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Revenge of the Sith! In 2005, it was the long-awaited segment of the Skywalker family story in which viewers finally got to see the enigmatic clan's most darkly fascinating member, Anakin Skywalker, fall to the Dark Side in agony & anguish, to rise like a dark Phoenix from the horrific lava shores of burning black "sand" as the savagely angry Alpha Male named in the Sith as Lord Darth Vader --- severely injured, a burn victim with pneumothorax and TBI, including a subdural hematoma (which Palpatine desperately tried to relieve via trephanation but failed while they were traveling back to Coruscant), a cervical spinal injury and several amputations with prosthetics ---- passing through much surgery and painful medical tribulation and PT and OT under the care of Palpatine's trauma centre and droids, to ultimately emerge in shocking dark power and prowess, known by the Galaxy ONLY as the dread Darth Vader, most feared of all Dark Lords of the Sith, even moreso than the almost preternaturally adept Emperor Palpatine himself!
With controversial yet deeply nuanced and subtly brilliant acting by young Hayden Christensen and a cast of stars able to adapt to difficult & unusual roles, this film and the others feature intense state-of-the-art (for their era) SciFi special effects and astonishing animation and CGI, but the series' truest drama is expressed in a complex multilayered plot about politics, human rights, non-human sentient life, the clash of cultures, and the tragic psychological drama of a deeply troubled yet gifted and resilient family.
George Lucas made it the saga of both a massive Galactic war and the private and painful struggle of a severely dysfunctional family in acute and future-deciding crisis. He has an amazing gift for producing SciFi with deeply timely messages about politics and key sociological issues neatly percolating underneath the mindblowing special effects, CGI and set/costume design. Not to forget how he has gotten stellar acting from his cast members. In this motion picture he has hit a home run with all the bases full in the bottom of the ninth.
Though there is a wealth of fascinating characters with amazing backstories, one of the main characters absolutely stands out as one of the ultimate badass villains of cinema. Moreso since he starts out as a hero, albeit an unstable one with a massive ability he can scarcely control and a hidden psychological torment no one who offers him support ever properly deals with, leading inexorably to an almost unbelievably hideous catastrophe.
No Spoiler Alert here: come on peeps, everybody knows Darth Vader started out a good guy, turned to the Dark Side, was nearly burned to death, and emerged as the ultimate badass of cinema. Of males, anyway. Somewhere out there in cinema is an equally badass female.
George Lucas is quiet and soft-spoken but daring as a director can be. And thus he can be excruciatingly subtle. He has to be: he takes on in the serial Star Wars such topics as life after death, the meaning of Tibetan Buddhism (that's what the Jedi Way generally is, with a touch of other Asian religions to work on the warrior angle, as Tibetan Buddhist monks are non-combatants) for the Multiverse, human kindness, human cruelty, how relationships unravel when you're not looking, how you can't be really sure you know the person you're closest to, and such horrors as accidental incest, spousal abuse, child abuse, human trafficking, chronic PTSD, and a character who could be the poster child for Borderline Personality Disorder, a true tortured genius who later develops such severe dissociation as to leave his entire former life behind and become a new person, quite literally: in the first days of his new life--- after his trauma unit stay, because he manages to get burned nearly to death in the process of this change, while he's trying to kill his best friend in a paranoid fit right after choking and beating his pregnant wife unconscious --- and all the things large and small that trigger him.
The accompanying books on Darth Vader's transformation give amazingly nuanced detail. Right after the accident, he has noplace to sleep so his only remaining "friend" -Palpatine- lets him crash in the top story of a building he owns, near where the trauma center is, where Vader can't sleep very well and gets the sun right in his eyes very early first thing in the morning anyway, and sometimes lies awake all night knowing it's getting later and later and he's STILL AWAKE and soon enough that morning light will mean he has to get up no matter how he feels. It's in one of the books. Lucas finds so many things people can relate to. I think we've all been there, peeking at the clock and knowing we just AREN'T going to get ANY DRATTED SLEEP TONIGHT, botheration, so we'll be a hopeless mess all day at work tomorrow, so it's relatable even though it's Darth Vader-- but still, reading that passage, you'd think Palpatine could spring for some window shades. And some pillows or something, yeesh. Vader's suffering enough. Let him sleep in if he's been up most the night. He's recovering from being a burn victim. And a few Vicodin might help him get through the day, too. What's wrong with you, Palpatine?!! Don't you know how much third degree burns hurt?? I'll bet Emperor Palpatine popped a few pain pills--at least a couple Paracetamol-- after all that Sith-Lightening got deflected back into his face by the late great Mace Windu's beautiful violet lightsaber.
