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.
The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinc improvement on the last two episodes, “Th Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying fro natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.
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.
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