[Ed. note: Sorry it’s taken me so long to post my thoughts on ROTS, but like I said in a comment for an earlier entry, this movie is a big deal for me and it’s taken a while to absorb and process it. Given that it’s been out for a week and the box office returns for last weekend were flat-out astounding, I’m going to assume that half the planet’s population has already seen it. If, however, you are one of the handful of folks who didn’t come down with “Jedi flu” last week, be warned that this entry contains more spoilers than my usual movie reviews. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it can’t be helped in this particular case.]

I finally got to see my long-imagined lava-pit duel as well as the planet of the Wookiees (although the latter amounted to little more than a teasing glimpse). By themselves, these bits of fanboy wish fulfilment would probably be enough to earn Revenge of the Sith my personal thumbs-up. But as it turns out, the sixth and final Star Wars movie gave me a lot of other reasons to like it, too. It was, in fact, everything I was hoping for, a redemptive finish to the generally lackluster prequel trilogy and a successful, plausible bridge into the “next generation story” told in the original trilogy.

That’s not to say that Sith was a perfect movie, or even a perfect Star Wars movie. But I thought it was a surprisingly good movie, and, for me at least, a completely satisfying one.

Before I elaborate on that, however, let’s be clear about something: I’m not the most objective viewer when it comes to movies bearing the Star Wars label. My affection for George Lucas’ fictional universe is so deeply rooted that anything short of an Ed Wood-style debacle is going to get at least a “not bad” from me. That means that, yes, I basically liked even Episodes I and II. They weren’t great movies, they weren’t the movies I would’ve made, and they both could’ve benefited enormously from a couple more revisions to their respective screenplays, but when you get right down to it, I enjoyed them. I know a lot of other people out there did not. Sorry for your pain. But I did, so there.

What I’m trying to say with this little statement of defiance is that I approached Revenge of the Sith with a predisposition toward liking it. I wanted it to work for me, and it did. Curiously, however, the parts of the film that worked best for me are the elements for which George Lucas is most often criticized: the quiet, dialogue-driven, character-based scenes. I was actually somewhat bored by the large-scale combat scenes that are being pushed so heavily in the film’s advertising.

Take, for example, the film’s opening sequence, a titanic space battle in the skies over the Galactic Republic’s capitol world, Coruscant. It’s a space-opera smackdown like something out of a Patrick O’Brian novel, only with Star Destroyers instead of sailing ships. The image of entire fleets of huge spacecraft exchanging broadside laser-salvos has long been a staple of literary space fantasy, but has never been fully realized on the screen. I’ve always wanted to see something like this in a movie, and it should’ve been amazing. But it wasn’t. It was… tiresome. There was just too damn much going on in the frame — big ships, small ships, debris, explosions, laserfire, missiles, droids, all flashing past the camera at just-barely-comprehensible speeds. I’m probably showing my age with this complaint, but I kept thinking this all might have been cool and wonderful if only we viewers could actually look at some of it. Honestly, what is the point of creating all this amazing imagery if it zips by so quickly that no one can appreciate it?

(I recall an interview George Lucas gave years ago in which he said he was interested in testing the limits of what humans could perceive in the cinematic medium; that is, he wanted to see how much information he could pile into a scene and how quickly he could deliver that information, and still have the viewer make sense of it. I think he has his answer now… and I also suspect he’s as bored with it as I was.)

As the opening sequence continues, our heroes, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, board an enemy ship in search of the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine. There, Anakin must confront the evil Count Dooku in a scene that bears some nifty parallels to the end of Return of the Jedi, but this moment is somewhat derailed because it feels as rushed as the battle outside the ship. It’s as if GL was thinking, “Okay, I’ve got to tie up the loose end of Dooku, check; I’ve got to plant the seeds of Anakin’s destruction, check; and now those things are out of the way, we’ve got to get back into the big spectacular spacey stuff and get that over with, too. Check, check, check.” The sequence ends with Anakin somehow piloting a fragment of a destroyed space cruiser into a survivable crash landing… despite the fact that the engines were in the ship’s other half, the half that we just saw blow up.

At this point of the film, I was worried. We were 26 minutes into the last Star Wars movie ever and so far I just didn’t care about any of it. It was like watching a demo for the latest Playstation game from LucasArts. I started preparing myself for a wrenching disappointment…

And then something interesting happened. In the very next scene after the crash, the pace downshifted, and the film’s tone began taking on a melancholy quality. There was a quiet moment of dialogue between Anakin and Obi-Wan, and it felt… real. There was warmth and humor between them, a genuine sense that these two men actually were comrades, friends, even brothers. I found myself thinking that I really liked these two characters. And suddenly I was hooked.

