A Pretty Impressive Capper, But Vader Should Still Seek Revenge for Defamation of Character

“Star Wars is the defining event of our lives,” my dad remarked to my mom on our way home from seeing Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. “The first one came out just as we entered adulthood, and the last one just as our kids are entering adulthood.” It’s a formidable thought. Nearly 30 years for George to complete his legacy. Unless he still has the triple trilogy in mind… It’s strange, setting up a series in such a way that everyone knows how the story ends long before it begins. We all knew that this third installment leading directly into the epic that started it all would be by far the darkest of the six. It makes for a slightly surreal experience, knowing that everything has to go wrong, watching in revulsion but stopping just short of willing it not to happen because you know it’s required for the glorious events of the original trilogy. In the end it begs the question: Did we really need these prequels in the first place? I’m not a hard-core enough fan to answer that question. But I recognize this is the end of an era, and I celebrate it by making it my 600th review – one hundred for each movie if you like. No matter what, you have to admit George Lucas had a pretty impressive accomplishment.

So, how was it? Well, I missed the mayhem of opening night, though my brother and our exchange student got in on the fun. My parents and I saw it three days later. We still had to buy our tickets three hours in advance and wait in line for an hour after turning in our tickets in order to be assured decent seats. Aside from a few light sabers, ours was not a costumed audience. Only one man had the full regalia, a fellow who’d been there for the first showing (and maybe every night after) in his $2700 Darth Vader costume. I want one. Not really. I’d rather have a life-size R2-D2. Anyway, we were treated to a rather unusual occurrence that night. Just before the previews were about to start, the lights went up and a man, armed with the disclaimer that he had nothing to do with the movie, announced that he was attending with his girlfriend, who was very special to him, and he requested that she join him in front of the screen. Then he proceeded to get down on one knee and propose, and her affirmative answer was met with rapturous applause. Oddly enough, I think it was the loudest applause of the night…

Trouble is, Revenge of the Sith is rarely a movie that makes you cheer. It’s like a Shakespearean tragedy, with Anakin (Hayden Christiansen) in the spot occupied by Othello and MacBeth and other anti-heroes who leave the audience groaning and thinking again and again, You moron! Anakin is a decent guy at the start of the film, teaming up with master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) to battle evil robots while rushing to the defense of indispensable little R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) when his mentor maligns him. His passion is his undoing, however. In spite of Yoda’s warnings to release himself from attachment to anything he fears to lose, he is increasingly driven by paranoia brought on by a series of disturbing dreams about his beloved secret bride Padme (Natalie Portman). Christiansen doesn’t bug me as much in this movie as he did in Attack of the Clones, but he’s still too moody and whiny to be very likable, or very impressive. I can put up with Luke’s petulance at the outset of A New Hope; at least he comes across as a sweet guy. I don’t know how I wanted Anakin to be, but I think I preferred having his origins ambiguous. Darth Vader is arguably the most formidable movie villain in cinematic history, and I find him cheapened by an inadequate history. And while we are supposed to believe that the intensity of his love for Padme is so great that he is willing to all but destroy the Jedi order to ensure her safety, they always seem wooden in their scenes together. It doesn’t help that they’re still hampered by the occasional excruciating dialogue. If my husband had just told me that he wanted to take over the galaxy, I’d like to think I could have come up with something more useful to say than “You’re breaking my heart.”

If Christiansen still lacks chemistry with Portman, he demonstrates it with McGregor. They kick off the film together with a dizzying action sequence at the conclusion of which a light-hearted conversation between Obi-Wan and Anakin reveals just a hint of jealousy that the padawan is outranking his teacher. Theirs is a relationship torn by the tension between affection and ambition. For the most part, we do get the sense Obi-Wan accepts the notion that he is training a Jedi who will become more powerful than him and resents the fact that other members of the council find Anakin less than trustworthy. Anakin, however, is less generous, always grumbling about Obi-Wan standing in the way of what he wants to do. It doesn’t take him long to abandon concern for his master. As Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) leads him further down the path of corruption, Obi-Wan looks more and more like the enemy. McGregor helms most of the film’s truly emotional scenes, most notably the culmination of their climactic battle in which an agonized Obi-Wan is forced to admit once and for all that he has lost his padawan forever. We see a great deal more from McGregor this time around, and I would classify him as a much better actor than Christiansen. It’s just a shame that one of the most beloved Star Wars characters was played by two different actors who’ve seemed almost resentful of the fact that they were involved. I suspect McGregor’s recent comments on his fans may have alienated a few people; I guess he has a hunch now how Sir Alec Guinness felt.

