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My basic reaction - I liked it. Here is my review:

The Star Wars Sextet:
America's First Creation Myth

It is enjoyment tempered by flaws that often infuriorate, but for which you develop love. What struck me is the realization that what the movies lack - a believable emotional core, depth of personality - is exactly what the central character, Anakin Skywalker, lacks in his psychology. And what he possesses in droves - showy flair and pride, a command of technology, and access to deep, essential knowledge of consciousness and self - reflect the larger narrative arc, as well, over the course of the six movies. Lucas's heart was obviously in this Episode III, because the fever pitch and nuance were each at their highest. Both Anakin and the entire epic are visually arresting and deeply informed by mysticism, yet are tragically kinked in the middle zones that involve emotional depth and interpersonal maturity.

On one hand, the Star Wars sextet ought not, on the surface, be taken too seriously. This is popular art with intentions of discreet depth only for those committed to look. As I entered the Chicago theatre to see the newest episode, my expectations were pretty low. Episode III delivers at what it should - being a kosmic tale largely for 12 year olds, with treats for the older folk who get into the character connections of the larger narrative arc. Lucas has said that one of his intentions has been to encourage spirituality in youngsters. Time will tell how successful he was at that, but I believe that he stands a good chance of success in that regard. But these are space adventures meant to look 'neat'.

I mean, look - the real appeal of this episode and all episodes, which started this cultural tidal wave of adulation for these movies, has primarily been the eye-candy factor. Episode IV's initial impact on our culture was in its technological presentation ('ooh, big ships in space!'; 'evil, black terror machine/man'), and that has continued for each subsequent episode, including the prequeals (and if you believe Roger Ebert, the post-quels of episodes 7, 8, and 9, to come sometime before Lucas dies). The main reason Lucas re-edited the original trilogy was because newer and better technology was developed, to realize his original concepts more concretely. Lucas, for all of his flaws, is firmly entrenched as an intuitive artist, who creates not linearly but circularly, and not in any standardized time frame. When the means become available, he doesn't just tweak, but re-examines every aspect of his films. He wants to create 'all at once', the condition of the contemporary artist, but the reality of actual creation is always bound by the rigors of physical sequence.

Much has been said about the dreadful dialogue when it comes to real human to human emotional exchange. I agree on almost every count, and I have nothing to add except that by now, you know what to expect with a Lucas film. The best lines in that regard (such as Han: I love you; Leia: I know) were improvised by Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, and not in Lucas's script. That pretty much says it all. Lucas gives his actors little to nothing to work with as they attempt in vain to portray a semblence of real personnas. Thus I find that the only interpretive mode that allows forgiveness of the generally awful dialogue is to interpret the dialogue as director intention. In other words, instead of viewing the dialogue as badly executed art, you suspend disbelief, step back, and take it at face value. You then make your interpretations that question how this strange dialogue fits into the larger artistic statement. For as I wrote in my opening, the faults of the film are in almost precise parallel to the faults of central character. Is that a coincidence? I suggest to consider not - and perhaps only with the completion of this link in the overall narrative can we make this interpretive leap.

Machine as Extension of Human Consciousness

The most resonant through-line of the narrative is Anakin's relationship with machines. In Episode I, we learn that young Anakin, as boy genius with too much time on his hands, a lack of a father figure, a conniving slave-master, and little direction from mother (who was a hard laboring slave), through his own wits and intelligence built a C-3PO droid. This is a crucial window into what becomes Anakin's defining psychological dynamic. C-3PO is an interpreter droid who is fluent in millions of language, but has the depth and ability of self-reflection of, well, a 12 year old. Threepio's interior is, essentially, unexamined. He is a robot that with an awareness undifferentiated. He is easily agitated, lacks mature responses to stress, often cowardly, and is a deep worrier. It can interact with anyone, but has no soul (or little soul). It is shaped human-like, has a pretty, shiny exterior (the 'golden one') carries like a human (awkwardly), and cannot be left alone, else it gets itself caught in the worst of sticky wickets. He is graceful with language, but that's it. Somehow Threepio is still likable, even as he is deeply annoying.

