When all the film critics and millions of former fans are quietly rooting for a movie maker to fail, he does well to pay close attention to acronyms. Revenge of the Sith was a real gamble as titles go. So many charming possibilities for review headers: “Yep, It ROTS”, “ROTS from the Head Downward”, “A New Hope ROTS Away”, “With All That Wooden Acting, Of Course This Flick ROTS”, and so on.
What I think of ROTS’s actual merits doesn’t matter a lot, as every other American of movie going age saw it before me. Nonetheless, I’ll offer my belated opinion, based on viewing it yesterday in an extremely uncrowded Las Vegas theater: This is the best of the Star Wars movies since the first one and so far superior to its immediate predecessors, so much so that I wonder whether George Lucas has been replaced by a cinematically savvy pod person.
There are, admittedly, a few plot slippages: Anakin and Padmé are living in the same apartment, yet Obi-Wan Kenobi figures out only at the last minute that Anakin is the cause of Padme’s rather obvious pregnancy. (I guess that the Jedi are more like monks than I thought.) Neither the Jedis’ special powers nor the advanced medical technology of the Galactic Republic are aware that Padmé is bearing twins. (Is our civilization atypical in having invented ultrasound before FTL travel?) And Padmé still looks pregnant at her funeral, which is rather disconcerting. (I hope that this doesn’t mean that Natalie Portman has gotten fat.)
Incongruous with the ultimate conclusion of the series, if not an actual plot hole, is Anakin’s slaughter of the Jedi younglings. On no other occasion does Anakin/Vader engage in gratuitous (emphasize gratuitous; blowing up a rebel planet is purposeful) violence against innocents, a fact that made his redemption at the finale of Return of the Jedi morally acceptable. In light of what we now know, he has no right to such cheap grace.
On larger matters, though, Revenge of the Sith moves forward plausibly, with some deft ironies. Three are particularly worthy of note. First, in a twist as old as Greek legend, Anakin’s efforts to avert the prophecy of Padmé’s death lead to its fulfillment. Second, Anakin’s crisis of conscience over killing the helpless Count Dooku influences his crucial decision to save the seemingly helpless Chancellor Palpatine from death at the hands of Jedi Master Mace Windu. Finally, though this is evident only when one thinks ahead to Episode “IV” (the real and original Star Wars), the lie that brings Anakin fully over to the Dark Side – that his own angry blow killed Padmé – removes any motive for tracking down their child and thus leads to the Sith Emperor’s ultimate defeat.
So far as spectacle is concerned, this movie at least equals any of the others in quantity and quality. After the cheesy special effects in Attack of the Clones, which reminded me a lot of Flash Gordon, without the excuse of a minimal budget and primitive technology, we are shown thunderous space battles, dazzling planetscapes and not-too-bad light saber duels. So what if gravity in space acts arbitrarily or Obi-Wan needs a long time to think of just shooting General Grievous instead of sparring with him.
I’ve seen many warnings against the insinuation of politically correct, anti-War on Terror themes into ROTS, and a few are indeed present. They are, however, contradicted by the main thrust of the film. Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” was doubtless intended as a shot against President Bush, but it has no force, because Sith do not “think in absolutes”. Palpatine bases his appeal to Anakin on the necessity of going beyond narrow-minded hostility to the Dark Side, and Anakin, after his transformation into Darth Vader, declares that evil depends on one’s point of view. The Sith are power-hungry moral relativists. That the Jedi misapprehend them fits with the order’s limited imagination and intelligence. Luke Skywalker’s image of the Jedi Knights, built on Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s nostalgic mythmaking, is an idealization. The Jedi of the first three Episodes are in many ways like the popular image of the knights of the middle ages: physically powerful but short on subtlety and easy to deceive.
The Jedis’ shortcomings are a key to Anakin’s conversion to evil. Their overt distrust, repressed jealousy and misjudgement of the young knight’s idealism push him toward the Dark Side just as much as Palpatine lures him. Thus, as in a proper tragedy, evil arises from the flaws in good men, not simply the machinations of villains.
What a pity that George Lucas lost his touch so badly in Episodes I and II. But what a consolation that it was not lost for good.
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