So, having made its benjamins in theaters for the last five months or so, Star Wars Episode III comes out on DVD Tuesday. Allfather/carrion George Lucas has promised more adventures in the “Expanded Universe,” including a couple of developing TV series, but Epsiode III is the last part of the Star Wars saga I can imagine ever caring about in any way not stemming from nostalgia or embarrassment. In other words, this is probably my last chance to geek out about Star Wars with any enthusiasm or timeliness.

Unfortunately, five months late, I have nothing really original or well-remembered to contribute. Fortunately, since this is Self Amusement Theater, I can go ahead and jot down some stuff anyway.

I generally liked the movie. DVD will tell the true tale, of course; any opinion of the movie formed alongside the horde of the fanniest fans is going to come out a shade too rosy by half. You can hardly give an eyes-wide-open review of a movie you saw at 2:00 a.m. on a school night surrounded by guys dressed up as the Power Droid. (There will always be a special place in my heart for the guys so immersed in the fantasy that they dress up as characters, but not immersed enough to dress as one of the good characters. It’s like they want to escape their humdrum lives for a galaxy far, far away, but they don’t have the self-confidence to imagine anything but another humdrum life waiting for them out there on Planet Dirt. I’ll always be pulling for you, Guy Who Could Have Been Boba Fett But Chose Walrus Man.)

Even without the cheering Halloween party in the theater, even without the two guys having the prolonged, all-business, attention-ravenous lightsaber duel in the front rows before the show, I would have thought Revenge of the Sith was the best of the prequels, which is admittedly the equivalent of winning the gold medal in Olympic Speed-Walking. Better than Return of the Jedi? I’m not trying to make any trouble. I only know that I went home satisfied in 2005, and that in 1983 I went home with a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on which I can now recognize as unmet expectations. (I had many years to become familiar with that feeling later.)

Perhaps because it went out of its way to tie everything up with a neat red and black bow, however, the movie ended up underlining fundamental issues that have always been there. After the original, the Star Wars movies just don’t work if Vader is Luke’s father.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid watching Star Wars I always imagined that Darth Vader was “born” and led his stormtroopers on a brutal quest, using his Jedi insider knowledge to hunt down and personally dispatch his former colleagues. It was a cool, bad-ass, epic thing in my imagination. On the screen, it happened in an afternoon by remote control.

But it had to happen that fast. Once paternity enters the picture, Vader’s on the clock. He’s locked into a timeline. Luke is 15-20 years old, so Vader has to be charming/”fully functional” enough to make a baby with somebody, turn into the quintessential, picture-next-to-the-word-in-the-dictionary Evil, and eradicate the Religious Left from the face of the universe so that by the time his kid’s a teenager, the eradication has to have happened a very long time ago. Vader has to multitask.

This is the kind of s*** that happens when you write the story backwards.

Remember how the Jedi were treated in Star Wars? Han Solo acted like he’d never heard of ‘em before. That officer who made fun of Vader on the Death Star behaved as if the whole idea of super-powered Jedi knights (which during his lifetime had once been the government’s entire peacekeeping force) was ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Wouldn’t that be a lot like me never having heard of the Reagan administration, or believing audiocassettes were an old wives’ tale?

At one point, Peter Cushing says of Ben Kenobi, “Surely he must be dead by now.” Why would that be reasonable to assume if he’d been a vital Jedi when they’d last seen him several years earlier? And boy, those last 15-20 years were pretty hard on ol’ Obi-Wan, there. That’s a pretty short trip from Ewan MacGregor to Alec Guinness. I guess years on the lam in the desert, watching over the son of Space Hitler from a discreet distance to make sure he doesn’t start Force-choking kids on the playground, really wear a brother down. (Not to mention staying in the closet about being Public Enemy #2, spending every day of your life with nothing to do but think about having unleashed Space Hitler on the universe, dreaming about overthrowing the government with no one to help you but a Muppet in a bog.) It’s sort of like how President Clinton looked like Elvis F. Kennedy in 1992, but by 2000 looked like he had been repeatedly struck by lightning.

I’ve had plenty of years to watch and think about these movies, but it was only after seeing the last one that I finally got it. I’ve realized that everything you need to understand the evolution of these films can be found in the life of George Lucas himself.

Lucas is Star Wars, Rough Draft:

The original Star Wars was made by a kid, one of a band of rebellious kids working against the studio system in the seventies, as a scrappy more-or-less independent film. The movie was about a scrappy band of kids who didn’t have a whole lot of money or resources– there was one princess on a trust fund, but the rest of them were basically blue collar– fighting the evil imperialist System and its lockstep oppression of freedom and creativity. Everything in the System was gray and uniform and corporate, right, but the rebels weren’t about that. Sure, they did things on the cheap, but they made do and did things their way. And the System was being run by Vader, this old stuffed shirt who had turned his back on the ideals that got him his power in the first place, man. But the rebels had had it with the System; they were gonna fly right in there and blow the System to smithereens. They were gonna blast the System right where it was weakest: in the heart. Take that, System! Take that, Dad!

Then, as the story progresses… Lucas gets his own company, starts to get a little gray in his neck-beard… and sure, Vader is running the System with an iron fist, but you have to understand: there is good in him. He doesn’t want to be a part of the System; it’s just too late for him to do anything about it now. But maybe, even within the System, there’s still a chance for him to take everything that’s wrong with the System and throw it down a bottomless pit or something. He’s made some wrong moves, but you know, in the end he’s basically a good guy.

Actually, now that we’re on the subject, what about Vader? Did you ever stop to think about how such a basically good guy ends up a part of the System? Have you ever thought about how hard it was for him? Forget the rebel kids and all their overzealous idealism. There’ll be time for rebel kids in some later installment. In the meantime… look. You have to understand, Vader was only trying to do good work. Trying so hard. All he wanted was a little recognition and respect for his vision… but noooo. Those artsy-fartsy philosophers in their gigantic ivory tower wouldn’t let him in, would they? They wouldn’t let him be on their precious Council; they were just so afraid of all his talents. And the bureaucrats, oh my God, the f***ing bureaucrats. You have to go through fifteen people to get anything decided, and half of them don’t even speak your language; they speak in subtitles through some damn snout thing. Vader just realized that the only way he was ever going to be able to do good work is if he grabbed the power of the System for himself and made everyone do it his way, correctly, efficiently, with computers. And if that meant replacing a dozen cheap Jedi knights in ponchos with thousands of digital clones and slaughtering some little padawans’ childhoods, well, it’s tragic but Vader had the best of intentions. Nobody can fault Vader there.

(Imagine how this might have turned out if I could actually remember the movie. If I’d written a review when it was actually timely? Way shorter.)