Not long ago, on a TV screen.......

I sit here [at my computer] watching the extras on ‘Star Wars Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith’ and it strikes me that it is the best in the entire series, possibly even the best that George Lucas has ever directed although having only seen five out of the seven movies he’s done I cannot say this with any great level of certainty. ‘Episode 4, A New Hope’ is a brilliant popcorn movie, a crowd pleasing masterwork, an action adventure flick with an incredible depth and soul….. but it’s not exactly challenging. Really and truly though it has the potential to do this it does not make you think, it is brilliant, and far more complex than it would at first seem but this complexity is lost in the near complete lack of subtlety and ambiguity. This lack of subtlety is corrected, and brilliantly so in ‘Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back’ the depth and soul of the first movie is elevated as the story comes top greater complexity in this the undeniably darkest and best of the original trilogy. ‘Episode 6, Return of the Jedi’ is somewhat a return to the [even] greater lightness of the original but with a greater richness of story and action and for better or worse a nearly Spielbergian level of schmaltz on its own it would be a good movie it only becomes great when put together with the previous two. The less said about episodes 1 and 2 the better but ‘Revenge of the Sith’ is a truly brilliant, terrifying, heart wrenching, thought provoking, tragedy in the true Greek sense of the word, it has a terrible complexity and ambiguity to it, it will twist your head in a million different directions from sympathy to revulsion and back again you will shed real tears and feel real emotions, only true art can do that to you and ‘Episode 3’ is more real than any of the others, it is the one resounding, final clinching piece of proof of Lucas’s genius, and yet Lucas himself sees the series in the simplistic shades of black and white, good and evil, his view of it is bereft of the finer tastes of the deeper, more shocking and mocking ambiguitys of near paradox.