USA, PG-13, 140 m, 2005
Directed by George Lucas. Stars Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, et al.

George Lucas’s purported swan song to the Star Wars franchise, Revenge of the Sith (using Star Wars: Episode III before the title seems a bit too formal for what is really just a glossy rendering of those Flash Gordon chapter plays from the 1930s) largely succeeds in bridging the narrative gap between Attack of the Clones and A New Hope. We knew the latter back in 1977 simply as Star Wars, a tacky, though spirited space opera that went on to rake in gazillions of dollars and forever transform (some may charge for the worse) the way Tinsel Town made movies. But twenty-some years later, what with the almost perverse emphasis on computer-generated FX in The Phantom Menace and the cold and stiff Clones, it was becoming evident that the new Star Wars flicks had lost touch with the childlike giddiness that endeared us to the original trilogy. How did the once visionary Lucas come to think that Star Wars devotees placed less value on story and character development than eye-popping action sequences? Perhaps all those years he spent doing God-knows-what on Skywalker Ranch blunted his once especially keen “movie sense.” But just as we were starting to look to filmmakers like Peter Jackson (who, ironically, fell in love with the medium because of Star Wars) to give us what Lucas no longer seemed capable of, Revenge of the Sith blasts into the multiplex and recaptures that excitement we felt as younguns when The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi premiered. Of course, since this most recent chapter prefaces A New Hope, it’s inherently anti-climactic; the only real suspense is how Lucas is going to connect the dots and lead us back to where we came in circa ’77. But for its last hour or so, Sith throbs with the mix of excitement and dread that singled out Empire, and at long last we’re plugged into what motivated Lucas to spend ten years of his life fleshing out (well, maybe it’s more like pixeling out) the back-story of A New Hope. Though we had to sit through an awful lot of Jar-Jarring filler to get here, Lucas makes it worth our while.   

Though I knew that the last act of Revenge of the Sith would find Anakin Skywalker’s soul merging with the dark side of the Force, I wasn’t prepared for the journey there to be so emotionally draining. Watching Anakin fall from grace and turn into Darth Vader is both horrifying and sad; his turnaround at the end of Jedi has now gained in poignancy. For years we’ve only heard about the purge of the Jedi, but it’s finally depicted here in a disquieting montage of clone troopers turning on their unsuspecting Jedi compatriots and frostily dispatching with every Knight from the cone-headed Ki-Adi-Mundi to the galaxy’s only blue-eyed Negro, Stass Allie. Children may become distressed upon seeing their favorite action figures reduced to so much space dust, but even adults will feel a pang when Anakin readies his lightsaber to butcher Jedi schoolchildren. (Mind, the violence in Sith is just as bloodless as it was in Attack of the Clones, but it’s much more intense, justly earning the series’ first PG-13 rating.) After learning from the audio commentary on the recent DVD release of The Empire Strikes Back that Lucas regretted exposing small fries to the severity of that film’s second half, I was stunned to find Sith taking on the color of a horror show as it surveyed the baking depths of Hell. One might wonder if the fan boys (perturbed with the increasing infantilism of Star Wars since the Ewoks reared their furry heads in Jedi) influenced the redirection towards gloominess in Sith or if it was part of Lucas’s grand design all along. When The Phantom Menace debuted back in 1999, Star Wars geeks the world over were aghast to see the long-awaited resurrection of their hallowed space saga devalued by the pratfalls of a cosmic vaudevillian named Jar Jar Binks. I’m the first to admit that Jar Jar was given at least fifteen minutes too much screen time in Phantom, but when I began to take notice of how the goofy Gungan was estranging older members of the Star Wars fan base, and perhaps even subverting all that Lucas had built, I toyed with the idea of heading an Ahmed Best fan club. (In regard to the claim that Jar Jar is a caricature of black Americans, well, mesa thinks dat smells stinkowiff.) The anti-Binks brigade devoted entire websites to ripping on our floppy-eared friend, which not only suggested that they needed lives, but that they had forgotten (those silly rabbits) that Star Wars movies were for kids. (Take a stroll through Toys ‘r’ Us if you need reminding.) In the end, though, Jar Jar’s detractors had their way: his appearance in Sith barely amounts to a cameo. 

