Fans finally have something to look forward to-sort of.
The disgust over Star Wars Episode I and II wasn't based so much on a comparison with the original trilogy but rather on frustration with Lucas' half-baked ideas and first draft scripts. They weren't just bad Star Wars movies, they were bad movies.
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Now comes Revenge of the Sith , the film that witnesses Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) succumbing to the Dark Side and the birth of Darth Vader and his kids, Luke and Leia. Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin attack the battleship of General Grievous (Matthew Wood) in an attempt to rescue Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). After the rescue Palpatine, secretly the Sith lord Darth Sidious, begins manipulating Anakin, using his youthful frustration and arrogance against him. When Yoda (Frank Oz) and other members of the Jedi Council become suspicious of the chancellor, Anakin's loyalties are split in two.
Watching Sith is a give and take-there's good stuff (lightsaber action, no Jar Jar) and bad (wooden acting, droid banter). Held over from the previous two films is Lucas' awful dialogue, particularly in the "romantic" scenes between Padme (Natalie Portman) and Anakin; there's also the digital backgrounds that give the whole film an annoying and impossible sheen. Unlike the previous two films, though, Sith actually focuses on young Skywalker's fall from Jedi grace, ostensibly the goal of all three prequels.
Unfortunately, many of the loose ends the series was expected to tie up remain dangling, diluting and confusing the dense mythology of the original films and creating a new series of questions fans will likely never see answered. Many of Lucas' best ideas aren't integrated into the story, remaining nuggets of information that make the film, and the trilogy, feel lumpy. Though titled Revenge of the Sith , it's never clear what the Sith are getting revenge for or who and what they actually are. Are they simply bad Jedi? Does that really constitute a story?
Lucas does deliver with Anakin's final transformation, though, showing the battle between the future Vader and Kenobi on a lava-covered planet, a scene that's long been know in Star Wars lore. Lucas also gives an appropriate visual nod to the original Frankenstein in Vader's debut. Unfortunately, he tries to make Anakin a sympathetic character
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by making him regret the actions that have led him astray. Instead, Lucas should have left well enough alone and allowed Episode III to connect to the original series by making viewers wait to see the good in Anakin at the end of Return of the Jedi .
Though loved among fans, Lucas overuses Yoda in Sith . His backward syntax wears thin the more he speaks and understanding him when he's dangling participles can be unnecessarily difficult. Sith provides an ending to a series that never could have lived up to its own hype. It may not be a good Star Wars movie, but, unlike the first two prequels, it's closer to being a good movie. The once vast universe of the Star Wars films has shrunken in the past six years in order to accommodate the limited scope of its creator's imagination. Thankfully with
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, that universe has expanded, if only slightly and with nowhere to go.
