Crimes of Dispassion
"Revenge of the Sith" redeems series, but needs more emotional punch

(SPOILER ALERT: This review reveals plot points you might not want to know if you haven't already seen the movie.)

Okay, I'm one of those old-school Star Wars fans, the over-25s (some of us considerably over) who embraced the original 1977 film as an unalloyed, even life-altering delight. The benevolent afterglow from the first film was pervasive enough to extend to the next two films in the series, as movie technology gradually caught up to George Lucas' eye-popping vision of that galaxy far, far away.

But subsequent retoolings of the original three films to slicken them up in "Special Edition" re-releases have left me a little cold. (Darn it, I miss Mark Hamill yelping "Carrie!" instead of "Leia!" back in the hangar after he's blown up the Death Star.) And when Lucas launched the second trilogy with Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999, it seemed as if all the charm and swashbuckling panache of the very first Star Wars (Episode IV, for those of you keeping score at home) was due entirely to its shoestring budget and youthful chutzpah. What's been missing from the second trilogy is the hands-on funkiness and the user-friendly camaraderie that made the first film so much fun. Now that Lucas has become an empire unto himself, he can buy all the slick fx he wants, but he's come perilously close to mortgaging the soul of the entire franchise.

In Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith, the climactic episode in the Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader story (prelude to the Luke Skywalker story in the first three films), Lucas goes a long way toward redeeming the series. He has a compelling human storyline in which a good man, badgered by his own demons, goes bad. He rolls out a marvelous denouement that irresistibly links the end of this trilogy to the beginning of the next one. He even sprinkles in some cheeky, contemporary-sounding political allusions. (A Jedi councilor declares "Our allegiance is to the Senate, not to a leader who has stayed on long past his term.")

Yet, Sith is more impressive for what it tries to do than what it actually achieves, never quite mustering the resonant human drama that ought to be the heart of the film.

Jedi apprentice Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is now secretly married to Princess Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), while hoping to earn the rank of Master, under the sponsorship of his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). But civil war threatens the Republic, as Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), concealing his identity as a member of the evil Sith Lords, plots to subvert democracy and create an empire that serves the Dark Side.

As battles rage throughout the system, Palpatine picks Anakin as his personal assistant. The Jedis want Anakin to spy on Palpatine for them. But when Anakin starts having terrible nightmares that the now-pregnant Padmé will die in childbirth, Palpatine begins the delicate process of seducing Anakin to the Dark Side, promising him that the Sith, not the Jedi, have learned how to conquer death, and only this knowledge will save the life of his wife.

While the storyline aims high, there's also plenty of downside. Lucas' uninspired Mythos 101 dialogue is as flat and stilted as ever, especially the corny, unconvincing love talk between Anakin and Padmé. ("Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo.") There's an astonishing dearth of females of any social strata on view, or any suggestion of feminine life. Padmé doesn't have any girlfriends, ladies' maids or attending midwives, and is never shown doing anything but sitting in her pristine apartments alone, gazing moodily out at the skyline. (Don't they get Oprah in this galaxy?) It's not even clear what she's doing in the capital city, since her family is back on her home planet, Naboo, and—despite her pregnancy—she's not supposed to be married to Anakin. Nor is there any sense at all of ordinary lives lived on the fringes of the epic battles, or (literally) beneath the notice of the mighty who maneuver for position in the towering skyscrapers of power.

Instead of this sort of texture-providing background material, Lucas keeps interrupting his main story—Anakin's moral fall—with battle scenes between lightsaber-wielding Jedi, clones, battle droids, wookies, or space dogfighters, in such exotic locales as a vast mountain cavern, a flaming lava field, and the primeval "wookie planet." Often, Lucas cuts from Anakin in crisis to a battle scene, then back to Anakin, then back to the same battle in progress, fragmenting both storylines, as if the viewer couldn't be trusted to watch an entire dramatic sequence without a lot of explosions and action along the way.

But given the performance of Hayden Christensen in the pivotal role of Anakin/Vader, Lucas might have a point. Granted, the actor doesn't get much help from Lucas' stale dialogue; still, he ought to be able to find a way to tap into the inherent drama of the situation, to convey either the torment, or the exaltation of evil, that should be the heart of the story. Anakin is "the Chosen One," the grandest hope for the future of the Republic in whom the Force is supernaturally strong, mentored by the best of the Jedi, yet supposedly so conflicted, he plunges into the molten abyss of villainy that is the Dark Side. His is a spectacular fall from grace of epic proportions. Shouldn't he look like he feels something about it?

But when the Dark Side is on him, Christensen looks like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, all yellow-eyed grimace, but without the comic perversity. We're told Anakin is too angry, too prideful, too volatile, that his secret marriage to Padmé is an act of willful recklessness, but all Christensen does is scowl and pout. The moment he turns on Padmé—for whom he's ostensibly given up his own soul—because she rejects the Dark Side, should be as horrific as Othello and Desdemona. But this Anakin shows more emotion when he kills a Jedi to save Palpatine.

If Anakin showed a little anguish after assaulting his wife (for all he knows, he's killed her), then turned on Obi-Wan in a rage, accusing the Jedi of driving him to murder, that would make more psychological sense, the perpetrator of a heinous crime of passion casting about desperately for someone else to blame. But Anakin callously flings Padmé aside and turns to face Obi-Wan with cold formality. Christensen plays it silent and glowering, and the one moment the movie might have been authentically heartrending is thrown away.

Nor does Lucas ever bother to delve into the seductive power of the Dark Side. We never see what it is that drives Anakin to give up everything he believes in and everyone he loves to follow the path of evil. He's as sullen on his killing rampage against "younglings" and other enemies of the empire as a teenager ordered to clean his room. We never get what's in it for him.

Thank the Force for Ewan McGregor. Having single-handedly rescued Episode II: Attack of the Clones, from utter banality, his Obi-Wan provides enough soul-searching, and lively swashbuckling, to give us someone to root for. (It's also a kick to see him romping around on a giant rainbow-hued iguana in some battle or other.) And it's a pleasure to watch old pro McDiarmid freshening up his lines with a droll, insinuating spin.

The last half-hour or so is pretty terrific too, as Lucas ties up loose threads and sets the stage for the next chapter—which is, of course, the original Star Wars. Anakin (or what's left of him, after being fried and mutilated; think twice about bringing small kids to this one) is strapped into his Darth Vader suit and bursts away from the operating table in an explosion of crackling electricity, like Frankenstein's monster. The twins who will become Luke and Leia are separated at birth and shuttled off to their respective guardians

—although the subtle strains of the Luke, Leia, and Darth themes from the first film provoke an emotional response that's missing from this one. The best thing about Revenge Of The Sith is it makes you want to go back and watch the original Star Wars again right away.

STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH With Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, and Natalie Portman. Written and directed by George Lucas. A 20th Century Fox release. Rated PG-13. 139 minutes. (***)