are then chopped up, thrown about, electrocuted and consumed in blazing explosions. You’re lucky if you only die once.