George Lucas closes the circle: the last of the three prequels, evenly spaced out at three-year intervals. (The filmmaker's latter-day visual style comes back to us in a twinkling: the flatness of the humans and the overfertilized fluorescence of their computer-generated surroundings, something like sticks of wood in a stop-motion tomato patch.) Anakin Skywalker, as we all are aware ahead of time, is on course to explore the Dark Side of the Force, his personal Darth side, "motivated" by his impalpable passion for Padmé, the Senator formerly known as Queen, and by his premonitions of her death in childbirth. Looking more and more like Uma Thurman (pupils floating upwards) and talking more and more like Ryan Phillippe (pouty lips over tight jaw), the leading man, Hayden Christensen, appears to plumb the depths of darkness about as far as a college sophomore facing a term-paper deadline when he'd really rather be chugalugging beer. It's true that he has a hand in a lot of carnage (personally dispatching a roomful of "younglings," sentimental overkill reminiscent of the slaughter of Macduff's family in Macbeth), yet the dire warnings of the film's unsuitability for children seem a bit off base. Surely it's more suitable for them than it is for adults. Lucas's obsessive castration symbolism (a fear bordering on hysteria) may be over their heads, but on the other hand they will be less likely to carp at the murky exposition of the faux-Shakespearean political skulduggery, more likely to sit there in contented incomprehension, inasmuch as the murkiness, thick though it is, fails in the slightest to obscure the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad. So clear is this separation that Anakin's change of allegiance -- Jedi selflessness for Sithian selfhood -- reduces him to a dupe at best and a loon at worst. And, in the midst of what looks to be an erupting volcano, his climactic lightsaber duel with his mentor leaves him quite literally diminished in stature (or symbolically, once again, castrated). Though he gets propped up afterwards in the operating room, he comes out of it as a sort of Wizard of Oz with the curtain thrown back. Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd