A grim finale for 'Star Wars'

By Mike Snider
USA Today

Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is lured to the dark side in "Revenge of the Sith," which draws on archetypes of mythology to shape the saga of its pop-culture icon, the evil Darth Vader — who arrived on movie screens with a black-hearted stride and has since turned out to be Luke Skywalker's father and a fallen Jedi knight. Lucasfilm Ltd & TM photos

Jedi master Yoda packs a lot of punch when he wields the Force. He's an icon of the series who is also showing up in such merchandising of this latest film as a cola commercial.

Anakin Skywalker shares a quiet moment with his secret wife, Sen. Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman).

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, left) and Anakin Skywalker face off against enemy droids.

'Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith' Opens 12:01 a.m. Thursday

In the summer of 1977, when Darth Vader stepped out of a haze of smoke five minutes into a magical film called "Star Wars," a new brand of bad guy arrived.

His breathing, raspy and mechanical, resonated through theaters. Then he spoke, almost in Sensurround, "What have you done with those plans?" Next, he crushed the neck of the rebel officer he had been holding at arm's length and tossed him into a stanchion.

Cool. And corrupted.

Nearly three decades after Vader first appeared on screen, moviegoers on Thursday will finally see in "Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith" what led Anakin Skywalker to succumb to the dark side and become Darth Vader. Vader is the antagonist of creator George Lucas' six-film series, which has made about $3.5 billion in theaters worldwide. Nearly three times that has been spent on "Star Wars" merchandise, including scores of Vader action figures.

With fans already lined up to see the latest film, Vader remains, as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi describes him, a master of evil.

David Prowse first donned the black quilted leather and fiberglass Vader costume in 1977 to stalk through Lucas' first three "Star Wars" films.

Prowse, 6-foot-7 and a former bodybuilder and English weightlifting champion, chose the dark side when Lucas asked whether he'd rather play Chewbacca or Vader.

"If you think back on all the movies you've ever seen, you always remember the bad guys — Goldfinger, Oddjob, Blofeld and Jaws, all those terrible villains," Prowse says. "They are easier to remember than who played James Bond in the movie."

Prowse says Lucas told him: "Dave, I think you are making a very wise decision. Nobody will ever forget Darth Vader."

Vader is still the villain moviegoers love to hate. Maybe it is the chilling admission in "The Empire Strikes Back," when Vader faces Luke Skywalker in battle and says: "Luke, I am your father." Or maybe it's Vader's three-movie descent into the abyss.

In movie lore, the mechanized man in black is up there with the most infamous evildoers. Two years ago, when the American Film Institute listed the century's top 50 movie heroes and villains, Vader came in at No. 3, behind only flesh-eating Hannibal Lecter of "The Silence of the Lambs" and Norman Bates of "Psycho."

Such a Cool Guy

There is something seductive about Vader, much like villains such as Dracula, Michael Corleone and "Scarface's" Tony Montana — each of whom killed off his own planet's worth of adversaries.

Vader is "a good bad guy," film critic Roger Ebert says. "He was so cool to look at and listen to. How could you hate him when he brightened up every scene he was in? The black costume and the shiny black helmet would have been approved of by Coco Chanel or Diana Vreeland — a supervillain can go anywhere with a little black cape. And the voice by James Earl Jones had warmth beneath the forbidding tones.

"You could sense there was a story in there."

And that story, unfolding over the past three decades and six films — half of the 60-year-old Lucas' life — continues to entrance viewers.

How could this obsidian-caped character be prepared to kill sandy-haired Luke, knowing that Luke was his son? And how could a cherubic boy (Jake Lloyd in "The Phantom Menace") metamorphose into this monster?

"You know it's not a happy ending, but you have to watch," says John Lyden, a professor of religion at Dana College in Blair, Neb., and author of "Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals." "There's been nothing else like this in the history of cinema that quite has this quality."

The mything link

When "Star Wars" first arrived, it seemed like a simple sci-fi flick. But now, as his saga is nearly complete, it's clear that Lucas has created a myth for modern times.

In "Star Wars: A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi," Lucas appeared to be telling a hero's tale of how Luke Skywalker rises from obscurity to help defeat an evil empire.

But taken as a whole, Lucas says, the six-chapter space opera "is really about Darth Vader. It's about Anakin's descent and the redemption of Vader."

Lucas drew on mythology, religion, psychology and cultural images, popular and past. And just as Lucas relied on Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" handbook as the mythical underpinning for his saga, his villain had multiple purposes, too.

On the surface, Darth Vader may seem to be the successor to a villain such as Ming the Merciless from "Flash Gordon," one of Lucas' beloved Saturday matinee serials. But Vader is more complex.

"He's not a mustache-twirling villain. There are layers of depth in there, and people relate to that," says Shanti Fader, a contributing essayist to the book "Star Wars and Philosophy."

Vader may torture his daughter, Princess Leia, and watch as the Death Star destroys her home planet of Alderaan, but, as Luke attests, "there is still good in him."

When given the opportunity, Vader refrains from killing Luke.

That combination of good and bad elevates Vader above many cookie-cutter villains.

"There is a bridging in his character between the light side and the dark side, and there's a constant shifting in his development in the story line," says Jonathan Young, a psychologist and founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives and teacher at the Center for Story and Symbol, both in Santa Barbara, Calif. "He started as sympathetic in that we loved him as boy and, to some degree, as a teen. There is a level of identification; we are closer to this villain than one such as Darth Maul or Darth Sidious, who just shows up."