I found it very hard to feel sorry for Anakin throughout the film, even if his initial motivation was noble. It’s sad to see him manipulated by Palpatine, who is perhaps the true star of the film as McDiarmid takes him from benign presence who nonetheless seems to possess a slightly sinister air to fully disclosed evil emperor. But it seems good judgment should have tipped him off early on that Palpatine was up to no good. He recoils at Palpatine’s request to kill Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, who must be getting tired of playing second-tier villains with somewhat embarrassing death scenes) and refuses to acquiesce to his demand that – supposedly in the interests of time – they leave Obi-Wan behind. But apparently there are years of influence at work that we don’t see on screen. Palpatine is truly frightening for most of the film, evoking a moral crisis in Anakin, particularly when he announces his familiarity with the dark side and offers to pass on his knowledge. I found the altercation in the theater unsatisfactory on Christiansen’s end, or at least whoever wrote the dialogue. Palpatine’s fine, but Anakin again seems stiff and unconvincing. The scene sets us up for the moment that should demonstrate to him once and for all that this guy is extremely bad news but instead seems to eradicate any trace of a decent human being in young Skywalker. Perhaps he sees himself as party to such a calamity that he already deems himself irredeemable. All he supposedly cares about now is Padme, though once he begins to carry out Palpatine’s orders it can hardly be said that thoughts of her have any influence over his actions. The last indication in the film that she still means anything to him is so excruciating, one wonders how James Earl Jones could have been convinced to decimate his dignity by agreeing to it.

Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) embodies the struggle for the Jedi to remain relevant in a time of great change. He is a formidable force, rather like the man who plays him. I find it amusing that he talked Lucas into giving him a purple light saber so he’d stand out and that he actually included a stipulation in his contract that his character had to have a noteworthy death scene. Visually, it’s pretty riveting. Emotionally, it’s the turning point of the whole film. Yoda (Frank Oz) spends much of the movie hobnobbing with the Wookiees, and while I was looking forward to this aspect of the film, it didn’t really satisfy me. For one thing, I imagined the planet as an idyllic locale, and it might have been if not for the fact that it was a war zone. The Wookiees almost looked like Klingons with all their ammo and war decorations, and when it came right down to it the whole interlude at their planet seemed to serve little purpose other than to get Yoda out of the line of fire for a while. Chewy (Peter Mayhew) shows up, but we don’t get any sense of his personality except that he’s on Yoda’s side. So that was a bit of a disappointment, but Yoda never fails to come through for me. He’s one of my three favorite characters in the trilogy, all of which conveniently appear in the prequels portrayed by the same actors. I still prefer the swamp-dwelling Yoda to the more dignified personage of the prequels, but he’s still the same delightful character, and he radiates wisdom and heart in a film whose protagonist stands in sore need of both.

The droids are my other favorites. There is precious little to be seen of C-3PO, though when he is on screen he certainly attracts attention with his ultra-shiny new frame. Generally he’s a great chatterbox, and I could have used more of his silly comments. I was also rather perplexed by his appearance just after Anakin departs to subvert the inevitable altercation between Palpatine and Mace Windu. It cuts to Padme, and C-3PO waddles up to her, and then it cuts to a completely different scene. Those five or ten seconds seemed completely superfluous, and I was left with the impression that a scene had been deleted and due to sloppy editing or a teaser for the DVD or whatever, they left the beginning of it intact. R2-D2 shines in Sith, however, particularly at the beginning. He is as much a hero as Anakin or Obi-Wan in the opening minutes, and he handles his sticky situation with typical good humor. Most of the movie’s funniest moments involve him. When we bought our tickets, we received a complementary copy of Flick, a Cinemark magazine, and this issue focused entirely on Star Wars. One page advertises various available merchandise, including life-size cardboard stand-ups that come equipped with a chip allowing them to speak quotes from the movie. One of the figures is R2-D2, which begs the question, of what significant quote my favorite little garbage can-like being could boast. Still, he’s awfully expressive for a guy who speaks exclusively in a series of unintelligible squeaks, beeps and whistles, and you can never really accuse him of having a lame line.

So did Sith deliver all that I expected? I can’t say for sure, though a hunch still tells me no. Phantom Menace was a lot more fun, and I rather liked our feeling of jubilation as we exited the theater. It seemed the only appropriate reaction to the end of Sith was pensiveness. But it wasn’t any more depressing than I expected, and less violent than I thought it would be. It was visually stunning, though it lacked the beauty of Naboo as revealed in different forms in the first and second installments. The dizzying chases through space and sky threatened to give me vertigo, while Palpatine passed on the creepy crawlies every time he appeared on screen. Anakin, too, mainly in the horrific scenes following Mace Windu’s death that are as distressing for what they don’t show as what they do. The most tragic moment for me in the entire film was when a young Jedi, eyes wide with fear and trust, turned to Anakin for protection and received something entirely unexpected. In ten seconds, that young man packed an emotional whallop infinitely greater than what Jake Lloyd was able to accomplish in the course of an entire movie.

I won’t say that Sith impressed me as much as I thought it could have, but all in all it was a pretty affecting film and a mostly satisfactory link between Episodes I and II and the original trilogy. But I still think Darth Vader will never be quite as cool as he was before the prequels exposed Anakin as a character most undeserving of being the subject of a grandiose 6-part space epic.