“I am your father.” Those words still echo in my mind. They take me back to the moment when Darth Vader revealed the terrible truth to Luke Skywalker, and I remember how it shattered my expectations—and those of millions of others—in the best way possible: dramatically. The first three mythic Star Wars films (Episodes IV, V, and VI) embedded themselves in our cultural consciousness. Twenty-eight years later, George Lucas brings us full-circle—to the end of the beginning—with “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.” In this final chapter, we find out the answers to the questions we’ve been asking since day one: what happened to make the Evil Empire, well, evil; what made Luke’s father turn to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader; and how did he become Darth Vader in the first place? Episode III does answer these, but it still leaves a lot of other questions unanswered.

Stephanie Zacharek, a movie reviewer for Salon.com, voices a similar opinion in her article “Same Old Sith.” Her commentary on Episode III is best summed up with her statement that most people will see Episode III as “a scathing indictment of the Bush administration.” In fact, (nearly) her entire review shows displeasure with the film’s political commentary. This is not to say that Zacharek gives the movie short shrift. To the contrary, she delivers a fairly complete (yet bitingly satirical) summary of the events in Episode III. But this summary only serves as a brief detour. Zacharek resumes her list of issues with Lucas’ absolutist storytelling, and the political parallels contained in the movie: “Clearly, the hope is that moviegoers will find it rousingly topical.” I think this is where she’s missing the point; fans like myself had some expectations that weren’t met, and that is where Episode III disappoints.

Zacharek’s review usually echos the thoughts that I had about the movie after I had gotten over the fun of actually watching it. She says “compared with its predecessors, at least, the picture moves along reasonably swiftly.” Well, that’s certainly true. The pacing of this movie is actually a little too quick. There’s a scene in which Anakin is defending Palaptine (the manipulative antagonist) so he can be tried in the courts. Mere seconds later, he is pledging to be Palapatine’s right-hand man, and tromps off to go wipe out everyone at the Jedi temple. Anakin’s transformation from gloomy, conflicted Jedi to glowering, murderous stooge takes about forty-five seconds to complete, and that’s including some Jedi killing. Why couldn’t this agonizing—and potentially, deliciously dramatic—transformation have been spread across two films? Had it taken more than a few seconds, we would have actually rooted for Anakin to fight the temptation of the Dark Side. At this pace, however, it’s hard to care at all.

At times, Zacharek sounds like a stuck record; she keeps coming back to politics. It’s not that she’s off the mark in her analysis – she’s actually quite astute. She does hurt some of her political commentary by using pretentious language: “Preoccupied as they are with good and evil, with so little gray in between, the ‘Star Wars’ movies are more like faux Wagnerian epics that have been clumsily retrofitted with democratic ideals.” Huh? Why not simply say “There are some silly political parallels and two-dimensional moralistic themes,” and then move on to the meat of the movie’s flaws? Ok, so she swings and misses on that one. Zacharek tries again, saying Episode III “doesn’t work as a political statement because for all the lip service Lucas pays to democracy, he barely seems to know what it is.” That’s pretty fair, but honestly, who cares about the political parallels between today’s society and one from long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away?

If Zacharek is looking for issues, why doesn’t she mention problems with the plot or characters? Or the issues Episode III creates in continuity with the other films? Those are surely bottomless wells of topics to pick from. For example: why is it that, when Palpatine tells Anakin that the Force can create life, Anakin completely ignores it, despite his own virgin birth? Seeing as how for the last three films, he’s constantly told that he is “the chosen one,” it seems unlikely he’d gloss over that detail. In a world of antigravity cars and robotic limb replacements, why in the galaxy does Padmé’s pregnancy end in a painful delivery? Don’t these people have laser epidurals? If you were General Grievious—an asthmatic, lightsaber-wielding, Jedi-killing cyborg—and your duty was to destroy people who can deflect laser blasts with a sword, wouldn’t you spring for a cyborg body that actually covered your vital organs? Is Obi-Wan Kenobi only pretending he doesn’t know R2-D2 in Episode IV? After all, he’s known R2-D2 ever since Episode I, and has extended interaction with him in Episode III. The list of questions goes on and on – I only wish that Zacharek had asked some of them.

While her summary is a little editorial for my taste, I think that Zacharek’s review of Episode III is fair, especially as the movie stands. But her fixation on the political and moral overtones, and how they damage the movie is misguided. The problems with Episode III are deeper than shallow politics. They’re ingrained in fans and the twenty-eight years they had to fill in the plot. They came from Lucas under-delivering on the drama that we all knew happened: the collapse of a noble Republic and the rise of a despotic Empire; the dispersal and all but total destruction of the Jedi Order; and the sad, tortured soul of Anakin Skywalker as he slipped from grace and became Darth Vader. Sure, the conversion from Republic to Empire would have still required a little politics, but there would still be plenty of wonderful opportunities for truly complex characters and mythical storytelling.