So why are you hogging all the pain meds, Palpatine? Because you WANT Vader to BE IN CONSTANT PAIN. THAT part is in the books as well. Not about the pills. About how Palpatine deliberately allows flaws in Vader's suit that cause constant pain. Plus there are other flaws that haste caused, as they went well past the "golden hour" in striving to save his life. They had to build that life-sustaining suit fast. No time for ultra high-tech frills. That's in there as well. The books truly augment the movies.
And here, George Lucas and crew do it again. Thinking decades ahead of his time, Lucasfilm: had a handicapped character occupy a top position in an organization, and showed how one might learn to adjust one's goals to compensate for losses suffered after an accident or assault.
Vader improves his suit and compensates for his weaknesses-- described in detail in the books written by people approved by Lucas (before Disney, but I'll bet they're still Canon)-- gradually, changing his lightsaber fighting technique and learning a Sith secret to invisibly garotte people with the Force, as he already showed talent there and can no longer shoot Force Lightening. IRL disabled people won't be doing THAT sort of thing unless they're in Black Ops, but one gets the general idea.
And Darth Vader, a character so intensely beloved in SciFi Geekdom that he's almost got to apply for American citizenship--- he (via the movies & books) DIRECTLY BECAME THE FIRST TO ADVOCATE MEDICAL PATIENTS STATING "I SHALL BE WARD OF MYSELF," meaning that we have the right to: discuss meds & treatment options with our physicians, report worrisome side-effects too; express anger or fear if something unethical is done; decide what prosthetics we'll use; make Advance Directives. In Star Wars, Palpatine ends up acting as Darth Vader's Health Care Proxy, and in the books, using other terms, Palpatine reminds Vader of that fact later. Vader replies that he did not like all of Palpatine's decisions and that he wants to arrange it so that his own wishes will be recorded in their high-tech computers, and take precedence in any future emergency. They have a bit of a row over it but work it through, and that's why Vader is so independent. He just keeps raising the bar. He had, it said, originally thought he'd be confined to a repulsorlift chair, SciFi version of a wheelchair. But he was determined to walk and he eventually met that goal and beyond. There's a surprising amount of material in the SW books on that type of thing. Some if it is from rather long ago. That means George Lucas was thinking ahead of the rest in that area too.
This means that the Star Wars franchise had yet another socially applicable New Idea: both the Advance Directive and the Health Care Proxy. Above all, the now mostly accepted idea that we all, as patients, are health care consumers, and today that's no longer Science Fiction. What it means is we have the right to participate in our own healthcare--further, the RESPONSIBILITY.
But that's IF we can afford the insurance; especially if we have as many pre-existing conditions as Darth Vader. I do. Living in America is both wonderful and scary. Anyway...
This film explores some genuinely extreme human controversy, and they are issues that the notoriously bold visionary movie mogul George Lucas was right to bring to the silver screen.
Set in exotic, richly gorgeous sweeping outdoor real and CGI panoramas and magnificent enormous indoor sets, along with beautiful costumry, depicting a futuristic world in another Galaxy somewhere in our Multiverse that is supposed to have lived out its complex history long before ours arose, this serial Science Fiction Fantasy story has compelled several Generations to keep watching and reading, and still has not concluded, although an exhausted George Lucas voluntarily surrendered his role in the stories' creation.
Lucas had finally become free to direct his utterly unique, quietly intellectual style to other projects as he chooses. Interviews suggest that he had begun to feel that his blockbuster serial had taken on a life of its own and was severely limiting his desire to do other things with his life. It had apparently also interfered with personal relationships by taking so much of his time. As in DECADES.
On the point of the controverial issues Lucas was daring enough to take on, they included the way a Democracy or a Republic can become a Totalitarian dictatorship, in ways that, upon examination, are uncomfortably like our own seems to be doing just at the moment. Was that insight or prescience?
They tried to teach moviegoers the ways a large political system can be sabotaged by some of its members to gradually erode public freedom until basic human rights have been all but lost.
In Lucas's parallel Universe, a long-successful Democracy eroded into stagnation, its members failed to notice a subtle coup was taking place, and it became an Imperial Fascist Police State.
Anakin Skywalker fought against this process during most of a civil war that resembled a cross between the U.S. civil war and Brexit but turned out to be a massive fraud created by Palpatine and his people.
