Lucas has a winner in the final Star Wars episode

09:14 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 17, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

With his rousing, high-spirited Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith, writer-director George Lucas has brilliantly closed the final chapter in the space saga that has fueled generations of imagination ever since the first Star Wars film, in 1977.

All the loose ends are tied up tightly and cleverly in Revenge of the Sith, which opens Thursday (and at 12:01 a.m. in some theaters). Here, Lucas has dispelled whatever doubts anyone might have had back in 1999 when Episode I -- The Phantom Menace opened to a general chorus of disappointment 16 years after its predecessor, Revenge of the Jedi, had left us panting for more.

Of course Revenge of the Sith isn't the "final" chapter in what Lucas has decreed will be a six-movie series (back in '77 there had been talk of nine films). Because Revenge of the Sith is Episode III, it marks the middle of the series. The 1977 Star Wars is Episode IV -- A New Hope and picks up several years after Revenge of the Sith ends. Sith closes, fittingly, on the desert planet Tatooine with a shot of baby Luke Skywalker, son of Darth Vader, in the arms of his adoptive aunt and uncle as they gaze on the planet's setting twin suns.

For my money, the '77 film is still the best (though some swear by next-in-line The Empire Strikes Back). But Revenge of the Sith is a very close second.

It moves at warp speed for one thing, with dazzling special effects. The opening sequence, a huge battle involving the zippy fighter craft of the Republic blasting away at the lumbering ships of the breakaway rebel force, echoes the mind-boggling space battle waged against the Death Star that closes the '77 film.

Yet the film also has great drama, passion and sadness in its tale of the fall from Jedi Knight grace of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). Revenge of the Sith chronicles Anakin's embrace of the Dark Side, his turning away from his loving wife Padme and her values of decency and goodness, his reincarnation as the black-robed, partly mechanical Darth Vader, who breathes wheezily from behind a black helmet. All these things combine to make him one of the movies' great tragic characters.

Christensen, so wooden in The Phantom Menace, here comes of age as a hero who, through the best of intentions and more than a touch of self-aggrandizement, has lost his way very badly, eventually turning into the hellish monster who terrified us in Episodes IV through VI.

Because Lucas laid out his plans for the series "a long time ago," as the familiar motto of the series tells us up front on every film, there are few surprises. Yet one is in awe at how marvelously, seamlessly, all the themes of the other films are brought together here. Perhaps the major surprise is how Lucas's blueprints, laid out more than three decades ago when he began writing the series in 1971, have played into the current political climate.

Some have already carped about that. Lucas seems to delight in tweaking current events as he describes the dangers faced by the Republic, which some wish to turn into an Empire under one man's solid control, at the expense of personal freedom.

"So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause," sighs Sen. Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) as she watches the Republic's Senate eagerly turn over all-encompassing powers to Chancellor-turned-Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). Earlier, in referring to the escalating war, she remarks, "This war represents a failure to listen."

Padme, who has secretly married Anakin, is carrying his twins in her womb and is, importantly, the film's conscience.

But later, Anakin, already turning to the Dark Side, shouts to his longtime mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), "If you're not with me, you're my enemy," paraphrasing something George W. Bush once said. To this, Obi-Wan replies, "Only a Sith lord deals in absolutes."

However, at the start of the film, Chancellor Palpatine is not a menace, but a victim, and the reason for the opening space battle. Palpatine has been kidnapped by the robotic droid leader Gen. Grievous, of the Separatist Alliance, and it is the Republic's darkest hour. Kenobi and his eager protégé Anakin Skywalker lead the daring rescue attempt in a breathtaking sequence that includes rocket-firing "vulture" spacecraft as well as jellyfish-like gizmos whose buzz-saw "feet" cut through metal and lumbering spaceships that fire on each other in close contact just like in pirate movies of yore.

It's the first of many dangerous confrontations that Anakin and Obi-Wan face together and, ultimately, against each other in the film's spectacular climactic lightsaber duel, which takes place on the fiery lava floes of the burning planet Mustafar. There, Obi-Wan realizes that his protégé has been lured to the Dark Side and decides he must destroy Anakin amidst the cascading lava (some of the footage is from the eruption of Sicily's Mount Etna in 2003).

Throughout the film, characters from earlier Star Wars adventures turn up. Some play major roles -- R2D2 (Kenny Baker), the Jedi Knight Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson), Palpatine (McDiarmid), Yoda (Frank Oz). Others have considerably less to do -- C3P0 (Anthony Daniels), the Wookiee Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), Jar-Jar Binks (Ahmed Best). Jar-Jar, the character even die-hard fans loved to hate in Episode I, thankfully is without a line of dialogue here.

Like McGregor's soulful Obi-Wan and Portman's sad-eyed Padme, the backward-talking Yoda ("I hope right you are," "Act on this we must") is a major presence through whom we measure the sadness of Anakin's descent to the Dark Side and the foundering of the Republic's freedom. He seems lost, mournful, as he ponders the unfortunate chain of events.

The film's real-life settings -- including the dragon-tooth mountains of Guilin, China, which plays the Wookiee kingdom, and the Swiss Alps, which double for Princess Leia's adoptive home planet, Alderaan -- are nearly as spectacular as the special effects. But happily, even more important are the film's dramatic human moments: Padme's sorrow at discovering Anakin's perfidy; Obi-Wan's determination to stop Anakin's traitorous drift to the Dark Side; Anakin's temptations as he's swayed by dreams of becoming the ruler of everything.

Lucas has not only created colossal adventure on a sky's-the-limit scale, he has given us deeply felt characters who mirror the choices we all face on Earth. And that makes Revenge of the Sith both larger than life and touching.

*****

Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits, Frank Oz, Anthony Daniels, Christopher Lee, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence.