A Humble Confession

I told myself I wasn’t going to do it. I told myself I was never going to give George Lucas another damned dollar and that he had ruined the Star Wars franchise after the abysmal, craptacular entries The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Hell, I didn’t even like Return of the Jedi when it originally came out and it was only years later that I sort of came to terms with its childish entertainment value. But I have to humbly admit that I was wrong about Revenge of the Sith.

It was awesome.

A couple of nights ago I finally sat my ass down to watch it on DVD. Strangely, I was looking forward to suffering through it. Perhaps I simply wanted to get it out of the way and feel superior to it, brag to my friends that I had witnessed yet another shitty film by Lucas and that I had been right all along—he was a hack and a fraud. Well, he may not be the best director around and he’s certainly not a good writer (but we’ve all known that for decades, right?), but damn if he didn’t pull out all the stops with this presumably final and certainly important film in the series. I won’t bore you with reviewing it—most of you have already seen it and have chosen sides—but I just want to publicly confess to those friends who were urging me to see it and who insisted that it was not a waste of time. You were right. And for the first time since Return of the Jedi, Lucas actually made a Star Wars film that felt like a real goddamn Star Wars film. Who knew he still had it in him?

Then again, perhaps it was the bottle of wine that helped me through it.