And when Skywalker goes to confront his mentor Palpatine, his Jedi teachers already having done so, he ends up betraying his people and joining a mystery-shrouded group of mystical, martial-arts and lightsaber-fighting people called the Sith.
But Sith are so wildly competitive that the Order can only have two genuine Lords at a time- a leader and a learner- or they'll annihilate each other. There are many peripheral "almost-Sith" but these have only a fraction of the precognitive, psychokinetic, and brilliant intelligence of true Lords of the Sith. The history of the Sith can be explored in the mass of books that support and explain the serials.
Let's touch again on Hayden Christensen, the young male actor who tackled Anakin's incredibly difficult role.
Because many critics claim his acting was erratic, whiny, and bad, Christensen has suffered much for having acted the role of Darth Vader; which actually is very unfair and untrue: they simply had no way to understand what they were being shown.
Since it was so far outside Hollywood conventions, they had no way of grasping what Lucas and Christensen were doing.
Decades from now, Christensen's masterful and heartwrenching performance will be belatedly hailed as a major turning point in psychological acting. Who knows? An entire new "school" of acting technique may one day be named for him. I hope his career takes off once again, as soon as some other forward-thinking director or producer "gets" what he was doing and the depth of raw talent it took.
And the nerve, both for Christensen and for George Lucas, who is said to have suffered much emotionally when people didn't "get" Christensen's masterpiece performance. To me, it is ansolutely riveting.
Given the truly iconic, massive fame of the character of Darth Vader (Anakin's Sith Name), Christensen was heroic just by accepting the role! He has been treated with grossly unfair calumny against his supposedly terrible acting. Let me explain how he was brilliant.
Years ago, around when the first Star Wars motion picture (A New Hope) came out, a completely unrelated TV miniseries came out that suddenly drew public attention to an extreme form of trauma-driven dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), then called "Multiple Personality".
But it accomplished two very opposite things: it set the standards for movies and TV to depict DID very incorrectly, not even remotely akin to the truth of it, but on the other hand it helped to draw attention to the plight of very severely abused children, including those exposed to war, along with numerous types of brutal abuse including incestuous rape, other sexual abuse, and the vile practice of human trafficking, the modern term for Slavery.
Sally Field did the precise opposite of what Hayden Christensen did. Had she done what he would do decades later, it'd have ended her acting career right there. You see, sometimes real life looks too fake to be depicted on the big screen, even when it's a heartwrenching topic.
So. When offered the role of Sybil, based on a real woman with DID, Sally Field decided, according to a later interview, that real DID "looked like bad acting". Yes, she said that. Verbatim.
Let me repeat that: the ACCURATE DEPICTION OF SEVERE PSYCHIATRIC DISSOCIATION LOOKS TO THE UNINFORMED EYE LIKE "BAD ACTING". This means an actor brilliant enough to accurately depict such things as dissociative fugues and -- as well-- the emotional rollercoaster of the character disorder that most often accompanies DID, a personally excruciating and socially damaging, intractable condition termed Borderline Personality Disorder (which most often happens without DID, as the latter is much less common), WOULD APPEAR TO LACK ACTING TALENT TO OBSERVERS UNFAMILIAR WITH THE WAY DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER REALLY LOOKS.
In reality an actor daring and gifted and empathic enough to carry such a gruelling role should be hailed as a master talent. And Hayden Christensen did precisely that. For accurately depicting dissociation, he is accused of bad acting.
And critics complain that Christensen "whined" and "carried on like a drama queen" as Darth Vader. And angry fans complained that Darth Vader supposedly turned out to be "a wuss"! Ptaaah! I object! Hayden, young sir, I commend you. You should have been nominated for an Oscar. Hell, you AND Lucas should've won one.
For accurately depicting Borderline Personality Disorder, so brilliantly, so deeply and shockingly that one finds oneself wondering what such a young gentleman drew upon, from where within himself, to produce such breathtakingly real nuance of the internal torture and horrifying outward fanfare of BPD. As a sufferer of BPD, I know exactly what I must look like sometimes when the pain inside me just will not be denied and I break down; if I were an actor, thinking of playing a Borderline, I'd have to think twice if I were starting out, as genuine ability to accurately do that would still, in 2017, be more likely to ruin and acting career than launch it.
But Lucas and Christensen did it!! I was spellbound, in tears, amazed, absurdly grateful. They did it. They showed the hell of such a constant storm inside the brain at the same time as they showed political intrigue and other nuanced messages hidden like video "Easter Eggs" for people to see, if they could only "get" it.