All of this is essentially a multi-leveled or polysemous metaphor for everything that Anakin is. There are three basic levels to consider. The first is the surface/sensorimotor manner in which we view Anakin's look and objective actions. The second is his emotional/mental makeup. And the third is his spiritual/breath force that involves his essential will. These parallel the levels of consciousness and being present in all humans - body, mind, spirit. Lucas's character of Anakin, portrayed by Hayden Christensen, operates on each level, and thus provides interpretive material to consider and reconcile within the larger dramatic opera. Here is a sketch of each, one at a time.

Anakin is the chosen one, the 'golden child'. On the sensori-motor level of consciousness, Anakin often moves awkwardly. He consistently overdresses. He is lanky and too tall. He has a wooden and mechanical manner of speaking, yet is painfully polite in most situations. He is capable of ego-centric irony that is entirely self-referential, just like 3PO. Yet he is charming, handsome, graceful with light-sabers and flying ships. Fundamentally, he is uncomfortable in his own skin. And all in all, Anakin, like Threepio, appears solid, and capable of being a normal person who lives up to his potentials (which for Anakin are enormous). Yet this outward appearance is mere setup for deeper issues within.

On these deeper emotional and mental levels, Anakin has unfortunate subpersonality pathologies that in large part result from lack of a father figure. He loves Padme primarily as an object, that he looks at and beholds. He has had temporary father figures who abandon him, are killed, or do not trust him. He suffers from a lack of knowledge about what or who created him. His interpersonal skills are painfully undeveloped, his emotional responses are exclusively immature, yet his spatial and logical/mathematical intelligences are off the charts. Like Threepio, Anakin is faithful to anyone who will take a moment and direct him. He lacks the ability to distinguish motivations in people, and instead is wildly projective of his own interiors upon others. He finds a true father figure in Palpatine/Sidious, the subtle architect, (who, Lucas implies, had a hand in Anakin's virginal birth), and thus confides in a man who is the root of the galaxy's unrest. Deeply confused, Anakin lives in ambiguity, and thrives on impulse and unrestrained passion. He suffers the same lack of emotional nourishment as an adult that he did as a child, and this physical jail of his childhood (as a slave) becomes the emotional jail of his adult life (unable to connect), and then the physical reality again (as man in machine). Where he once was outwardly golden on the surface, he is outwardly black, traditionally a symbol for evil and plague, as well as psychological conflict within.

On the essential/spiritual level, Anakin and 3PO are both painfully thin, yet deeply informed. Their deepest motivations are pure to the sake of parody. Anakin's lack of listening skills means he rarely if ever connects with another person in a manner in which personalities melt away, and human to human unity is achieved. Padme, as deeply intuitive and alive feminine counterpart to Anakin's logic-based nightmare, can always sense when Anakin is not transparent. His deepest drive - to protect Padme and their baby (which turns out to be babies) - mirrors the most resonant and direct example he knows - that of his own mother's deeply protective stance towards him as a young child. This is heartfelt, but narrow. He feels that by accomplishing this task, he and Padme would rule the galaxy and bring peace to everything. This confusion of possessive love (me and mine) with compassionate love (me and all of us) undoes him.

Organic Soul as Counterbalance to Cold Machines

Of course the fact that Anakin becomes 'more machine than man' confirms the human/machine relationship at the core of Lucas's space folklore. Yet Lucas provides ample balance, through the depiction of characters alive, vivified, and soulful. That Threepio's counterpart - R2D2 - is emotional, intuitive, and feisty parallels the reciprocal relationship of Anakin and Padme. R2D2 will, in my estimation, be the most memorable character in all of Star Wars, because you realize that the little white and blue droid has, literally, seen and experienced everything. The robot cannot speak in words, but its emotional intelligence is immediate and unmistakable. R2 has the most funk of any of Lucas's characters. For Lucas, even machines are not always cold and emotional bereft.

And nor are all humans. The characters played by Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Sir Alex Guinness - Lucas's UK contingent (best suited to Lucas's style, due to the physicality of British theatre) - not to mention Samuel L Jackson and, surprisingly, Jimmy Smits exhibit a mostly satisfactory emotional empathy and resonance, at least for this adolescent-intended tale. Yoda, especially in his younger age, exhibits spunk and wisdom. The Jedi are a lively and panentheistic bunch, built on a pantheistic mishmash of various religious and spiritual traditions - a mix of Christian self-less love, Buddhist analytical compassion, Islamic revelatory embodiment, and bearers of a secret truth based upon master/student transmission, lineage, and communal revelry that echoes Gnostic, Pagan, and tribal traditions the world over. Animals, too, have soul - witness the memorable Chewbacca and even the dragon Obi-Wan rides in Episode III as he fights General Grevious.

