In “Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope,” when Luke Skywalker, frustrated and chafing in the stasis of farm living, climbed that sand dune and gazed with infinite longing at the twin suns of Tatooine, I sensed a great doom had just occurred and all of existence was subsisting on its periphery, that everyone had slipped a few notches, fallen from grace, gone the way of Ozymandias, a glory lost and unable to be recalled. Muck was the essence of life and to muck it had returned. But what was the horror which had befallen the cosmos? From which Pandora's box was this drowning dust devil unleashed? Luke went out with Old Ben (formerly Obi-Wan Kenobe) into the wide wastes to sew up the fissure, shake a universe from its shock and stupor, restore the gauzy architecture of utopia. And so he did (with the aid of a motley and reluctant band of fellow exiles), and the film ended on a Hollywood high note. Still, on subsequent viewings, I couldn't help feeling the ending was a stopgap, not a solution, that the happy ending was safety-pinned together. This wasn't an ending, it was a lull. The story would have to go forward and backward, back to the birth pangs of this despair and forward to its remedy. The Emperor was still wedged, like a stake, in the heart of the galaxy, his cohorts dug in, a viral presence only further blaster fire could purge. Darth Vader was still at large. And while, in the real world, the Devil is allowed to do as he pleases, and everyone turns an apathetic eye from his carnage, in the celluloid universe, life isn't jagged round the edges, plotless and messy, but tidy and episodic. At the end of New Hope, even as the fanfare of democracy blew, I knew, in my heart of hearts, this was neither ending nor beginning, but oasis.

“Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith” brings this sextilogy to its conclusion by bringing it to its brink, the horror muted through five previous episodes has now been let out of the puzzle box and all locks and bolts and answers have clicked into place. For 28 years we wondered; now we know. We know how the grave pillars of Jedi-dom, Obi-Wan and Yoda, were wiped from the galactic consciousness, banished to the nether regions of its unconscious self (the human to its deserts, the gnome to its jungles). Characters who never needed back stories, whose presence was, at best, embroidery (R2-D2, C-3PO, Chewbacca) now have legacies worthy of Beowulf, and the divas of this space opera (Anakin, Padme, Palpatine) now resonate like carillons with dramatic history Homer, Lucas’ ancient Greek counterpart, might have penned. And, ultimately and at last, we know how Anakin wound up in that gulag of rasping machinery known as Darth Vader, how the diamond of Obi-Wan’s eye turned to coal. Without revealing too much, suffice it to say, it’s a long plunge and the sudden stop at the bottom isn’t pretty. A disciple of gore, even I found it painful to watch. Lucas, once a minor lyricist, has since graduated into a major sadist. “Brick by brick I seal his doom!” I can imagine him chortling, parroting Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, as he jabs tragedy after tragedy, like voodoo pins, into Anakin, who takes his licks like a man who doesn’t believe in fate but succumbs to it anyway. Lucas, like a feeble, self-flagellating memoirist, equates unspeakable suffering with taut drama. Loving mentors become hectoring schoolmasters, quick with the ruler, harsh with the tongue, relentless in their brutal life lessons. His first love must die, and Anakin must be the cause. He must slaughter children, dim prelude to the extinguishing of whole planets. Yet Anakin’s pasteboard shoulders are insufficient to support the weight of terror Lucas pours on his hapless, little Atlas. In the end, ROTS is like watching a scarecrow undergo a trial by fire.

ROTS is at once larger and lesser than Life. The characters in this movie conduct their affairs at a magnification of 1000 X. Their close-ups consume the screen. Yet, excluding Kenobe’s zen kaon of a brow wart, these people are clean of the acne of existence, both figurative and literally. A hero is not created through exfoliation. For a hero to have any mythic resonance, we must find ourselves in their faces. The Obi-Wan and Anakin and Padme of ROTS are mirrors, but only because their skin has been burnished to such a point, it makes a reflective surface. I tried, truly, to wrap myself up in these characters, but it’s like wrapping myself in a roll of tissue paper in order to weather a hurricane. A hero’s true vitality comes not in his perfect complexion or the pinpoint accuracy of his moral compass, but in the wellspring of his patience, in his capacity to last out the suffering. The stuff of heroes can be found in most mortal men. What is lacking, usually, is the steel of perseverance, of faith, the ability to smile through the lumps and evil luck and inexplicable acts of God. In the end, ROTS is a story about men (and women) of faith, who make unworthy vessels for our own.