I got it.
For the first time, viewers saw on the silver screen what both DID and BPD truly look like in real life, not on old soap operas, new cop shows, and old movies like "Sybil" and "The Three Faces Of Eve".
This influences real people, and not only those who have endured massive trauma. It shapes how our rapidly-evolving society looks at, feels about, interprets, and responds to real expressions of normal-to-severe trauma they may encounter- or experience.
Powerful motion pictures like the Star Wars serial movies can and do teach people in real life what to think and do about the issues they depict when said issues enter real life: political unrest; incest; human trafficking; bereavement; religious indoctrination that teaches that basic, healthy human desires such as love, sex, and having a family are sonehow "wrong," and on top of it all severe untreated mental illness in a young person tossed fresh out of trafficking into the midst of a massive and unbelievably destructive war.
Taught essentially to be an assassin, he switches sides over the issues of having a family (his pregnant wife is carrying twins) and not EVER being permitted to explore, express, work through, release the rage and recover from his victimization as a true survivor. Hell, he's not even permitted to acknowledge it's there!
Here I permit myself to say a few things to some choice Jedi characters....
He's not permitted to mourn the dead, yet when he kills, you Jedi hypocrites (sorry, Obi-Wan & Yoda, I love you both but you shanked this one so far into the woods it came out in a parallel universe!! And you bloody well knew it even before you did it!) say he is a monster for having killed! Well, yuh, you think??? Yes, killing is monstrous because Life is sacred and death is irreversible. And WHO taught him how to kill, as a youth? YOU did.
And, grief?? Oh, Yoda! What happened to Yoda's ridiculous advice to "celebrate" and "rejoice in" the death of a loved one?! Not easy when it's your own, eh? HE TOOK YOU LITERALLY; send those Jedi kids off to that mythical sweet slumber YOU described! The books read that he believed he was setting them FREE! He was round the bend.
Yoda, drat it; Obi-Wan, you were his best friend!!! Mace Windu, you were a magnificent master of Vaapad-- why were you so bitterly harsh on him right from the start?! As if the fact of his being "tarnished"" by abuse meant he had already committed the hideous actions he would carry out one day. Did you consider how an abused child feels being spoken to like that?
And later, all of you, as he kept bringing up Sith-related issues---- DID ANY OF YOU EFFING JEDI MASTERS EVEN BLOODY NOTICE HE WAS HEADING STRAIGHT UP THE POLE?!!
If you wanted to help Anakin, Yoda, you little pointy-eared idiot, you might've chosen realism over all that "Celebrate the death of the ones for whom you care" rot. You took the few healthy impulses that the poor wretched little brave Emo Machismo kid (brand new kind of Goth, and we're all Gingers!) and you made THOSE some horrid thing he had to fear and pay penance for, too. Why did Yoda decide later that Jedi could stay with their families and still train after all?? BECAUSE YOU KNEW YOUR FORMER CODE WAS RUBBISH!
Why was it wrong for him to have a wife and children and have emotions? Did anyone EVER try to help him, or did literally EVERYONE just use him and teach him it's selfish to EVER want ANYTHING, oh, you Jedi, did you ever realise you were easily as bad as Palpatine in what you drove him to, and all the cries for help you bloody ignored?!!!
Here, I end "cursing out the Jedi blunderers"!
When I make such protests toward the ideas represented by those characters and their actions, I'm NOT justifying ANY violent actions on the part of sufferers of BPD or DID or both together--- no, being abused does NOT justify inflicting abuse----- that's how the Cycle of Abuse goes ever onward; and, oh, how I'd love to stop it. For myself, I have. Survivor, NOT Victim.
If I were a movie maker, I'd go for it. I'd show it like it is. But sonetimes moviegoers don't like it that real. And Society still excludes Borderlines as a rule, and BPD is grossly misinterpreted in meaning. Sometimes disastrously so.
It takes time for change to take hold. But I still have faith that the human race on the whole is moving away from bigotry.
I expect this motion picture shall be revisited one day by people who understand and are not repelled by what they see. The violence, yes: IRL that's utterly unacceptable-- Columbine and that.
But Hayden as Anakin: the weeping, the broken voice, the emotion of a person being consumed inside by what he dares tell no one...the later very clear (to a practised eye) staggeringly brilliant realistic depictions of dissociation...then finally the terrible explosion of savagery. It didn't have to happen.