Having researched Joseph Campbell and the 'hero's journey', Lucas's overall narrative has innumerable whiffs of historical creation myths and literature (the Romeo and Juliet parallel of Anakin and Padme was nicely done) because the basic pattern is followed, and artfully concealed. This attention to and mastery of conventional form allows him to go post-conventional and nonlinear with the narrative, in ways that seem to make the conventional hero's journey fade into the discreet background. Lucas has made new cinematic conventions. Through his virtuosity emerges all the smaller subplots and devices needed to fill out the epic - Jar Jar, Greedo, Jabba, Lando, and many more - that serve to entertain the audience, more than educate or enlighten.

But the primary examination of Star Wars is man's inevitable but uneasy relationship with machine, on the levels of body, emotional, mind, and spirit. The capacity for democracy itself as a satisfactory machine for political peace is deeply questioned by the post-hippie, pre-new age Lucas, himself deeply suspicious of political power in Hollywood and American government. Likewise, the Jedi council, which operates not through democracy but through informed intuition shared in a small collective, is seen as an imperfect machine. Episode IV was released in 1977, in the wake of the controversial Vietnam War and Nixon's Watergate, seen in some circles as two examples of abuse of power. Government is social machine to defend borders, facilitate internal and external economy and trade, and manage the installation and enforcement of laws. Lucas gives constant scrutiny to government and the political forces within.

Eventually, circumstances and his native psychological makeup mean that Anakin succumbs and submits to machines, where his daughter and son each face similiar trials (Luke in his confrontations with Vader; Leia with her undying love for Han Solo, even when frozen in a carbon machine) and are able to transcend. Darth's eventual salvation comes when his son removes the black mask and reveals - yes - there is still good, a human good in him. The machine did not completely overrule organic consciousness. Like all machine technology, Vader's ran its course.

America's First Creation Myth

The quest for power through machination - personal, political, and spiritual - becomes the axis around which the entire six episodes revolve. It is the thread that is essential and homeopathic in every moment of every movie. That the Force - a metaphor for energy in its total, discreet form that permeates all of creation - is not mechanical and pliable by human control but is instead organic, wild, and unpredictable is Lucas's fundamental conclusion. The Sith treat the Force as a machine for their own benefit and manipulation. The Jedi take the opposite approach to the Force. To accept this condition, and not fight it or attempt to control it, is their essential premise. The Jedi time and time again displays the fundamental experiment for humans to acquire this realization - be mindful of your thoughts and feelings, practice contemplation - or by any other name, meditate and then train.

For Lucas, humble thoughts and simple behavior result in acceptance of Nature's chaotic undercore. 'May the Force be with you' is a populist reminder to carry realization of your true Self with you in everything you think and do. For at the end of Episode III, after the war has been fought and the Jedi have lost, Yoda gives Obi-Wan something rather surprising. He gives him a practice. Even a person as wise and experienced as Obi-Wan can still cultivate a stronger and deeper connection to original Nature. We can all improve and deepen our consciousness.

The Jedi - deterministic, measured, yet optimistic - are Lucas's paradigm for cultural change. Small groups of highly talented and empathetic individuals who intuitively and heuristically find workable truths, in concord and collaboration with the world around them. The distinct ethnic differences in Lucas's characters, and his critiques of uncontrolled democracy, bespeak his desire for pluralism tempered by common sense and flexibility.

In the end, Star Wars is about families, as a machine for creation, destruction, pathology, nurturing, confusion, and salvation. It is about our fathers, our mothers, our sons, our daughters, our brothers, our sisters, and our ancestors. Love is most difficult when it enters into areas of deep familial conflict. I believe that the overwhelming cultural response, for almost the last 30 years, to the six episodes of Star Wars is reciprocal to the areas of emotional weakness present and oft-critiqued in Lucas's epic narrative. We attract not what we want, but what we need. The act of love includes the acceptance of that timeless and troubling dynamic. If the audience finishes and completes the art experience, a conclusion I share, then the outpouring of love, and depth of love, in the world's cultures for these films supplies what Lucas and his actors could not provide themselves in the created artifact.