From there, the movie progressed smoothly, with a confidence and a sense of inertia that the first two prequels lacked. (My sense is that everything that follows the opening battle is the actual backstory that George created thirty years ago, and that everything that precedes it — including the first two prequel movies — was mostly filler to tide us over until the meat was served.) The plot this time around was straightforward, not at all muddled or forced as The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones often felt. There were few surprises — if you’re a Star Wars fan, you pretty much know exactly how this story is going to run — but George managed to make the details of Anakin’s fall from grace interesting, and, by the time the young Jedi makes his fateful decision, I was fully invested in the story. As I admitted the other day, I spent the last hour of this movie choking back sobs.

Yes, it’s true, Revenge of the Sith made me cry like a little kid with a skinned knee. As silly as it may sound in our post-ironic, hipper-than-thou world where movie sentimentality of any kind is generally frowned upon, I so completely bought into this film that not even knowing how it all must end could save me from feeling absolutely heartbroken when it all came down. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s possible that knowing where the film was headed was exactly why it had such power over me — I’ve long felt that the prequels only work if you’re familiar with the original trilogy, and that someone who’s never seen any of these movies can’t start with Episode I and view them in order, because it just wouldn’t be effective. In any event, seeing with my own eyes what crazy old Ben Kenobi described in a handful of sentences in a movie I saw when I was seven was deeply moving for me.

I cried more in this film than I remember doing in any other movie I’ve ever seen, including the last film that really moved me in this way, The Return of the King. I cried when Anakin turned to evil, and I cried that he did so for what he thought was the right reason. I cried when uber-cool Mace Windu was defeated, and when the rest of the Jedi were slaughtered, and when wise, lovable old Yoda took upon himself the blame for everything that had happened. (“Failed, I have.”) I cried when Anakin cold-bloodedly cut down Nute Gunray, the pathetically craven leader of the Trade Federation who has been a constant throughout the prequels. And of course I cried when Anakin turned on his beloved Padme, followed by his friend and mentor Obi-Wan, and then I cried some more when Obi-Wan won the fight and Anakin met his final destiny.

I even cried over moments of this film that weren’t especially tragic, times in which I just plain loved these characters: when Anakin and Obi-Wan say goodbye before departing on their respective missions, the last time they would part as friends; when Yoda tries to talk Obi-Wan out of reviewing the Jedi Temple’s security tapes, to spare him the pain of what they both knew he would see; when Chewbacca and Yoda share a moment of screentime, an admittedly fanboyish moment that didn’t need to be there, but which worked for me anyhow; when Luke and Leia take their first breaths; and, of course, over the film’s closing scene, when Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru look out into the familiar double-sunset of Tatooine, an obvious but nevertheless beautiful metaphor for “a new hope.”

Hell, I even cried when that idiot Jar-Jar and the slobbery ruler of the Gungans appear at Padme’s funeral, because it was just so damn appropriate.

Now, as I said earlier, ROTS has its problems. I agree, for example, with those who say the hotshot Jedi were too easily killed, by stormtroopers no less. (I suspect that this sequence was so perfunctory because of time constraints in an already-long movie. Sith probably could’ve been done as a four-hour mini-series; indeed, maybe all the prequels should’ve been done for TV, where they would’ve had the space to really explore all the details that got glossed over. You could also argue that the Jedi had grown arrogant and couldn’t conceive of their own troops as a threat, an idea that’s somewhat supported by dialogue in Attack of the Clones.)

I also think the droids were badly used by this script, as they have been throughout the prequels. Artoo fares a little better than Threepio, who has no purpose in these stories at all, but both of them are out of character, extraneous to the action, and not very funny in their little bits of business. Lucas always said in the old days that the droids were the true heroes of the entire saga and would figure prominently in any Star Wars movie, but that’s not how it turned out, and I am disappointed by that.

As I’ve already complained, the space battle over Coruscant and the big combat scenes on Utapau and Kashyyk were hyperkinetic messes. The Emperor’s shuttle seems to cover the distance from Coruscant, at the center of the Galaxy, to Mustafar on the Outer Rim, in about a minute and a half, a little far-fetched even by the standards of this universe. And when did battle droids acquire personalities?

In addition, this movie’s guest-star bad-guy, General Grievous, doesn’t amount to much — he’s basically just a macguffin to get Obi-Wan off Coruscant while Anakin turns dark, and he’s also one more in a long line of Star Wars villains who are little more than a cool-looking costume. (Boba Fett and Darth Maul, anyone? Wouldn’t it have been much cooler if Maul had been fleshed out as an actual character and been an on-going troublemaker throughout the prequel trilogy instead of creating new Sith Lords and new secondary bad guys in every film? Yeah, I thought so, too.) And my viewing companion Anne was absolutely correct when she suggested that Anakin’s attack on the younglings would’ve been more effective if we’d seen him interacting with them earlier, teaching or playing with them like an older-brother figure.