Phantom’s follow-up, Attack of the Clones, was such a lackluster affair that I found myself pining for Jar Jar’s Jerry Lewis meets Butterfly McQueen style of tomfoolery. And when I wasn’t stifling yawns during Anakin and Padme’s love scenes by the Naboo waterfalls, I was cursing Lucas’s seeming indifference toward flesh and blood actors. The schmuck couldn’t have cared less about promoting an atmosphere on his stupid green-screen sets that would’ve enabled his players to hit the right notes; they were little more than seasoning for his CG stew (apt verbiage for a filmmaker who likens directing to cooking), and you just knew that he was itching for the day when he could digitize them out of the frame for good. Despite its myriad of technical “improvements” over The Phantom Menace, I thought that Clones looked like Bantha do-do. That it was shot entirely on digital video (a first for the Star Wars series) was nothing for the nerds at Lucasfilm to crow about: the action was blurry, indistinct. I think it was an even bigger faux pas for Lucas to trade in Yoda’s foam rubber for pixels; the lovely nuances of Frank Oz’s puppetry were forsaken for a dumb gag in which the half-pint sage went at it head-to-ankle with Count Dooku. (Couple that with the fate of Sy Snootles in the 1987 revamping of Jedi and it becomes clear that Lucas doesn’t consider puppetry to be much of an art form.) I had once thought that Lucas’s aim was to realize a greater authenticity with each new Star Wars film, but Clones couldn’t have looked more synthetic. Even the film’s littlest moments were awash in CG trickery; the director’s inexplicable need to fancy up every godforsaken shot kept pulling me out of the story. I must say that I find Lucas’s FX-obsessed approach to these prequels (as well as his tweaking of the originals) ironic when you consider that the Star Wars films are (at least on a thematic level) emphatically anti-technology. After all, it was a stick-wielding tribe of teddy bears that finally succeeded in toppling the Empire. (Has the force of the all-mighty buck weakened Lucas’s ideals?) Incredibly, Revenge of the Sith contains more special effects shots than The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones combined, but the impossibly high expectations put on this chapter practically command Lucas to pull out all the stops. Lucas still doesn’t trust enough in his effects to let us linger on them, and yet the director’s hurried approach winds up complimenting the story’s intrinsic urgency. Sith really moves.  

Picking up three years after the start of the Clone Wars (the events of which can be viewed in the Cartoon Network’s series of the same name), Sith hits the ground running and rarely slows down. Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), Ben Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and R2-D2 (sometimes operated by Kenny Baker) are on a mission to rescue the kidnapped Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from the mechanical clutches of the Separatist droid army leader, General Grievous (voiced by Don Wood).  To reach Grievous’s flagship, The Invisible Hand, our heroes must not only blast their way through a sky full of enemy aircraft, but detachments of insect-like droid saboteurs that are released onto their starfighters by way of laser-guided missiles. The vulture robots signal an imaginative daring that will flood the rest of Sith; too bad it took two whole Star Wars films before ILM’s digital razzle-dazzle was put to good use. Maybe Lucas needed that much time to remember that special effects aren’t all that special if they’re not figured into a gripping yarn. When The Phantom Menace first hit the screens, there was lots of carrying on (mostly by the critics) about how “breath-taking” its special effects were, but what I saw being cranked out by the new school of movie magicians had nothing over the quainter “practical effects” seen decades earlier in such wonderments as Bladerunner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Lucas’s own The Empire Strikes Back—all of which had interesting stories to tell. If the effects in Sith seem livelier than those seen in Episodes I and II, it’s because Lucas has finally thought up a premise that’s worthy of their inclusion. The most inspired piece of all this recent CG trickery is General Grievous, a spindly cyborg with the face of a grasshopper (it was actually modeled after a spray-nozzle) and a hacking cough (supplied by Lucas himself). Grievous can split each of his robotic arms in two, allowing him to spin around four lightsabers at a time. His unorthodox fighting style has won him many duels against the Jedi, and he keeps the swords of his slain opponents as trophies under his robe. But Grievous’s true function here is to foreshadow Anakin’s destiny of becoming “more machine than man—twisted and evil.” 

Palpatine’s abduction is really just a ruse designed by the Chancellor himself (or his alter-ego, Darth Sidious) to get Anakin back in the ring with Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), who won the first match in Clones by severing Anakin’s right hand. The ensuing duel recalls (or, in terms of the series’ chronology, foreshadows) the one between Luke and Vader in Jedi as Palpatine, looking to trade in his aging flunky for a newer model, commands Annie to direct all of his murderous rage against Dooku. (The eighty-something Lee’s head has been grafted onto the body of a more nimble stunt double so Lucas’s fondness for leaps and somersaults can be worked into the fight.) But whereas Luke was able to stifle his rage in the face of Palpatine’s mocking, Annie succumbs to it, and with a lacerating glowstick in each hand, snips Dooku’s head clean off.  