IRL we can, amongst those we know, learn to tell when someine is in genuine trouble and may need help, even if that help takes the form of coerced hospitalisation. If in the Star Wars serial, that had been done with Anakin like-- was it Shaak Ti or someone else? -- was thinking...but even by that time it was too late.
So what is his story really about?
His story is that of a young man who is pressured from all sides by people whom he hopes desperately will love him but because of his untreated Borderline Personality Disorder (he is classic, literally almost a textbook case) he thinks in black-and-white absolutes and can't sustain a truly healthy social support network. He winds up with two male role models: his slightly older best friend and teacher, and an older man who turns out to be recruiting him for the Sith Order: Senator Palpatine, who, when Democracy dies, names himself Emperor.
At this point, Anakin is sleep deprived, not eating, dehydrated, and almost literally out of his mind. The books describe the process of increasing dissociation as he slowly implodes and his ENTIRE social support network falls apart: he experiences depersonalization, derealization, and ultimately dissociative identity disorder.
Several alternate persons vie for control of his ruined life: Darth Vader wins. IRL some people who have experienced very long fugue states have suddenly left their lives and lived elsewhere for years, even decades, under another name, only to "awaken" and reassume the original or "host" identity when the fugue ends.
The books describe how Darth Vader is aware of host Anakin Skywalker's memories but they do not seem like real life to him. Even though Darth Vader is severely physically disabled, he diligently works hard at physical therapy and becomes far more independent than the original self was, except for two very severe limitations: he functions as though he is a sociopath, divorced from Anakin's conscience, and he is absolutely dominated by the only person with whom he shares regular human contact: Palpatine, the other Sith Lord. His Sith instructor. Whom one day he will replace once he finds an apprentice. Both his children, whom he meets as young adults and severely abuses, understandably vehemently repudiate the Sith cause and join the opposing forces. His son becomes a Jedi. But Darth Vader won't let go.
As all this is going on, Darth Vader carries on bizarre behavior, a genius with an almost autism-spectrum degree of introversion but a contradictory narcissistic degree of self-confidence and sense of entitlement.
He gets into violent confrontations with his own allies and manages to kill a number of them. And he brutally attacks the designated Enemy: the Rebellion and the few surviving Jedi.
He is intensely private but strangely enough he allows one of his officers, Piett, to see him without his concealing frightful mask as Piett blunders into his private room with an urgent combat message. Odder still, he is less severe with and not prone to attacking Piett.
One might wonder if the secondary self Darth Vader is capable of loneliness, or love. Or fusion, for that matter. Occasionally Anakin tries to influence events from within, as does an entity they regard as the "Dead Star Dragon". But Vader vehemently repudiates both. The written story seems to indicate at least two other indistinct alternates.
Darth Vader crushes all, but decades later, in Anakin's late 40s, he suddenly fuses with Anakin and kills Palpatine to save his son Luke. They experience fusion as a wonderful thing despite being fatally injured, and Luke stays with him until the end.
On DISSOCIATION:
Chris Costner Sizemore, the real "Eve," was outraged at the way she was depicted; it was so traumatic she spent years dissociating wildly again until she pulled her life together and wrote a book. Years later, a reversed but even more depressing version of the sane thing happened to a woman named Truddi Chase who wrote her own DID true story: they turned her book into a ridiculous and insulting T.V. movie which made her seem like a self-obsessed slut. It was hideous.
And severe dissociation is what happens to the character Anakin Skywalker in response to his horrifically traumatic life as the child of a trafficked woman. He is trafficked himself until he is nine, when he is suddenly separated from his mother and all his friends, to find himself in the middle of a war. In fact, one war after another, during which he finds out his mother is assaulted by a gang, and she dies in his arms, and he discovers the meanings of his special abilities but is inducted into a well-intentioned but restrictive religious order which demands lifelong celibacy though he wants to get married and have children, demands that he walk a tightrope between political factions in their crumbling Democracy though he has never been trained in diplomacy (his secret wife has political training, however, and enjoys her career as a Senator until their Democracy implodes)
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Reviews with images
Good price but case damaged
I bought this new never been open Star Wars blu-ray. Works great. Case had a hole in it. Kind of wish I had known about the hole before I bought it. Price was lower than other new revenge of the sith so no complaints here. But still wish I was told about the hole in case. It was never opened as described.
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Andre Gutierrez Bautista
La mejor película de la nueva trilogía
Reviewed in Mexico on May 5, 2019
Andre Gutierrez Bautista
Reviewed in Mexico on May 5, 2019
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