Those quibbles aside, however, I am surprised by how few complaints I really have with Sith. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like the good in a Star Wars movie outweighs the bad. Visually, this one looks the best of all three prequels — either I’m just getting used to it, or all that computer-generated crap finally looks real. It didn’t bother me that Padme and Anakin didn’t know she was carrying twins (although I’ll concede it could’ve been better handled somehow) and her death from a broken heart, while unrealistic as hell, didn’t trouble me either. It’s a common motif in fairy tales, and we have to remember that Star Wars is, at its core, a fairy tale. (Although, again, I’ll concede it probably would’ve been better to have her go off to Alderaan with Bail Organa so as to better match Leia’s recollections in Return of the Jedi. As it is now, Leia must have one amazing brain to remember her mother from a thirty-second glimpse right after being born.)

I flat-out disagree with those critics who are still carping on about lousy dialogue and poor acting, because I just don’t see it that way. I’ve never thought the acting in these films was all that bad, to be honest. (Well, Captain Panaka in Episode I makes me cringe, but I’m talking about the leads here.) The characters do speak in a fairly flat, formalistic way, but I suspect that was deliberate, either because Lucas was trying to say something about the culture of the Republic “before the Dark Times” — i.e., it was a more formal time when people behaved in a more buttoned-up, “medieval” fashion — or because he wanted these films to reflect an old-fashioned style of filmmaking. People today don’t understand that our modern sense of realism hasn’t always been the dominant mode of acting in films; by our current standards, a lot of older movie performances come across as fairly stiff, too. In any event, I don’t think it’s fair to criticize this prequel on the acting front. Hayden Christiansen does just fine as Anakin Skywalker, Ewan MacGregor has always rocked as Obi-Wan, and Ian McDiarmid is downright amazing as Palpatine. Seriously, I think McDiarmid deserves an Oscar nom for this one, although it will never happen. He slides effortlessly from helpless and kindly old Palpy to cunning politician to seductive Mephistopheles figure and finally to the familiar, scary Emperor we remember from Jedi, often within a single speech. The scene between him and Anakin in the operahouse, when Palpatine reveals the history of the Sith, is freakin’ brilliant. I never really cared for the Emperor as a character before, but McDiarmid’s work in the prequels has been compelling.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I liked this movie because it cleared up all the loose ends and made the prequels feel like an organic part of the original Star Wars trilogy. My biggest complaint with Episodes I and II has never been Jar-Jar or seeing Anakin as a little kid or any of the things most people hate about them. What has bothered me is that they didn’t feel right, that they just didn’t seem to be chapters of the same story. Now they do. Partly this is accomplished through a number of in-jokes and references to the original films — the appearance of the Tantive IV, for example, the royal Alderaan spacecraft that Princess Leia uses, or Chewbacca’s “Tarzan yell,” which is a direct nod to a gag in Return of the Jedi. The Millennium Falcon even appears in the skies of Coruscant, if your eyes are quick enough to catch it. But Sith also closes the gap between the new and old films by addressing pretty much all everything we haven’t understood up ’til now — the mystery of Anakin’s virgin birth, what exactly Palpatine has been up to with all his skulldudgery, why Yoda and Obi-Wan disappear when they die, how Luke and Leia came to be raised separately, and, of course, why Threepio never seems to have a clue in the original films about what’s going on. Oh, there are still a few small details left dangling — why would Luke have kept his family name “Skywalker” when Leia did not, for example — but I am satisfied with pretty much all of it.

I’m also intrigued by the way Sith deepens the moral scheme of the Star Wars universe and causes us to reinterpret some of what we took for granted. Anakin turns to the Dark Side for what appears to be a noble reason — to save the lives of those he loves. He suggests to Obi-Wan at one point that good and evil are fluid concepts that vary depending on one’s point of view (which reinforces something Ben will tell Luke in ROTJ). Also, Anakin makes Padme the same offer that he later makes to his son — together we can end the conflict and rule together — which I’ve always taken as a ruse, but now think is a sign that Anakin wants family connections, even as he uses and exploits them for power. That indicates to me that he’s lonely, and that perhaps is the greatest price for going to the Dark Side. Even Palpatine displays some degree of tenderness and compassion when he comes upon the ruined body of his apprentice; he genuinely cares for his Darth Vader, even as he uses him. Fascinating, and not at all how we’ve interpreted their relationship all these years.

I’ve gone on much too long at this point and probably have very few readers who’ve stuck it out this far, but as you can see if you are still here, I’m very enthusiastic about Revenge of the Sith. I’ve said before that I would’ve been perfectly content if George Lucas had never made any new SW films beyond the original three. I still feel that way, and I also remain doubtful that the prequels will be as well remembered in fifty years as the original trilogy. But in the end, the prequels are here, and I think the last of them is remarkable. It has restored my faith in my boyhood hero, George Lucas, and allowed me to finally accept six very different movies as parts of the same story. As I said way back at the beginning of this entry, I am satisfied.

Your mileage may vary.