For a while at the beginning of STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH, one almost has the sense that one is in for the kind of whiz-bang magic carpet ride that made Star Wars both fun and revolutionary thirty years ago. Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker seems to have something approaching a pulse, and Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi seems to have gained the clout in the last few years to tell George Lucas to stuff it; he's going to play the character HIS way, and as a result, actually imbues the first half-hour with the kind of fun that we remember so fondly.

Alas, that sense of fun disappears rather quickly -- as soon as Anakin gets home from his latest adventure and finds his former babysitter, then lover, now secret bride, is pregnant. For as advanced as the Republic is in terms of technology, it is, after all, long, long ago, and so no one in this galaxy far, far away has heard of birth control, and no one seems to know how to talk to one's loved one in a way that isn't cringeworthy. For alas, George Lucas still hasn't learned to write dialogue, and he's even less adept at writing dialogue in the context of interpersonal relationships.

For all the lip service Anakin gives to being pleased about this turn of events, it's clear that he is, like many men, ambivalent. And soon the disruption to marital bliss that any pregnancy can be is magnified by the fact that what was merely hinted at in Attack of the Clones is now readily apparent: an Oedipus complex of epic proportions young Skywalker has, and it's all kicked loose by the dynamic that the woman he's looked to to be both his lover and maternal figure is now looking to him, because she's going to be someone else's mother. So you see, it's all Padme's fault, really. I mean, it may be long long ago and far, far away, but even the ancient Egyptians had something resembling a pessary, and it's just sheer carelessness on her part, right?

Many of the problems I wrote about two years ago in regard to Attack of the Clones are still valid, so I won't rehash them here. But that said, REVENGE OF THE SITH is a much better film. Not a great film, and not an epic film, but it does have a good, surprisingly taut and fast-moving narrative for its nearly 2-1/2 hours of running time, a wonderfully integrated computer-generated reality, and all the popcorn stuff you want from George Lucas' grandiose vision of space opera. Lucas wisely eschews most of the political pronouncements that made the viewer's eyes glaze over in the previous film, notwithstanding its much-ballyhooed echoes of the bellicosity of George W. Bush, which are less important than the hype would have you believe.

The tragedy of REVENGE OF THE SITH is that in Anakin Skywalker, George Lucas has created a potentially interesting character arc involving loss and fear and what happens to a bright, gifted kid who loses his mother at a young age, is permanently scarred by the loss, and who often feels himself to be nothing but a pawn between warring factions. What happens to Anakin, how he is betrayed by his own emotional baggage, is the stuff of Grand Operatic Tragedy. Lucas is hyperaware of the Grand Themes of his space opera, no thanks to Joseph Campbell, but he's in such a hurry to get the Darth Vader mask on this kid that he doesn't allow Anakin's fall to play out, instead choosing to make Skywalker's descent to the dark side seem more like a question of choosing Door #3 instead of Door #2, when he could have gone either way.

That Anakin's dreams turn out not to be what will happen if he doesn't embrace the dark side of the Force, but instead what will happen if he does, seems to have escaped the story's creator, or at the very least, Lucas doesn't mine this irony for the story interest it has to a Jedi philosophy that seems to involve far too much "trusting your feelings." Well, if your star Padawan's feelings are filtered through the fear of abandonment caused by his fatherlessness, the loss of both his first mentor Qui Gon Jinn and his mother at an early age, and some pretty clear emotional weirdness that happens when the older woman you marry to replace your mother is about to become someone else's mother, it's pretty irresponsible to tell him to "trust his feelings." It's tempting to just say that a good behavioral/cognitive therapist could have helped poor Anakin more than all the Jedi training in the world, but there's a highly complex character in Anakin screaming to get out, and neither writer/director Lucas nor actor Christensen has the chops to set him free.

Lucas seems hamstrung by the fact that the audience knows what's going to happen; unable to understand that even when you know of the unhappy outcome, an even passable screenwriter/director can make you hope that what you know will happen doesn't. For all of James Cameron's faults as a screenwriter, and God knows some of his dialogue in Titanic fell into the theatre seats with a resounding =thud= like chunks of iceberg, he understood that just because you know the outcome of a story doesn't mean you don't want to believe, even for a short time, that it's going to be different this time. But for all his problems with dialogue, Cameron at least knows how create vivid characters, then hire good actors and entrust the characters to them, whereas Lucas insists on being The Director -- even though he's lost whatever ability to direct actors he may have once had. We KNOW that Hayden Christensen is capable of far better work. His uncanny, nuanced portrayal of Stephen Glass in Shattered Glass proved that in the hands of a director who understands character, he's at least a serviceable actor, not the wooden, lifeless Abercrombie and Fitch model we see here. And we KNOW from that sensational scene in Closer in which Natalie Portman's character and Clive Owen's character play off each other's hard candy shells that she has the potential for greatness. And Ewan McGregor has in twelve years compiled a truly astonishing away of great performances so we KNOW what he can do.

I don't expect a Star Wars film to be a quietly moving character study like The Station Agent, but if I'm expected to feel the kind of investment in the Fall of Anakin Skywalker that thirty years of lead-up ought to engender, I expect the director to focus on Anakin's humanity at least long enough to make me CARE that he's taking this disastrous road and that there's nothing I can do to stop him; to care that he's reading his own dreams all wrong, and to linger on his conflict long enough to give me that hope. There is one all-too-brief flash in which Anakin's internal conflict about who's telling him the truth gives us that brief flash of hope -- but Lucas refuses to run with it and let it play out, because there are light saber fights to be had, and the kicking of much Jedi ass to be done, and babies to birth and lots of CGI explosions and fires and all the cool stuff that he still loves best, despite his grand mythical pretensions -- and there's that mask which marks the Grand Turning Point of the film, the Symbol Which Ties It All Together, so he rushes through the most interesting, nuanced part of the film just to put a 30-year-old mask on his protagonist. It's as if Lucas himself has had enough of all this and can't wait for it to be over.

And yet, for all the sense of relief that I think many of the series' biggest fans have that this final chapter in the saga Does Not Suck, there's no denying that while the drawing of this particular arc of the circle of Star Wars is nowhere near as good as it could be, there's a certain comfort level in finally closing this particular book, knowing that the story is at last complete, that we now know all that is to be told. For unlike Bilbo Baggins, who left some blank pages for Frodo, who left some blank pages for Samwise, there's no more empty pages at the end of this particular story. It's over. Now go home already.

 

-- Jill Cozzi

Read Gabriel's review of Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith