A satisfying note to go out on

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2005)

Revenge of the Sith is the last Star Wars film George Lucas will suffer to make, unless he changes his mind or he needs the money (both of which seem remote at this time). But Lucas knew that going into this, I believe, and he also knew that this would be the last film he made that anyone wanted to see in his lifetime (I don't believe Indy 4 will ever get made. You can if you wish; I don't). That being said, there is always a certain aspect to any work of art when the artist knows it will be his last great offering, much like a farewell tour or a final exhibition. There's a little bit of ego involved, a little bit of nostalgia, and an insistence on hearkening back to earlier, better times, when things were shiny and new and you didn't know all this was coming to a close.
The need to tie things up hangs palpably over this movie, and there are many references to Lucas' other films (and a few clumsy ones to films outside the trilogy). Sometimes with this Lucas goes monstrously overboard (the last fifteen minutes busy themselves with trying to resolve every single plot hole fans have been whining about for six years), and sometimes he hits the mark dead on.
In brief, the film follows the last days of the Clone Wars and the rise of the Galactic Empire  all the stuff Lucas glossed over in the backstory to the first Star Wars film now visited in detail. Specifically the movie concerns itself with Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side, his rebirth as Darth Vader, and the reasons that cause him to do so. There's a lot of flash and spectacle, a lot of action and battle scenes, and some shockingly beautiful scenery and design work. But is it any good? Well, there's a lot going on. You have several plots that need tying up, and Lucas tries his best to get to all of them. The main focus is on the dramas between Anakin (Hayden Christiansen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) and Anakin and the Chancellor/Emperor (Ian McDiarmid). Another major player is, of course, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), and Yoda, the digithespian who gets a fair amount of screen time. Jimmy Smits is on hand as Bail Organa, all around sympathetic helpful guy, and Samuel L. Jackson gets to glare and brood as Mace Windu.
While there's lots of action and some of it is way over the top (General Grievous, a CGI cyborg, has a wheelie vehicle that is so ludicrous it belongs in a Transformers cartoon), the movie's heart, oddly, is not in its fleet combat or even its lightsaber duels, but rather in its drama. This is an odd choice for Lucas, who has never especially excelled in that department, but here he has to show us exactly why Anakin turns, and despite my fears, he pulls it off, and pulls it off pretty well. The Anakin/Padme relationship that was so stale in Episode 2 pretty much works here, and Anakin, even while slipping into evil, is far more interesting and compelling than he ever was before. His friendship with Obi-Wan is also explored, again, with surprisingly satisfying results. It doesn't hurt that McGregor, Christiansen and Portman are all talented actors, above this material; and while no one will confuse this with Shakespeare, for Lucas the emotional content was surprisingly effective and well done.
It's a dark movie. Expect to see a lot of minor characters killed. Casual viewers won't even know who these people are, but die-hard fans will see their universe getting chopped apart, and it's not always fun (though the fall of the Jedi sequence was tightly edited and has great emotional impact. Seeing one young apprentice of about twelve battling a squad of troops in a futile gesture was particularly effective). The battle scenes, while pretty, are mostly chaotic and confusing, but at least we are given ample opportunity to see Anakin and Obi-Wan act like heroes rather than the immense dunces they were in the last film.
Revenge is not a perfect film. It has some flaws, mostly, like Episode 2, where Lucas fails to show any restraint at all. But it also has some well done and powerful moments, and coming after the worst film in the franchise it is a bit of a relief that it's mostly a pretty well done film. Lucas' need not only to finish the story but to firmly establish the franchise as mythology  as if it weren't already  sometimes embellishes the proceedings, and sometimes gets in the way. There are moments that will have you shaking your head (one bit at the end is outrageously hackneyed and overdone), but there are more moments that will please you, and will achieve the goal of whisking you away to the galaxy far, far away one last time. If this is to be the final cinematic note of Star Wars, it's by far not the worst one Lucas could have chosen. The final image of the trilogy  an homage to the strongest scene in any of the six films  says it all; at once a fading, a looking back, and a looking forward to the future.