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When i saw the second one, i thought it was intensely relevent to the current state of affairs (except Bush is more Jar-Jar than Palpatine)

 

But this is just pulled from the site you advertise, antiwar.com

 

May 24, 2005

Is Bush a Sith Lord?

 

by Paul Craig Roberts

The current episode of Star Wars is dynamite for the duplicitous Bush administration. Palpatine, a Sith lord masquerading as a galactic republican, becomes chancellor of the Galactic Republic through deception. Palpatine uses wars that he instigates to elevate security over the power of the Senate and to become dictator.

 

In a moment of triumph, Palpatine tells the Senate: "In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society." The senators respond with sustained cheering and applause. Padme says, "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."

 

Sith lords use the powers of the dark side of the force. Jedi knights use the power of the good side. The Jedi are selfless and use their incredible powers to protect the Republic. Sith are evil and crave absolute power.

 

Palpatine, who is really Darth Sidious, manipulates the Senate and enlists the Jedi Council's patriotism to "defend" the Republic against a "separatist" army that he secretly directs. The purpose of the orchestrated war is to erode liberty in the name of security. The naïve Jedi catch on too late and are decimated. The Republic falls.

 

Bush's "war against terrorism" is no less orchestrated than Palpatine's war and has led to the same result: a society dominated by security concerns.

 

The top secret British government memo that was leaked to the London Times proves beyond all doubt that Bush invaded Iraq for none of the changing reasons that he has given a too-trusting public. Bush did not invade because of weapons of mass destruction or because he wanted to bring democracy to Iraq.

 

Why did Bush invade Iraq? No one, least of all the Bush administration, has come up with a believable reason. Yet there is no shortage of patriotic Republicans who sincerely believe that Bush has made America safer by turning the Muslim world against us and stirring up a hornet's nest of terrorists united by their hatred of America.

 

Moreover, like Palpatine's war, Bush's war in Iraq appears to be interminable. U.S. military commanders say we will be fighting in Iraq for years to come. Forecasts are that the war will have cost taxpayers $600 billion by 2010.

 

Meanwhile, Bush, like Palpatine, has brought civil liberties to a crisis. In the U.S., civil liberties are everywhere biting the dust. Not content with the Orwellian "PATRIOT Act," the Bush administration is pushing for expanded secret police powers. Even conservative Republican Bob Barr writes that provisions of the "PATRIOT Act" go far beyond fighting terrorism "and undermine our constitutional freedoms and Fourth Amendment rights."

 

Barr is chairman of a coalition, Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances. In other words, dear readers, the checks and balances are gone. Bush has enabled the police to bypass the courts. Executive power rules, and there are no Jedi knights.

 

The Sith, however, are everywhere. In our day, the Sith masquerade as neoconservatives. Neocons deal in absolutes. They believe the end justifies the means. As the Jedi master Obi-Wan tells Anakin, who is turning to the dark side and emerging as Darth Vader, "only a Sith lord deals in absolutes." Anakin to Obi-Wan: "If you're not with me, you're my enemy."

 

Palpatine is able to manipulate the Galactic Senate with the clever use of words that play upon emotions. People want to feel secure. They want their side to prevail and will do whatever it takes to win, including trading their Republic for an Empire. Palpatine prevails because people deceive themselves.

 

Republicans have become adept at self-deception. They will believe any argument that justifies Bush and no news report that casts doubt on Bush's war. The leaked British government memo is dismissed as just more anti-Bush propaganda from the liberal media, like Dan Rather and Newsweek.

 

Newsweek's retraction of its story that U.S. soldiers flushed a Koran down a toilet proves to Republicans that the only problem is an anti-American liberal media. The fact that Newsweek was absolutely correct in reporting desecration of the Koran by U.S. troops – and only got wrong the particular way in which the holy book was desecrated – has been totally ignored by Republicans.

 

Republicans believe everything Bush says. When he tells them he needs a police state to save them from terrorists, they believe him.

 

Who will save us from Bush's police state?

 

Just as Child Protective Services has had to frame innocent parents and child care providers as child abusers in order to justify its budgets and a massive bureaucracy, the vast Homeland Security apparatus will have to "find" terrorists. Otherwise, there is no point to all the expanded police powers and the huge budget.

 

Just as the indignities of airport security and its assorted searches fall on loyal American citizens, the police-state measures will also fall on loyal American citizens.

 

With the courts bypassed, a terrorist is whoever the secret police say is a terrorist. The U.S. government is already committing the crime of kidnapping people mistakenly identified as terrorist suspects and flying them to brutal regimes to be tortured.

 

Police states have an insatiable need for enemies. In Stalin's time, the secret police conducted "street sweeps." People waiting for buses and shopping for food were carted off to prison, where they were tortured until they implicated others. Thus was the gulag filled with innocents.

 

"It can't happen here," but the beginnings of it already have. The U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is full of mistaken identities and people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – including, according to the Associated Press, a chicken farmer and an invalid. Bush's brand of democracy – a regime that holds people in prison for three years without charges – does not have civil liberties at heart.

 

Republicans are cheering. According to news reports Congress has passed – and Bush is about to sign – a law requiring a national identity card (Real ID) containing invasive digital information about the person.

 

How long will it be before the card specifies whether the person is a gun owner? If it is dangerous for air travel to permit a passenger to have a toothpick or nail clippers, how can a terrorist-threatened society permit mass gun ownership?