To show his appreciation, Palpatine assigns Anakin to a chair on the Jedi Council. But Yoda and company won’t abide the Chancellor meddling in Jedi affairs, so they deny Anakin “Master” status and limit his involvement with the Council to keeping the minutes at their powwows. The slight is compounded after the Council requests Anakin to spy on Palpatine and find out if he harbors any ambitions of a power grab. But Palpatine is wise to their game, and he counters by telling Anakin that the Jedi are the ones scheming to become the Republic’s high muckety-mucks. In what may be the film’s most gripping scene, a tiny angel and a tiny devil position themselves on either side of Anakin’s head and vie for the attention of his conscience. Just kidding.  

As I write this review, recalling how all the events in Sith tied together is proving more difficult than Luke’s charge to mentally raise his sunken X-wing from the swamp on Dagobah. The movie bounces between so many planes of action that you find yourself too busy shifting gears to invest any feeling in what Lucas is throwing at you. Part of the appeal of the original trilogy was its simplicity, which was exemplified by our heroes’ mission in A New Hope: rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star and then blow it up. I stopped feigning interest in the dispute over the taxation of trade routes half way through Phantom’s opening title crawl, opting instead to bask in John Williams’ Wagnerian score while reflecting upon those simpler days of sand lizards and bickering robots. Sith also has a mess of exposition that we have to slog through in order to reach the good stuff, but at least there’s a through-line: Anakin’s gradual swerve into the dark side, which was Lucas’s motivation to turn out these prequels in the first place. Anakin’s great failing seems to be his fear of loss (which sprung up after his mother was killed by some Tusken Raiders in Clones), and when he learns that his secret wife, Padmé (Natalie Portman), has become pregnant, he is beset by premonitions of her passing away during childbirth. Alas, the weighty exchanges between Annie and his missus are just as stilted as their lovey-dovey scenes were in Clones. The dialogue is almost as atrocious, too, despite word that Lucas brought in British playwright Tom Stoppard to help dress it up. (I don’t know if I believe that; there’s not much in the writing here that indicates an artier shift from the last two films.) Thankfully, we’re spared howlers like “You are in my very soul, tormenting me” and “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere—not like you. You’re everything soft and smooth.” But Sith is due at least a few sniggers with “Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo.” (And Harrison Ford thought he had a hard time speaking the shit that Lucas writes!) The character stuck with the crappiest dialogue, though, is Yoda; his backwards syntax has been growing more awkward with each passing film. In Empire, screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett found just the right balance of puckish humor and fortune cookie philosophy for the little green guru to speak, but in the hands of Lucas, Yoda sounds like a retard. Lines such as “Faith in your new apprentice misplaced may be” and “A prophecy that misread could have been” not only edge toward self-parody, but also are confusing and out of sync with Yoda’s colorful and relatively varied speech patterns in Empire. Upon Lucas’s word processor a blaster should be discharged.  

As Yoda joins Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and his Wookiee brethren in fighting off the droid armies on Kashyyyk (the set design of which ties nicely into—believe it or not—The Star Wars Holiday Special), Obi-Wan ventures to Utapau to hunt down and kill General Grievous. In order to scale the outer rims the planet’s cavernous sinkholes, Obi-Wan uses a varactyl, a feathered lizard named Boga, as his mount. Boga is an unusually large critter, but fleet of foot, proving more than a match for Grievous’s wheel bike. Meanwhile, Palpatine is sinking his fangs deeper into Anakin’s soul. At the Galaxies Opera House (where the main attraction consists of vaguely angelic forms sloshing around inside of floating translucent orbs), he sells him on the idea that the dark side, through its manipulation of midi-chlorians, can keep Padmé from becoming worm food. Eventually, Anakin figures out that his mentor is moonlighting as a Sith Lord, which means, of course, that the Jedi Order’s most desperate hour is nigh.  

Sith may belong to the effects wizards, but acting kudos go to Ian McDiarmid, who may be one of the most underused thespians in all of filmdom. As Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, McDiarmid achieves an almost regal aloofness, but as Darth Sidious, he erupts with an unbridled lunacy that pilfers the limelight from everything around him—including the unfortunate Hayden Christensen, who’s just not growing on me. (My wife thinks that Christian Bale would have been a more desirable choice for the role of Anakin, and I whole-heartedly concur.) There’s nothing inside of Christensen to make us believe that his Anakin is capable of the sickening mayhem that he partakes in here, though Lucas’s inability to think up a plausible motivation for the character turning evil may have something to do with it. The prepubescent Anakin we met in The Phantom Menace was selfless, honest and obedient—a parent’s wet dream. But if the character had been permitted a whisper of aggression (like getting his kicks out of blasting defenseless womp rats), his subsequent conversion to the Sith would’ve been easier to swallow. I really don’t see how a bad dream and a dis’ from the Jedi Council is enough to make him go off and start carving up “younglings.” Still, an imaginative actor might’ve been able to expand on Lucas’s half-baked ideas, but Christensen is about as resourceful as a Tatooine rock.  

