..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Star Wars:
Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

Directed by George Lucas
Twentieth Century Fox

After Ebert offers three-and-half death stars and the Times' A. O. Scott hedges neatly, that it's "by far the best film in the more recent trilogy," need me for what, do you?

Rooting for a movie to be bad is not my way. The lights go down, I have faith - until my eternal hope turns out to be foolish. I wanted Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith to be good and worthy diversion, to disprove my instincts that George Lucas has become a terrible writer, a lazy filmmaker, a man who fills frames with all kinds of doodling even as he empties his mind of essential storytelling.

Stupid me. Willfully dumb, shamelessly incoherent on both a narrative and functional level, Lucas' assuredly-not-final-tilling of the Star Wars field is interesting primarily for events outside of its drear tedium. George Lucas is an industrialist, but I will admit that I've gotten more joy from watching a training film about the disassembly and reassembly of a steam turbine engine.

So much action, so little traction. The plot, such as it is, is a PG-13 day of reckoning, edited at a hurtling pace but never compelling. (This is how the world of Lucas' imagination ends, not with a bang, but a Pepsi-Cola tie-in.) Hayden Christensen, our scowling, petulant, Lord Vader-to-be teen-fascist, has a new look this go-round, a matted mullet of greasy ringlets that's as much about modern-day North America as anything on screen. If only he carried a guitar instead of a light saber.

The screen is busy with junk. Lucas, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, lays on the gewgaws, not with a trowel, but with a dragline. There's nothing here to be green-screen with envy over. It's enervating. A director I spoke to recently about another movie marveled at something his cinematographer pointed out: the director wanted to shoot a scene entirely without color. The DP pointed out that it required a burst of color - a plate of lemons in this case - to signal to the viewer the lack of color otherwise. Whatever Lucas' earliest influences, Kurosawa, blah-blah-blah, a 5-year-old's toybox is a superior model of composition. And the action? In the digitally projected preview I saw a couple of weeks ago, the extended light saber battles seemed even more repetitive because of the impression of any bright light being a jagged absence of image.

With dialogue-writing skills on a par with the simplest fan, Lucas does not burden or frighten the young with lyricism: he's the writing-directing equivalent of the male performer in heterosexual porn, whose greatest gift does not intimidate because he's customarily as homely as a hedgehog. "Annie, I want to have a baby back home on Naboo"? "You missed the report on the Outer Rim Sieges"? "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo"? "I sense Count Dooku." (I smell poop.)

The intrigues play out on planets carpeted with drear luxury condos with views of Staples Center-type buildings to the horizon, crushingly dense Dubai-like skylines, a mishegoss of motley pseudo-architecture. The armies of concept artists and special effects animators, re-framers and polishers do shoehorn in a couple of neat things, like a spire resembling Daniel Libeskind's ill-fated Freedom Tower.

Valuable art ought to be porous. "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," Leonard Cohen sang in the song "Anthem." Movies take several years to make. Cultural accidents happen. Coincidences pile up. Lucas may have been working with historical parallels from centuries past, with the template of the U.S. versus the Viet Cong when he began-and remember that this toy-merchandising maven was the original director of Apocalypse Now and, the story goes, felt betrayed when he didn't get to make it. Sith lumbers awake with a few bursts of blunt parallels with contemporary politics, which Lucas once seemed to pooh-pooh, saying he conceived the story long ago. Yes, but Lucas is also notorious for reshoots, reframings and last-minute changes, and there are lines that pop in this historical moment. Some online posters have insisted, "it's only a movie," which is naiveté beyond compare: Cultural artifacts, particularly massively mass-marketed ones like Star Wars leave shadows and shards in our heads and hearts.

Consider Lord Palpatine's "The attempt on my life has left me scarred." Can you say "Ukraine"? "I am the Senate": didn't a U.S. politician sneer something like that to a reporter last year? A reference to "the fog of lies"? "This war represents a failure to listen"?
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes"? Or the line "This is how liberty ends, with thunderous applause." Sounding like President Bush after 9/11, Anakin tells Obi-Wan: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy." (Bush's speech read, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.")

There's beauty here: the zeitgeist gonna getcha, no matter how hard you run. Online, ranks of Drudgelings are attacking the movie for daring to have resonance outside of dark, air-conditioned rooms. Any allusion to honest political disagreement, to some current voices, is to be a "Bush-hater." Conservative columnist John Podhoretz, for instance, wrote at National Review Online that "Lucas [reveals] with [his] brainless anti-Bushism the essential cowardly vapidity of pacifism." (No politics here, move along, move along.) At Cannes, Lucas joked at a press conference, "When I wrote it, Iraq didn't exist," continuing, "We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn't think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam…. The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable."

Mission accomplished.

-Ray Pride