Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith

Newsday's Gene Seymour gives last episode in Star Wars saga 2 1/2 stars as the story comes full circle

BY GENE SEYMOUR | STAFF WRITER

May 16, 2005

STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH (PG-13). The Skywalker chronicles come full circle at last. This installment is better than its two immediate predecessors -- which may not be saying a whole lot, but for the millions who cleave tightly to director-writer-producer-grand-poobah George Lucas' vision, it's more than enough. Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels, Jimmy Smits and Frank Oz's voice of Yoda are all present and accounted for. 2:20 (violence, scary situations). At area theaters.

Some things never change. The characters speak fluent billboard. The battle scenes, especially the ones at the very beginning, steal the show. And acting honors threaten to go, by default, to a 3-foot-tall special effect.

The long-awaited metamorphosis of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) to Darth Vader becomes complete in "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." And the first thing to say on its behalf is that it is such a fully realized story, one wonders why the two over-inflated, relatively silly epics that preceded it, "The Phantom Menace" (1999) and "Attack of the Clones" (2002) were necessary to set it up.

The cynical answer is that George Lucas, the driving force behind the "Star Wars" empire, needed to sell this trilogy, a prequel to "Star Wars" (1977), "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) and "Return of the Jedi" (1983), to a younger generation of toy consumers and, thus, probably felt he needed to keep things relatively cute and accessible. Lucas seemed almost apologetic when he informed the global village months ago that "Revenge of the Sith" needed a PG-13 rating.

Anyone who knows the way this trilogy's narrative arc is resolved -- which is to say at least every other person in the known universe -- knew at the outset that this episode would have to carry sharp, dark edges, maybe with a little blood on them for good measure. Otherwise, "Episode IV: A New Hope," the name now given to the blockbuster that started it all 28 summers ago, would neither make any sense nor deliver such a rush.

Lucas knows full well how much this story means to millions around the world of all ages, and that any egregious compromise in its narrative integrity would be far more harmful in the long run. So the best news to say about "Revenge of the Sith" is that Lucas the mythmaker asserts his authority over Lucas the businessman.

Indeed, the only real suspense in "Sith" comes in wondering how the inevitable bad stuff ensues. It starts off with Anakin, an apprentice Jedi Knight serving as a restless Robin to the swashbuckling Batman figure of Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). He is still secretly married to Princess Padme (Natalie Portman), who greets his return from battle with the shocking (to him) news that she's pregnant.

This makes Anakin more anxious about things in general and his ascension to full Jedi-hood in particular. The veteran knights, especially Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) and Yoda (the aforementioned special effect voiced by Frank Oz) have their doubts. But Anakin has a powerful ally in Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who convinces the kid that his future isn't in serving the republic, but joining him at the top of a new empire.

All of this and more is enacted with as much briskness and momentum as the earlier "Star Wars" movies, though one wishes there was even a little of those movies' jocular humor. (There's no one in "Sith" like Han Solo, who loved to deflate Princess Leia in "Empire Strikes Back" with sarcastic salutations of "Your Worship.") The dialogue is as balsa-wooden as ever, but McGregor, McDiarmid and even Portman get to do a little more with it. Christensen, for all his glowering, never quite convinces you, even at the end, that he's destined to become a heavy-breathing, armored monstrosity.

Even with its pulpy excesses showing, "Revenge of the Sith" has a grandiose melancholy that will especially haunt those who have grown up revering the Skywalker chronicles. The rest of the audience may well be on its own.