Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
A Review by John David Ebert

Ask any classical scholar, and he will tell you that The Aeneid is a masterpiece. But he will also tell you that it is a flawed, broken torso of a work that was never finished. In fact, at his deathbed Virgil requested that it be destroyed, for he knew that it was not worthy of Homer, his model. And when the work is taught nowadays in literature courses, it is only the first six books that anyone considers worth reading; the latter six are normally passed over as unworthy of the first half. But this does not tarnish the mightiness of those first six books, any more than Lucas’s prequels, with all their flaws, tarnish the majesty of his creation.

And indeed, Revenge of the Sith is probably the most flawed of all the Star Wars films, the second weakest installment after Return of the Jedi. Directorially speaking, it is a wreck, bearing all the marks of haste and impatience of a man anxious to finish a magnum opus that has taken him nearly thirty years to complete. But as with Virgil this does not mean that the film is not part of a larger work which is, after all, a masterpiece. There is nothing else quite like the Star Wars films, whether we are speaking of the original trilogy or the prequels, and there never will be again. They are absolutely unique: a modern epic for electronic society, just as Wagner’s mighty—and flawed—Ring cycle was a national epic for industrial society.

Lucas’s electronic epic is a mighty six part series of films telling a single great story: of the rise to power and fall into the machine of a boy who grows up to become a human cyborg and of the son who arrives to rescue him from the very machinery within which he has become entrapped. This is good old Gnostic mythology: in the Manichean creation myth, for example, a primal being known as the Anthropos made a suit of light and then descended into the realm of darkness in order to do battle with the demons of the material realm. But his mission failed. The demons tore off his armor of light and ate it, trapping him in the material realm. As a result, he had to be rescued from this prison by another divinity, the Holy Spirit, who reached his hand down into the darkness and pulled the Anthropos back up into the kingdom of Light. Thus, Anakin Skywalker, in Lucas’s mythology, is the Anthropos whose mission fails, and Luke Skywalker—whose name comes from the Greek leukos meaning “light”—is the Holy Spirit who has been sent down into the realm of darkness to rescue him from the demons, in this case, the Sith lords who have seduced him with delusions of power.

Lucas’s films then are a recasting of Gnostic mythology for the modern age, in which the soul as a spark of light that falls into the material prison of the human body becomes the fall of Anakin Skywalker—i.e. contemporary humanity—into the prison of the machine, our machines which have become so ubiquitous that they have turned each one of us into interdependent cyborgs. Anakin’s story is the story of our modern predicament, and indeed, it bears certain parallels to the life of Howard Hughes, as told by Martin Scorsese in his film The Aviator, for in that film, too, a boy who is fascinated with flying machines eventually becomes trapped inside of the labyrinth that he has constructed, becoming his own prisoner. (In the Lucas-Coppola collaboration Tucker, Hughes puts in a brief, enigmatic appearance, so we know that Lucas was familiar with his life story).

Thus when, in Revenge of the Sith, we are shown how Anakin is welded into an exoskeleton of metal and silicon circuitry by a group of robots, what we are really seeing is a modern version of the construction of the human body in Gnostic myth by beings known as Archons, who design the body as a prison within which to cage the human soul as it descends through the planetary spheres toward incarnation upon earth. Revenge of the Sith is filled with such scenes of superb science fiction mythography, and Lucas’s handling of his mythic themes is expert.

Likewise, the following sequence in which the twins, Luke and Leia are born at the darkest hour, when all seems lost, is a reiteration of an old myth motif of the incarnation of a divinity as a pair of twins when the cosmos falls out of joint. In Hindu mythology, for example, when the demon King Kamsa has thrown the cosmos out of balance, the god Vishnu plucks two hairs from his head, one white and one black, and they incarnate as the twin brothers Balarama and Krishna. When King Kamsa hears of this, he invites them to a wrestling match, to fight his strongest warriors, but when it comes their turn, Kamsa unleashes a wild elephant into the ring, which Krishna defeats by simply jumping onto its back and squeezing it to death. Eventually, Krishna will be destined to set right the cosmos by killing King Kamsa. In this myth, not only do we recognize the parallel with the birth of Luke and Leia as the twins born to set right the balance of power in the cosmos—the one by slaying the Evil Emperor and the other by killing Jabba the Hut—but we also recognize the essential similarity of the spirit of ancient epic mythmaking with what Lucas has been trying to accomplish in his trilogies, for the battle in the ring with the giant elephant invites a certain comparison with the climax of Attack of the Clones, in which the heroes battle in a gladiatorial ring against a series of monsters which they overcome by similar feats of strength.

Almost every scene of the Star Wars films echoes one ancient myth or another, for what Lucas has tried—and successfully achieved—is to recapture the spirit of the ancient mythological epics of the world’s oral storytelling traditions that were popular before the rise of the European novel made them seem crude and violent by comparison. Epic heroes, be they Odysseus or Mwindo, Achilles or Vainamoinen, are violent, and resolve their deeds through taking physical action: killing demons and dragons, slaying evil emperors and rescuing captured princesses. This is exactly what goes on in the Star Wars films, only the deeds take place within a mechanized landscape, consistent with the modern environments that technological innovations have wrought upon us. But, like the filigrees so enwrapping dragons and animals in Viking and Celtic art that they appear to be imprisoned within latticeworks of ornamentation, so modern man has wrought a technological landscape with which he has imprisoned himself and does not realize what it implies for his humanity.

Anakin is a violent individual who prefers to resolve his problems like the villains of comicbooks: through dark, bloody actions. In this sense, he allows himself to be swept away by his passions, whereas the discipline of his Jedi training should have taught him—as it teaches his son Luke—how to gain control over his passions and desires, and not let himself be blown about so easily by the manipulations of those around him. His story is relevant to that of each one of us: how often do we allow anger to resolve our problems for us? And what, inevitably, is the outcome?

But it is true that Lucas’s mythologizing has been conveyed to us, in this final installment, in a particularly broken and damaged form, like the shattered remains of Rilke’s Torso of Apollo. There is a great work of art in here somewhere: but it has been obscured by choppy editing, bad acting, and impatient directing. The film watches with all the turbulence of the last half hour of Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons. The action scenes play like they are on fast forward: scenes are rushed through with little set up to prepare us for them, and by the time we realize what has happened, they are gone, leaving us puzzled. Lucas seems here to have forgotten basic cinematic skills like pacing, staging, exposition and the creation of tension. The other two prequels, for all their flaws, weren’t this poorly edited and assembled. Their pacing was measured and sure, if slow. Here, everything seems rushed through, as though Lucas wanted to get it over with. The opening sequence is a case in point: the “rescue” of Senator Palpatine is deliberately meant to parallel the opening sequence from Return of the Jedi, in which Han Solo is rescued from Jabba the Hut. But that sequence is expertly directed by Richard Marquand, who handled it beautifully; the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith is stiff and plodding by comparison.

Lucas’s final film, however, ultimately delivers just what we expect it to: the Jedi are all killed off, the Sith are in power, Anakin is transformed into a biomechanical centaur, and all is out of balance. The cosmos is thus set right for the incarnation of a divinity in the form of a hero (or two) who will come to bring balance to the Force.