Sandwiched between J.R.R. Tolkien's grand and wondrous WWII allusion and J. K. Rowling's politically correct and elegant pen wizardry, George Lucas stands tall as one of the selected few to have created a world of his own then to be embraced by hoards of followers whose fervor defies comprehension. Almost thirty years after Star Wars: A New Hope defined the staple for the modern blockbuster, the journey comes full circle with an overbearingly spectacular conclusion, which above anything else reminds us that we are not children anymore and have to let go. For all its visual splendour and nonstop action, Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith is the first Star Wars picture, including the much maligned first two prequels, that did not provoke a remote desire for a repeat viewing within me. That is not to say that the film is a let down; on the contrary, it is a hugely impressive visual achievement, which does what it sets out to do to an acceptable extent. However, the exhilaration is gone; the film is a sad document underlining the fact that Star Wars may be a defining moment of a cinema-loving youth, but not a cinema-loving life.
As all baptised in the Star Wars creed know too well, Episode III is about the hows and whys of the young ultra-talented Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker's switch of allegiance to don the mask of the sinister Darth Vader. It is also about how the twins Luke and Leia come to be and how the Republic transforms into an Empire. The film makes this all clear alright, but achieves it with the grace of a chainsaw.
Ironically, the new Star Wars films suffer from its own lasting appeal. A younger audience graciously accepts choppy dialogue, and there once was a certain Han Solo to liven things up, but with much of the audience well past their teenage years the sporadic silliness of the story is much tougher to negotiate. George Lucas is a master of vision, but writing a rousing or even remotely human dialogue is hardly his forte. The characters' lines advance the clicking plot but genuine emotion is at a premium. Hayden Christensen in the key role of Anakin is the one most severely handicapped by the wasteful writing. He is given the arduous task of depicting a veritable transformation of an ambitious young man, but he is clutching at straws here. Every scene of emotion and moral choice he is in feels like a not particularly convincing and confused first take. Particularly painful to watch are Anakin's rendezvous with his beloved Princess Amidala (Natalie Portman), which grind the proceedings to a halt in yet another failed effort to accommodate romance into the story.
It must be said that in most scenes the actors have had to conjure reactions from thin air as they have been acting against a blue screen - a reported 70 per cent of the film is computer generated. This offers an explanation for the actors' wooden reactions, but explanation compensates for nothing. The only two characters who pass their associative acting test with flying colors are Ian McDiarmid as the scheming Senator Palpatine, and ironically, Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz), once a puppet, now a fully computer-generated character.
The film almost redeems itself by virtue of vision. It saturates every frame and is a joy to behold. True, the action often does not make sense; it stems from Lucas's vision rather than the other way round, but we've come to expect that and cherish it in a way. When Jedi Knights Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin undertake a rescue mission against an entire rebel flotilla, it hardly seems wise, but is great fun all the same. When Yoda and the Darth Sidius hurl senator boxes in the defining battle of good versus evil, it is as rousing as anything in the Star Wars pantheon. I am also seduced to mention Lucas's fixation with the chopping of arms, although there is no particular reason for me to do so. In a sort of Jedi comeuppance, at least five arms are axed in the first hour of the film.
All in all, the revenge that the Sith wage is all it had to be, but sadly not everything we hoped it would be. It completes the saga with commendable precision, but puts a sad full stop to the realisation that the ones who crowded the theatres in the early eighties and dreamed of Jedi glory are no longer young.