Sith Happens

As George Lucas packs up his light-sabre and bids adieu to the Skywalkers, Donald Clarke ponders the Star Wars Director's greatest folly - the lily-pad longing, fly-sucker that is Jar Jar Brinks.

Revenge of the Sith? You have to be kidding. Could there be any more persuasive evidence of George Lucas's arrogance than his decision to permit an anagram of the word shit to appear in the title of the latest Star Wars film? One imagines George's terrified courtiers - the sort of stringy little beasts that sat around Jabba the Hutt's daybed - desperately trying to work up the courage to explain that one simple transposition will give any disrespectful organ a neat headline for its snide review. Why not just call the film Revenge of the Turkey and be done with it?

Of course, Lucas has made a habit of ignoring unsolicited advice. Following the release of The Phantom Menace, a film so astringently awful that it stripped enamel from teeth and caused weeping lesions to break out on exposed skin, the fans retired to their basements and, after running the flick's various computer-generated atrocities through their minds, decided to direct their inevitable hate campaign against one Jar Jar Binks. For the last six years the internet has slowly been taken over by sites detailing exotic ways of doing in the Nabooian senator. Innocently try to access some electronic pornography and, as likely as not, you will be confronted by a shocking image of the unfortunate alien with a light-sabre through his head.

Binks, a pimp-rolling amphibian, who speaks in an offensively caricatured version of Jamaican patois, is not the first being to attract the hostility of science fiction propeller-heads. In the late 1980s, following the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a large band of trekkies (such fanatics prefer to be called trekkers, which is as good a reason as any to call them something else) repeatedly demanded the disembowelling of Ensign Wesley Crusher. Wes's services were dispensed with less than halfway through the series' run. At about the same time outraged chaps in scarves were deluging the BBC with complaints about the childish antics of Sylvester McCoy on Dr Who. The whovians, subsequently deprived of their favourite show for a decade and a half, may have ended up regretting the forcefulness of their argument.

But Star Wars fans (starries? warrers? swarriors?) are the most unforgiving in their hatred. A firm orthodoxy of their church states that Return of the Jedi would have been the greatest film ever made - greater than Tokyo Story, than L'Atalante, than Predator - if George had only managed to get through it without calling upon the services of the pesky little Ewoks. What is so wrong with these angry teddy bears? Well, like Jar Jar, it seems they are a little too cuddly and adorable.

The frog-beast and the fighting Furbies look a little too much like characters from a children's film and saying as much helps fans reassure themselves that they are devoted to an epic every bit as important as The Maharbharata or The Ring Cycle. There are, after all, no cuddly toys in The Iliad.

In fact, though Binks may be unreservedly dreadful, a progenitor of troubling memories you'd pay to forget, the Ewok folk stand for the best things about the Star Wars universe: they are funny, unpretentious and rather loveable. Most importantly, they appeal to younger, female children, a demographic which should - whatever darthmaulfan356 may think - form a significant part of such films' primary audience.

Anyway, Lucas is too rich and too insulated to care what the disciples think. Accordingly, Jar Jar Binks, an intergalactic ambassador for his lily pad, turned up during the arse-numbingly boring council sequences of Star Wars Part II: Attack of the Clones. And he is back again for Revenge of the Sith. "Jar Jar's senatorial robes are a dark red and violet scheme and cover much of his body," the official website, informs those who care."Jar Jar does not die in the film," Rick McCallum, Star Wars' producer, confirms to a disappointed universe.

Now, however much you may regret the presence of the shambling alien, it is hard not to admire the director's stubbornness. In an age where the average blockbuster is test-screened and focused-grouped into oblivion, it is refreshing to see a film-maker blithely persevering with a character everybody loathes. The audience naively believes that, having paid to go and see these films for a quarter of a century, they have acquired some sort of ownership over them. Not a bit of it.

I'm George Lucas and if I want to insert quasi-profanities in the title of my film and fill it full of racially dubious pond creatures then that is what I will do. You don't like it? Well, Sith happens. (Advance reports suggest that Revenge of the Sith may be by far the least terrible film in the current trilogy. With that in mind, The Ticket is taking the opportunity of using this awful pun - twice - while it can.)