Same old Sith

But Anakin is haunted by nightmares: He fears Padmé is going to die. What can he do to save her? Our galactic Robert Johnson finds himself at the crossroads. What's more, he grows resentful when he's appointed to the Jedi Council (yay!) but is not allowed to become a Jedi Master (boo!): He expresses his displeasure at this decision by glowering and pouting and stomping around noisily. Meanwhile Palpatine, grooming Anakin to be his right-hand man, whispers sweet nothings in his ear in an attempt to lure him to the dark side. He's the friendly stranger in the black sedan, and Anakin hops inside his car.

In a weird way, the story actually makes sense on-screen: Lucas (who also wrote the script, in case you couldn't guess) seems to have taken some care this time, and compared with its predecessors, at least, the picture moves along reasonably swiftly and with an almost shocking adherence to dramatic logic. "Revenge of the Sith" also looks much better than "Attack of the Clones" did: It doesn't have the flat, bland-bright color sense of the earlier picture, and its characters, thankfully, don't look so much as if they'd been pasted in after the fact. The action sequences, most notably the big showdown between Anakin and Obi-Wan, which takes place against some cool orange molten goo, are at least as exciting as the moment Padmé gives birth: George Lucas is not one to give short shrift to the miracle of life. I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it.

But "Revenge of the Sith" is still crap. "I sense Count Dooku!" Anakin Skywalker announces warily in one of the movie's early scenes, and he's right -- the smell is all around. The performers either act all over the place (McDiarmid) or slink through the picture with vague embarrassment, waiting for the whole thing to be over (McGregor). Others, like Samuel L. Jackson and Jimmy Smits, keep their heads down and their noses clean, perhaps hoping to get through a scene before anyone says their character names out loud. (There's no greater humiliation than to be minding your own business on the skywalks of Coruscant only to hear some yobbo yell out, "Hey, Senator Organa, how's it hanging?") Christensen, a young actor who has already given us one great performance (in the 2003 "Shattered Glass"), is especially thick and dull as he wavers sluggishly between good and evil. Why can't he just scoot on over to the dark side and be done with it?

"Revenge of the Sith" might be tolerable if it weren't designed to be taken seriously. But Lucas intends the whole damn thing to be funny as a crutch: Of the four "Star Wars" pictures he's directed himself, this is clearly the most ambitious, and the most highfalutin. Clearly, the hope is that moviegoers will find it rousingly topical. At one point Padmé, furious that the Senate has been so easily steamrollered by Palpatine's slimy promises, cries out, "This is how liberty dies -- to thunderous applause." Anakin, as he's becoming less Jedi knight and more dark knight, snarls at Obi-Wan, "If you're not with me, you're against me." Obi-Wan shoots back, "Only a Sith lord deals in absolutes."

Funny, but all Lucas knows is absolutes. "Revenge of the Sith" doesn't work as a political statement because for all the lip service Lucas pays to democracy, he barely seems to know what it is. In the "Star Wars" series, democracy may be the alleged goal of the Republic, but what the movies really value is order: Democracy -- the genuine kind, which means you just might get stuck with a president you don't like -- is too messy and complicated for the "Star Wars" worldview. The very scale of these movies prevents anything but the most obvious moral readings: Preoccupied as they are with good and evil, with so little gray in between, the "Star Wars" movies are more like faux Wagnerian epics that have been clumsily retrofitted with democratic ideals. They ask us to tremble in the face of their greatness even as they claim to be on the side of the little people. Lucas doesn't realize he can't have it both ways.

So is Palpatine supposed to be George W. Bush? It appears so, because he's ruthless, unappealing and arrogant. He's a cartoon baddie, like Ming the Merciless, or Mumbles, or the Penguin -- all of these are very bad men, just like that bad old George W. If Lucas really knew what he was doing, he'd have given us a character who believed with all his heart, as George W. surely does, that he's on God's side. That would have made for a truly creepy and treacherous villain.

But Lucas doesn't have that much imagination, or that much subtlety. Any point he makes is bound to be as obvious as a light saber through the sternum. "I pledge myself to your teachings," the now-evil Anakin tells his guru Palpatine, who responds, with homoerotic fervor, "I feel your power. The force is strong within you." In its thirst for wisdom, "Revenge of the Sith" asks many questions, but none more important than this one: Is that an absolute in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

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