For Lucas, real partnership on all levels of being is the only path to peace on one's interior and exterior. In my estimation, he has succeeded in the evocation of these ideals through the medium of populist cinema based upon eye candy theatrics. A flawed and self-reflexive masterpiece, the epic Star Wars will mark the late 20th century in the historical accounts. It has transcended its own limitations, grown beyond its creator and even its native environs, and lives forever on in the anonymous machinations at the edges of culture and consciousness, all the world over. Technologically, culturally, socially, and phenomenologically, Star Wars offers to the world in large part what America offers to the world, in large measure. Through these space odysseys, Lucas has translated the contemporary American condition into celluloid.

Star Wars just might be America's first authentic stab at its first creation myth, born of the country's escape from tyranny, birth amidst racial and ethnic slavery and strife, assimilation of earthy tribes and customs of conquered native peoples, the triumph and terror of industrial technology and science, and the personal and decidedly civic struggle for freedom of self within collective responsibility - as well as the self-consciousness of itself that only comes through age and the face-down of various internal conflicts. For human sacrifice, courage, grit, and wit are what redeem amidst turmoil and transition. America, as melting pot of the world, both succeeds and struggles to determine truths amidst tempered pluralism, lack of native history, the cusps between absolutism and multiplicity, geographic isolation from its roots, and the unavoidable ambiguity of frontier. Is that not, in essence and in subtle measure, Anakin's path and psychological condition?

Is this a stretch? Well I think the parallels are worth note. The deepest lesson in Anakin/Vader is that there is essentially good in him. Anakin fights for his identity, without father figure, within a world of slavery and transition. He is a romantic, falls in love with visual beauty much older than him, lives on the frontier (physically, mentally, even spiritually). He is not trusted by others, his own teachers either die or seem ill-equiped to fully train him, and he is left on his own, isolated by his psychology and his talents. His formative years were in geographic isolation, in a strict culture of hard work and anonymous discipline. Older now, others see him as troubled but also charming, full of potential, and and possessive of wide intelligences. He needs a bit more time to mature, in their eyes, though the world's problems beg his participation now. I believe this is, on the whole, a decent summation of the over 200 years of America's relatively short life in the world.

Sound too dark, or even with whiffs of anti-Americanism? I think not. The final note to remember is that there is good in him. Ultimately, Anakin fulfills his prophecy. In death as Vader, a redeemed Anakin returns as Palpatine's empire falls. He brings order to the galaxy. Lucas suggests that a de-enmeshment with one's past (his childhood fears, his lack of father figure, and other aspects represented by Darth Sidious) fuels what amounts to a personal salvation. The lineage of master to pupil through generations is relinked, and (we assume) a more stable galactic democracy is re-installed. Anakin learns who he can trust, and also that he can trust himself. Anakin's son and daughter were first illusioned, then disillusioned, and finally unillusioned - they were informed realists, who fought then forgave the sins of their father. And Anakin's spiritual force opens to its full bloom - a character who has seen it all, become the father he never had himself, finally found acceptance and peace of his own limitations, and seen the limitations of cold, mechanical thinking.

Lucas, through the vehicle of eye-candy cinema inspired by Flash Gordon comics, has succeeded in pulling the wool of deeper artistic intentions over the eyes of its adoring fans. Almost. He lets on in Episode III the connection between Star Wars politics and current world politics. Thus the conclusions emerge: He has created a portraiture of America's rocky, inspired, rugged, and showy entrance into the world. He believes, as I do, that while America's edges between idealism and realism are tricky, especially on the surface, what lies deeper is a gift to the world - the seeds of widespread realization of the power of spiritual acceptance and prayer, tempered application of power, talented communal exchange, respect for lineage, heirarchy, and flexibility, and the capacity for committed people of diverse backgrounds to work together for change, novel emergence, and improvement of the world. He wanted to plant these artistic seeds not in adults, but in children. And as Anakin's multi-leveled development shows, there is good reason to be patient - to witness how, and indeed if, these seeds take root and grow, especially if we believe that a sustainable and reproducible good can come from it.