'Sith': The Promise Fulfilled

He's a director of action and ideas, and in Anakin he gives us a man comprising both. Anakin is the classic man who gives up freedom for security, and ends up with neither. He's all those happy good Germans of 1938 who sold out to a Leader who would protect them from Bolshevism and who served thereafter without remorse or doubt until the world collectively rubbed their noses in it. Or he's the brilliant generation of young radicals who gave it up for Stalin's golden utopia and paid no attention to the messy steps of forced starvation and internecine slaughter of millions on the road to paradise. I suppose he's any man who believes in something so hard that he gives up his soul for it, and to forget the pain of the lost soul, he squeezes the new faith even harder until he's lost in moral space. And thus the equation that is the core of the story: Fear produces anger which produces loss of self which produces forgetting which produces rebirth which produces a capacity for . . . anything.

What this movie does is rise, rise, rise to a level of demonic intensity that hasn't been achieved since 1983's "Return of the Jedi." Anakin becomes the linchpin in Palpatine's plot against the old republic and its learned council of Jedi; using him as point man, Palpatine contrives a national security crisis as a way of turning himself into an Emperor, though it costs him a blast of energy that withers him. And then, of course, late in the plot, Anakin must meet Obi-Wan, in hell.

It's not actually hell, it's a planet of lava, with fiery rivers and geysers of flame, an orange-hued nightmare-scape. It's not hell, but of course it is hell -- the hell of men's conflict, pride amplified by fury amplified by the need to destroy, that is, the hell of 4,000 years of war. At last they have committed to sides, these two warriors, and now they will fight. The swords dart and hum through the air (the swordsmanship, presumably computer-assisted, is much faster than previously), the two thrust and parry, each obsessed with the rightness of his position. It's like the sixth act of an opera written by Nietzsche, Wagner and Robert E. Howard. I have to say that the heretofore wooden Christensen glowers, threatens, fences, fights, oozes evil magnificently; he's far more interesting as a proto-Darth than he was as Obi-Wan's best boy.

The movie, of course, has one great advantage: We know where it's going, and we're all primed as familiar signposts come up. We know it will end exactly where "Star Wars" began, and so as we tick off the implanting of the icons -- the Death Star, the Emperor's scorched and ghastly face, the mounting of the plastic mask under the Nazi helmet as Anakin becomes Darth, the birth and dispersal of the Skywalker twins -- there's a sense, most satisfying, that yes, indeed, you can go home again.

I'm not sure how all this will play for youngsters who've seen the first three films only on their TV screens. In 1977, "Star Wars" blew my generation away, re-creating for us lost pleasures of our youths in crummy B-grade bijoux in small towns and burbs, filling us with the hope that the kind of soaring, enabling narrative hadn't been lost from movies that were just then coming out of a deep and morbid period of political unrest and self-questioning that led to great but disturbing films. As a generation, we needed a drink or a vacation or a wallow. "Star Wars" provided the latter, returning us to a childhood we didn't realize we missed.

So for my generation, "Revenge of the Sith" is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.

And if you thought I was going to tell you what a Sith is, the joke's on you: I have no idea!

(Okay, it seems to be a vanished or banished race or clan; Darth Maul, the red-faced sword ace from "The Phantom Menace," was a Sith and it turns out that a certain powerful figure has been a secret Sith all this time.)

Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith (140 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for a level of violence unusual to the "Star Wars" cycle, including the implied murder of children, the lopping off of limbs, an act of domestic murder and a terrible burning. Parents of small children should probably see it before they decide whether to take the youngsters.