Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (review)
Sith Happens
This isn’t just a movie. You don’t have to have been married by a justice of the peace in Jedi robes or have named your dog Boba or have spent the last three weeks on a line outside the Ziegfeld or Grauman’s Chinese Theater to feel that. If you’re any kind of geek and you’re around my age — 35 — you’ve spent pretty much your whole life waiting for this moment. It was nine years ago — 1996 — that George Lucas announced he’d be making a new Star Wars trilogy, and if you’re like me, hearing this was like being eight years old again and being told to wait patiently for summer vacation or your birthday. It won’t be finished until 2005? How can I possibly be expected to wait for that kind of eternity to find out how Darth Vader becomes Darth Vader?
And now it’s here. Now it’s over — or at least it will be by the end of August, when we’ve all seen Episode III a dozen times and have memorized it and are so totally wrung out by the exhausting tragedy and anguish of it that we’ll actually be ready for a break from it… until the DVD comes out in time for Christmas, as Lucas has promised.
And you will be wrung out. I don’t entirely agree with my spiritual brother in geekiness, Kevin Smith, that the film is “fucking awesome” — though there are certainly moments that are fucking awesome — but there is a haunting, disconcerting bittersweetness to the film that is impossible to shake. It’s a particularly GenX response, I suspect: people who saw the original films as adults will not share this reaction, I don’t think; nor will younger kids who did not experience Star Wars the way we did the first time around in the 70s and early 80s. It has to do with the visceral first encounter with Darth Vader — you had to be a little kid of a certain age, it had to come on a big screen, and it had to be something you couldn’t possibly have anticipated (ie, Vader couldn’t already have been a pop-
You know what I’m talking about: The corridor on that gleaming white spaceship blows open, and in marches this huge… thing, towering over everyone else, a monster with a skull helmet and a dominating presence that makes you want to cower like a puppy and let loose your bladder on that shiny white floor. Is it a robot? Is it a person? What the hell is it? It scared the shit out of me as an eight-
But now, here, in Revenge of the Sith? He really is just a man — a deeply flawed one, but a man nevertheless: sympathetic, complicated, tragic. Forget Episodes I and II — I never seriously believed that annoying little kid and that whiny teenager had anything whatsoever to do with Darth Vader, and it’s pretty clear that Lucas was just treading water with the first two films to get to this one. I’m not saying that Episode III doesn’t have problems as a film — 95 percent of the dialogue is horrendously awkward, for instance — but there’s mood and attitude here that there wasn’t in the other recent flicks, like Lucas actually has a point to make and cares deeply about making it. There’s a passion in this film that Lucas hasn’t shown since maybe even American Graffiti.
Of course, Lucas’s passion doesn’t have anything to do with rocking the foundations of the childhood fantasies of millions of Generation Xers — he’s concerned with politics and how democracies turn into dictatorships, and everyone’s going to be quoting Padmé’s terrific and terrifying line “So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause,” when the Republic Senate readily hands power over to Palpatine, and Obi-
If you wanna talk about who steals the film, we can talk about the battle between McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor (Robots, Big Fish) as Obi-
All those problems aside, though, the final confrontation between Obi-
Or maybe we’ve been waiting since 1977, even if we didn’t realize it. Because for all the amazing CGI and resplendent FX on display here, what is perhaps the supreme moment of Revenge of the Sith — at least from a rethinking-
see also:
• Reintegrating the Shattered Divine: The Hero’s Journey of Anakin Skywalker [at The Internet Review of Science Fiction]
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MPAA: rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and some intense images
viewed at a semipublic screening with an audience of critics and ordinary moviegoers
official site | IMDb
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