Faust

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2005)

This is the part of the new series that Lucas was waiting to tell, and everyone else was waiting to see. Everything that precedes it is filler -- magnificent at times -- but something to keep fans in suspense and sustain the cliffhanger tragedy in the public mind. For all the lambasting Lucas receives, he is a good orchestrator of ideas, though he has lost touch with the energy and pacing of his earlier films. He has the same kind of foresight that Mephistopholes has in this play. It is a grand, but flawed vision, full of coercion for the fans through relentless persuasion in the media.
In a way, this film feels like a confession. It is a commentary on the dehumanization of films through technology. Gradually, these movies have lost the real actors that were the vitality of the series, and piece by piece, have been replaced with CG 'clones'. The product of this vision is now more mechanized, so it feels like it is only sustaining us, keeping us alive enough to feed the Empire. One of the last shots in the film is a chilling one. Anakin's human eyes are replaced by computer-generated vision.