A satisfactory close to the Star Wars saga

To complete a trilogy of movies is not an easy task. To make another trilogy to explain the first is even more difficult. That challenge is what George Lucas took upon himself when he decided to film the first three episodes of Star Wars. Revenge of the Sith marks the end of this brave, though uneven effort.

As the last of the three prequels, Sith has the burden not only of tying whatever loose ends there are but also of restoring the luster of the Star Wars franchise, dimmed by The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones – full of sound and fury both, signifying but little. On the whole, it succeeds. For one, the movie brings special effects technology to yet another level. The first 20 minutes of the movie alone, showing a space battle on a scale unprecedented, leave one dazzled (if also a little dazed). The lightsaber duels, a sine qua non in the series, are here noticeably more frequent and more acrobatic than in the previous installments, perhaps as compensation for the lackluster duels in Attack of the Clones, where even the much-touted match between Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) and Count Dookoo (Christopher Lee) was amusing more than exciting–an inadvertent parody of Pat Morita movies. Although the tawdry romance of Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) mars this episode as it did the last, it is made up for by Lucas’s more nuanced exploration of the Obi-wan (Ewan McGregor)-Anakin relationship. Finally, Sith answers questions that Star Wars followers have been mulling over since the first of the prequels (e. g., why did not the droids recognize Kenobi when he appears in episode four?).

Sith presents another advance, in that it presents a complex portrayal of politics as never before happened in the series. This has the effect of rendering the alien world immediate. The machinations portrayed in Sith are not occurrences that happened "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away": a head of state staying in power longer than he should, a war started on dubious premises but waged anyway in the name of democracy. The classic Star Wars movies present a simpler universe, with the forces of good and evil clearly delineated. The universe of Sith, on the other hand, "holds a mirror up to nature"–and the image is as murky as reality is.

But perhaps what gives Sith the potential to transcend the age is its focus on the corrupting influence of power. Temptation, especially the temptation to create or indefinitely prolong life, is the stuff of the world’s oldest stories, continually revived in various guises, from the epic of Gilgamesh, to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, to versions of the Faust legend, to the allegories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They are warnings all against human presumption or the violation of moral or natural limits. Sith replays, in another idiom, that theme which still sends shivers millennia after it was first sounded and which, unless human nature changes, will probably continue to do so.

In Anakin/Darth Vader, too, Lucas has a potential tragic hero, a science-fiction Macbeth. They are similar in some respects. Both are figures of the "chosen one" making the wrong choice, who in trying to gain more loses all, including himself. Anakin transforms into Darth Vader, more machine than man, just as Macbeth, "peerless kin" and "worthy Thane" becomes "untitled tyrant bloody-sceptered." In his massacre of the young padawans, there is the same horror as in Macbeth’s murder of Macduff’s family ("What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?").

Both characters are also caught in a web of mystery. In Palpatine’s prevarications and blandishments ("Good is matter of point of view"), we hear echoes of the witches’ equivocations ("Fair is foul and foul is fair"), all of which ensnare our heroes-villains. Macbeth usurps the throne, but is he acting freely or is he acting at the suggestion of the witches? Is he fulfilling his destiny (as prophesied by the witches) or is he making his destiny (without which the witches would have nothing to prophesy)? In Sith, Padme dies because of Anakin’s choice to turn to the "dark side"; but Anakin makes his choice in an attempt to save her from what he foresees as her death. Like Shakespeare, Lucas leaves the conundrum unresolved, save to suggest that character is fate ("I sense much fear in you") and the best course is to "let go of the things you fear to lose."

Vader’s despair is also Macbeth’s: "My way of life / Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have." Of course, Vader hasn’t "fallen into the sear" when the movie ends, but he is plagued by the same "solitude of power."

Lucas, then, has material rich and deep–would that he had the bard’s gift for language. Tragic heroes require verbal grandeur, but at the turning point all Lucas gives Anakin to say is, "What have I done?" It little helps that Christensen plays Anakin. (Wags might add that if there’s anything Shakespearean about him, it is that he is the "poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard [thankfully] no more." And the sheer number of limbs lopped off makes Sith more Titus Andronicus than Macbeth.)

Sith provides a satisfactory close, for now at least, to the Star Wars saga. No, it does not have the exuberance of the original trilogy. But that, perhaps, is to be expected. The original trilogy was a comedy (in the medieval sense of "a story that ends happily"), the recovery of the prodigal father. The prequels form an imperfect tragedy, showing the cryptic interplay of circumstance, choice, and character. It may not be as great an accomplishment as A New Hope was in 1977, but it is, if nothing else, Lucas’s redemption and sweet revenge.