Bye now, don't hurry back

Rating: 3/10 (31 May 2005)

Way back when the first Star Wars film was released, I recall a friend telling of reading that George Lucas's vision was for a 9 part opus. The three "middle" episodes first, with Luke and Leia and Han, etc.; followed by the prequel to the original three, also in three installments; and, then, the three concluding episodes that pick up the story from the end of "Return of the Jedi." Let us hope that anyone who was ever entertaining that idea has long since had a change of heart.
"Revenge" was an improvement over the child-oriented "Phantom Menace" and the abysmal "Clone Wars." Damnation with faint praise was never more appropriate.
Everyone of course knew what the ultimate outcome of the film was going to be for Annakin and Obi-Wan and Yoda and a number of other characters (i.e. we knew from having seen the original film that Annakin/Darth's kids would be born and grow to be adults, that Obi Wan would teach Annakin/Darth's son, etc.). Thus, the screenwriter faced something of a dilemma in trying to maintain some level of suspense as to exactly how all those characters survived for what is now regarded as "Episode IV," or what I will always think of simply as "Star Wars." The cast had the potential to be capable of pulling off that difficult transition, but the script made it quite difficult. As another reviewer pointed out, even the scene that everyone knew was coming, when Annakin donned the mask that kids have been wearing for Halloween for nearly thirty years now, fell flat as a week-old bottle of open ginger ale. For a film where that kind of story line is carried off by the actors and the screenwriter, see "Godfather 2." Everyone watching knew that young Vito Corleone would become the head of an organized crime family, but the telling of the story was nonetheless brilliantly subtle both in terms of the scripting and the portrayals by the actors.
The series is tired. It is time to let it rest. It is time to let the box set DVDs of all six episodes come out. And who knows, maybe a long, long time from now in a galaxy far, far away, it will be time for someone to try to pick up the story where "Episode VI" ends.