Sith brings Star Wars saga to a spiritually muddled end

By Peter T. Chattaway

This is no small point, since it is in this film that Anakin turns against Obi-Wan and becomes the evil Darth Vader.

The film's opening sequence, in which Obi-Wan and Anakin rescue Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from his Separatist kidnappers - unaware that Palpatine is a sorcerer who has engineered the kidnapping as part of his plan to seize power over the galaxy - is also one of the most exciting, amusing and entertaining chapters in the entire series.

But there isn't much else to praise here. Natalie Portman, as Anakin's secret and pregnant wife Padme Amidala, has little to do; and some scenes are so ripe for parody, they practically satirize themselves.

The earlier prequels were surprisingly dull exercises in teenage romance and hokey political conspiracies; obsessed with boring, mundane details like the taxation of trade routes, they had little in common with the grand, mythic archetypes of the original films.

To its credit, Revenge of the Sith finally pushes the story back in a more operatic direction; but old habits die hard, and the characters continue to pay lots of lip service to the need for 'diplomacy' and 'liberty' and so on. Even Obi-Wan declares, in what should have been one of the film's most climactic moments, that he is fighting on behalf of "democracy".

Sith proves once again that Lucas has no idea, and little interest in, how real people relate to one another. This flaw is especially problematic here since, as Obi-Wan told us in the first film, "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force." Alas, Lucas is as tin-eared and ham-fisted with spiritual seduction as he is with the romantic kind.

One of the prequels' more regrettable aspects is that they have undermined the moral stature of characters we once thought were heroes, yet you suspect Lucas is oblivious to how he has compromised those characters.

For example, many people of my generation were introduced to relativistic thinking through Obi-Wan's insistence, in Return of the Jedi, that many of the "truths" we believe depend on our "point of view." But in Sith, this belief is expressed by Palpatine, who persuades Anakin that what is good or evil depends on one's "point of view".

Things are muddled even further when Anakin and Obi-Wan have their fateful duel. Obi-Wan seems to espouse a form of relativism when he tells Anakin, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes!" But when Anakin declares, "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil," Obi-Wan replies, "Well, then, you are lost."

Does Obi-Wan mean this absolutely? Or would he concede that Anakin was only "lost" from a certain point of view?

The prequels have robbed the Star Wars universe of much of its mystique. It turns out the years of mystery and speculation around the events that transpired before the original films was much more interesting than the depiction of those events that finally came out.

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The animal cartoons put out by DreamWorks have been really hit-and-miss. Five years ago, Chicken Run was a fantastic homage to prisoner-of-war movies; it was also, briefly, the top-grossing non-Disney cartoon of all time until Shrek came out the following year. But last autumn's Shark Tale was so uninspired, it put me to sleep. Literally.

Thankfully, Madagascar is at the more interesting end of the spectrum. This might be because it is the first film Eric Darnell has co-directed since 1998's Antz, a sharp and funny social satire that I found more compelling than its Pixar rival A Bug's Life. But I also found the film's music pretty catchy, and to my surprise, I genuinely cared about the characters, especially Alex the Lion (voiced by Ben Stiller).

Alex is buddies with Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock) and other animals in a Manhattan zoo, and his diet consists of the juicy steaks given to him by the staff there; like many people in the big city, Alex never really thinks about where his meat comes from.

But that all changes when the animals are stranded in 'the wild.' Alex's roar gets unexpectedly stronger, his claws pop out when he isn't expecting it, and eventually even his former zoomates begin to look like the offerings at a butcher shop to him.

This leads to a sincerely affecting moment where Alex, his mane gone scraggly like a madman's hair, cowers in a shadow, afraid of his own newfound appetites - while Marty waits outside, and promises not to let these recent developments get in the way of their friendship.

There isn't space here to discuss the crazy lemurs, creepy foosa, and criminal penguins who also populate this film. Suffice to say that Madagascar, like some other animated films of recent memory, had me wondering about the place of the food chain in Christian thought.

Psalm 104 celebrates how lions "roar for their prey and seek their food from God," but Isaiah 11 and 65 say lions will become peaceful vegetarians when the messianic age dawns. To what degree are these passages poetic, and to what degree are they meant to be taken literally?

And just to make things even more interesting, after Christ conquered death through his resurrection, John 21 and Luke 24 tell us he proved it by killing and eating some fish.

Madagascar hardly settles these themes, but it explores them in an interesting way. And without giving too much away, I can say that fish are on the menu for this film's happy ending, too!

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Good news for Jesus-movie buffs: the Pacific Cinematheque is presenting a retrospective on the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, including not only The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) - regarded by many as the best entry in the genre so far - but also a rare documentary on Pasolini's ultimately futile search for locations in Palestine.

The series runs June 15 - 30. Call 604-688-FILM for showtimes.