Yet, even though these characters are vast, pale shadows of ourselves, the worlds they traverse are so lush and crazy with the unchecked chaos of Life, that when the movie becomes a film of action (instead of a film of lax and heartless narrative) and we leave the sacred halls of the Jedi Temple or the Senate Chamber (whose mass is, in itself, a form of claustrophobia, of strangulation) for worlds unknown, where ships and bodies, both human and alien, move at hyper speed, then ROTS flames alive with detail and gesture. And, finally, that’s what this film is: a work of pop art where gesture, kinetic motion, is more profound than speech. Lucas’ facility with CGI is matched only by (and enhances) his characters’ finesse with their light sabers. The dueling match-ups here are so absurd, they’d border on self-parody if there was anything else in the series which even approximated what I saw here: Obi-Wan going energy blade to energy blade with a giant, tubercular mecha-mantis, who brandishes four sabers to his puny one; Yoda, that ponderous imp, going down and dirty with an Emperor who looks like a rumpled, sallow-eyed version of the vampire Quentin Tarantino transformed into in “From Dusk Til Dawn.” And the space battles, gloria in excelsis, the space battles (and by space battle I mean battles through outer space and the seemingly deep space of the space shuttles and stations, which seem to go on for ever and ever and ever, amen)! In the beginning, we see R2 (minus his gilded foil) playing Charlie Chaplin to Obi-Wan and Anakin’s Buster Keaton, and this one gesture alone is enough to forgive the other two recent and laughable entries. These aren’t action set pieces, but brawls of menace and image, every pixel fanged and glistening with poison. And the footwork, so fancy, it seems a shame it’s not performed in top hat and twirling tails.

I often don’t know if I like a movie until I’m wending home afterward on my 10-speeder, eyes dancing, ears ringing and heart singing. I took in ROTS (and by “took in” I mean, “It was poured into my eyeballs like magma!”) at its witching hour premiere at the Lockport Cinema 8. The crowd was rowdy, randy, the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” rabble trying to shift into Lucas mode (that is, fawning sycophancy). For the first hour, there may have been one too many burly, addled-nerve-inspired outbursts (“Come on, Yoda, kick some *ss!”), but as the stakes became more dire, the audience sloughed its frat-boy franticism for sheer dribbling rapture. All in all, it was a good crowd, a happy crowd, a pleased crowd, and a good, unhappy, pleasing movie: choppy, lite on drama, harsh, hard and heavy on everything else. It wasn’t greatness, in the sense of immortality, but it was, to quote David Denby, “a pleasant enough way to mislay a couple of hours.” But pedaling home, heart and mind charged with a forgotten and (despite my grave doubts) much-restored grandeur, the melancholy horns of John Williams moaning in my guts, I felt that Life and Grace and Flesh had been given back to the series. At last, weight had been imbued in this spongy epic. “Revenge of the Sith” is the anchor which weighs down this whole ghostly, airy enterprise. And yet, paradoxically, that weight gives it wings. It’s no longer buffeted about by the fickle trade winds of criticism, but has mass enough to bully through them, to muscle its way into the pantheon. It was a transforming experience, for the series and for myself. And as I zipped home, standing high on the pedals, eyes streaming, adrenaline going full-throb, I felt myself slipping, mind and body, back into the “Star Wars” continuum, back to that giddy, silly time when imagination overruled logic and taste, back to childhood. I found myself imagining (without any of the rebuking embarrassment I’d normally feel) that my bicycle was a speeder bike and I an avatar of this galaxy far, far away. The chill of the breathy rollers trundling down from Buffalo was actually the chill of space as it went zapping by, stinging and clinical and empty, yet also breathlessly organic. The squiggles of tar on the road were blaster fire and I dodged and ducked in and out, my instincts at the reins. The bland geometry of suburban housing became the blocky and looming shapes of Imperial space craft. I knew I was dreaming, but this dream had grit and reality. And I knew, even as I was riding home, I already was.

Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older