At least we have Ewan McGregor; his unfussy performance as Obi-Wan is the glue that holds these three films together. And who couldn’t dig on Sam Jackson as the galaxy’s baddest Jedi Knight, Mace Windu? Of course, since the Jedi are all but extinct come A New Hope means that Mace must buy the farm sometime in Sith. When he informs Palpatine that he’s under arrest for fraternizing with the dark side, Palpatine whips out his lightsaber, and with a mere three strokes, disposes of Mace’s Jedi comrades, Saesee Tiin, Agen Kolar and the amphibious Kit Fisto. Mace proves not as easy to kill, so Palpatine zaps him with bolts of Force lightning. Using his signature purple sword, Mace deflects the blasts, which now reign back on Palpatine to either disfigure his face or reveal the truth of it—I’m not quite sure which. Anxious to keep the Sith Lord alive, if only to continue picking his brain about how to save Padmé, Anakin jumps in and helps Palpatine send Mace to his eternal reward. Alas, Anakin’s bad judgment has now irreversibly united him with the Sith, which is made official after Palpatine bequeaths upon his new partner in crime the title of Darth Vader. And so begins the saga’s bleakest chapter: Palpatine implements “Plan 66,” the extermination of the Jedi, and then announces to the Galactic Senate that he will establish himself as the galaxy’s permanent sovereign ruler and reorganize the Republic into the First Galactic Empire. Meanwhile, Anakin is cleaning house at the Jedi temple, slicing and dicing his way ever closer to a spiritual meltdown. When Yoda comes across a hidden camera’s recording of Anakin’s nasty doings, he decides to go to the Emperor’s office and kick some Sith butt.   

Ever since I was a kid in ill-fitting Garanimals, I’ve longed for a battle royale between Yoda and the Emperor (each is the supreme embodiment of their respective side of the Force), and Sith delivers the goods and the some. The Emperor throws everything he has into trying to squash his grammatically challenged opponent, trashing the Senate rotunda in the process. The symbolism is obvious, yet powerful: the planets will no longer have a say in their future now that this fascist bastard has taken over! Which, alas, brings me to the hullabaloo over Sith’s supposed Bush-bashing. The left-leaning, Michael Moore-loving reviewers (actually, there would be no other kind if yours truly had got into writing about, say, the mating rituals of star-nosed moles instead of film) will tell you that Anakin’s “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy” line is a galactic jab at Dubya, who turned a similar phrase when addressing nations that were reticent about joining America’s war on terrorism. Lucas maintains that any resemblance between Sith’s villains to our sitting president is entirely coincidental, but that hasn’t stopped the Eberts and Edelsteins (Ebersteins?) from linking the Emperor’s sweeping galactic reforms to the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act… Wait a sec—this is a fucking Star Wars film, fer crissakes! Let’s get back to the groovy swordplay.  

There are no less than five major duels in Sith, but the one most fans have been waiting for is the one between Anakin and Obi-Wan. The pivotal confrontation takes place on the volcanic moon of Mustafar, which is covered in belching calderas and raging seas of magma. All that’s missing is a cloven-hoofed demon jabbing a pitchfork in Anakin’s rump. But Obi-Wan does us one better by hacking off Anakin’s left arm and both of his legs. As the tide of a fiery lake comes in to cook what’s left of Anakin’s fallen body, Obi-Wan walks away, leaving his former Padawan for dead. “I hate you,” Anakin cries out, his skin sizzling. 

The Emperor soon arrives to collect Anakin’s mutilated body, and then takes it away to be reconstructed (à la Frankenstein’s monster) into that towering, asthmatic creep we loved to hiss in A New Hope. But when the signature black helmet of cinema’s most iconic baddie is lowered and locked onto Anakin’s head, Lucas doesn’t demean the moment with a lot of fanfare. No, this is a moment of particularly tragic dimensions, and it marks the first time that I wept at a Star Wars movie. As Anakin Skywalker’s essence all but disappears into the personage of Darth Vader, Lucas reemerges as an artist. With him once again the Force is.

May 26, 2005

© Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.