 

If the constitutional protections of civil liberties can be suspended in order to better fight terrorism, the Second Amendment doesn't have a chance. A government that spies on its citizens will not trust them with guns. When gun control becomes an essential feature of Homeland Security, the National Rifle Association and talk radio conservatives will be as astounded as Bail Organa and Padme when they hear Palpatine declare "an empire … and a sovereign ruler chosen for life."

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All the left-wing and right-wing policies, metaphors and similes aside, I'm more concerned that the invasion of Iraq marks the first modern conquest of a nation by a global 'bully' purely for the procurement of resources. eek.gif

 

Basically, if your country has rare resources and you're not exactly a friend of 'The land Of Liberty', then odds on (one day) you'll be invaded. \:\(

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Which planet or star system is that ghastly Rice creature from? I wish she'd take her Star Trek suits and get the hell back there...

 

Don't worry about the US though. As Paul Craig Roberts knows (having served under Reagan), Evil Empires collapse under their own weight after a while.

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petrol light sabers? with fluro light tubes!

morons, that will get a honorable mention* in the next Darwin Awards** for sure.

 

 

*someone who 'nearly' died through stupidity

** awarded to those who actually die from a thoroughly stupid act and improve the gene pool by doing so.

 

 

p.s It happened in Essex, arent the stereotypical people from Essex notorious for being a little simple anyway?

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 Quote:
Originally posted by Sam The Eagle's Brother:
My bro is really into star wars and in the us. He has seen the new one 3 times already - says it is so much better than 1 and 2. He seems to be pleased!
uhh...would that be Sam the Eagle?
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Antony Lane review is here:

 

SPACE CASE

by ANTHONY LANE

“Star Wars: Episode III.”

Issue of 2005-05-23

Posted 2005-05-16

 

 

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

 

Lucas was not always a rootless soul. He made “American Graffiti,” which yielded with affection to the gravitational pull of the small town. Since then, he has swung out of orbit, into deep nonsense, and the new film is the apotheosis of that drift. One stab of humor and the whole conceit would pop, but I have a grim feeling that Lucas wishes us to honor the remorseless non-comedy of his galactic conflict, so here goes. Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his star pupil, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), are, with the other Jedi knights, defending the Republic against the encroachments of the Sith and their allies—millions of dumb droids, led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his henchman, General Grievous, who is best described as a slaying mantis. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every single person watching the movie. Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse.

 

This film is the tale of his temptation. We already know the outcome—Anakin will indeed drop the killer-monk Jedi look and become Darth Vader, the hockey goalkeeper from hell—because it forms the substance of the original “Star Wars.” One of the things that make Episode III so dismal is the time and effort expended on Anakin’s conversion. Early in the story, he enjoys a sprightly light-sabre duel with Count Dooku, which ends with the removal of the Count’s hands. (The stumps glow, like logs on a fire; there is nothing here that reeks of human blood.) Anakin prepares to scissor off the head, while the mutilated Dooku kneels for mercy. A nice setup, with Palpatine egging our hero on from the background. The trouble is that Anakin’s choice of action now will be decisive, and the remaining two hours of the film—scene after scene in which Hayden Christensen has to glower and glare, blazing his conundrum to the skies—will add nothing to the result. “Something’s happening. I’m not the Jedi I should be,” he says. This is especially worrying for his wife, Padmé (Natalie Portman), who is great with child. Correction: with children.

 

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve.

 

 

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

 

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a ****ing give.

 

The prize for the least speakable burst of dialogue has, over half a dozen helpings of “Star Wars,” grown into a fiercely contested tradition, but for once the winning entry is clear, shared between Anakin and Padmé for their exchange of endearments at home:

 

“You’re so beautiful.”

“That’s only because I’m so in love.”

“No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.”

 

 

For a moment, it looks as if they might bat this one back and forth forever, like a baseline rally on a clay court. And if you think the script is on the tacky side, get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Finally saw it today - special preview at TOHO cinemas.

Overall pretty disappointing - the movie lacks soul for a lack of another word. Hayden Christiansons performance was abysmal, wooden and flat he was not a credible Anakin. The whole movie was based around him and his journey but his journey was quick and easy with not much inner torment - a real actor was needed to bring out Anakin and Darth Vader, Christianson failed and that ultimately causes the movie to stutter along. Portman was mediocre in her role, not helped by the poor chemistry betwen her and Anakin.

Grievous was underused, a mere accidental bystander swept into the movie, who was he?. Christopher Lee got virtually no screentime.

Chewbacca made a token appearance what for? for the rabid old school fans? it was pointless to the direction of the movie

A lot of pointless visual extravanganza like the opening sequence that didnt help the overall plot and direction of the movie, just self serving ostentatiousness. Yes George we know you and you little team at ILM can create some phenomenal graphics but associate it, connect it with the overall direction and spirit of the movie.

Movies are about good acting and logical flow and good plots with "chemistry" between the lead actors. This movie has too much chopping and changing, snippets of scenes that barely set up the movie abound, it felt the whole movie was going through the motions, the tension build up was missing in action and the final transformation into the suited Vader was hollow and anticlimatic.

Movies were the supporting actors Ian McDarmaid and Ewan McGregor completely outshine and dominate the supposed lead are unsatisfying.

The former two are the only two actors in the whole movie the gave a decent performance. Samuel L Jackson is not a jedi, he has been terribly miscast in all three films.

 

 

Things change, in the 70's and 80's Michael Jackson used to make good music and George Lucas used to make good movies. Things change...

George is one from four, a mere 25% in directing StarWars movies 1,2,3, were weak only 4 was great and and seems in retrospect a directing fluke.

5 and 6 the best two in my book were directed by other people.

Perhaps he should have taken a back seat and let a real director handle things

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