I've got a bad feeling about this . . .

(Tomorrow I’ll post all about the wedding of the fabulous Lauren and Sarmad, complete with pictures. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for the delay.)

Matt and I finally got to see Revenge of the Sith, along with a theatre full of people who, like us, probably figured that everyone in the world had seen it by now and they could get good seats. We forgot to factor in the nerds who saw it opening night, and have been seeing it every few days since then. One such group of nerds had this conversation:

Nerd #1: Man, that was pretty cool seeing that wookiee army.

Nerd #2: Yeah, man, wookiees rock. But I think ewoks were the best.

Nerd #1: Oh, well, of course the ewoks are the best. I mean, definately the best of gungans and all of the other native tribes.

Native tribes, eh? Anyway, the movie was generally sort of not completely terrible, it kind of swung between being really engrossing and annoyingly transparent.

The part of the movie that most fascinated me was the way that the Jedi Council mishandled the whole Anakin situation. They seemed like a bunch of really distracted parents who were too busy to give their children the kind of attention they needed. When Anakin was all “Samuel L., Palpatine is a Sith!” and Samuel L. responded by basically saying “Be a good boy and go wait in your room.” I really wanted to reach into the screen and smack him. The Council knew that Anakin was powerful and they knew that he was potentially dangerous. AND, given that they can sort of read minds, they had to realize he was getting restless. So why didn’t they do anything about it?

And I know that there’s someone reading this who’s thinking that it was necessary for all of that to happen so that Anakin could become Darth, have Luke, and then restore order to the Force by killing the Emporer to save Luke. But it’s just as possible that the Council could have handled the situation better, and then Anakin would have restored order to the force by killing Palpatine instead of Samuel L. See that? Same result, less carnage. If only the Jedis had been a little more proactive.

In general, I’m very interested in watching other people parent. And one of the things I tend to notice is when there’s disconnect between what parents know of their children and reality. I admire parents who are aware of their children, who notice their needs and do what they can to address those needs under extremely individualized circumstances. For all practical purposes, the Jedis were parents to Anakin and the other pre-Jedi kids. They were completely responsible for their upbringing, and to think that they weren’t giving those kids individualized care is kind of interesting. First, I think we’ve all seen what can happen when parents have a child who’s “hard to handle” and treat him or her like all other kids: the kid doesn’t ever learn how to handle his or her special needs, doesn’t develop all that she/he could, and the parents have to spend astronomical amounts on therapy. Anakin kind of parallels this type of situation, and the Jedi Council is just like the parents who wait until it’s too late to deal with a challenging child.

Second, I find it interesting that the Jedi’s didn’t have essential child-raising skills, even though they were supposed to instill this whole moral code in the young Jedis. The Baha’i Faith is very clear on the fact that there’s no inherent virtue in eschewing a family life to serve God/some higher purpose. In fact, the Baha’i writings state that living the life of an ascetic is wrong, and that people should have families and serve God: the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and service is done through interaction with other human beings. I wonder what the Star Wars world would have looked like if Jedis were allowed to have relationships and families. It’s funny, because ultimately a key point of the six movies seems to be the importance of relationships. It’s the bond between Luke and Anakin that finally enables Anakin to kill the Emperor, and the three main characters in the last three movies are driven by emotion for each other much more than some righteous desire to do the right thing. Those family bonds might seem devastating from the Jedi Council perspective, but in the end those bonds are the strongest impetus people have to do what’s right.

(Although, it seemed like everybody in the movie knew that Anakin and Padme were together, and nobody seemed to care, so maybe the Jedis were actually just into free love.)

In addition to all of the above psychobabble, Natalie Portman’s hair was terrible. It was so bad that I found it distracting. And having Darth fall to his knees and yell “Nooooooo!” was the silliest thing I’ve ever seen on film.