http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20050515/111618582000.html
Without Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 at the
Cannes Film Festival this time, it was left to George
Lucas and Star Wars to pique European ire over the
state of world relations and the United States' role
in it.
Lucas' themes of democracy on the skids and a ruler
preaching war to preserve the peace predate Star
Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith by almost 30
years. Yet viewers Sunday and Lucas himself noted
similarities between the final chapter of his sci-fi
saga and our own troubled times.
Cannes audiences made blunt comparisons between
Revenge of the Sith the story of Anakin Skywalker's
fall to the dark side and the rise of an emperor
through warmongering to President Bush's war on
terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
Two lines from the movie especially resonated:
This is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause,
bemoans Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) as the
galactic Senate cheers dictator-in-waiting Palpatine
(Ian McDiarmid) while he announces a crusade against
the Jedi.
If you're not with me, then you're my enemy, Hayden
Christensen's Anakin soon to become villain Darth
Vader tells former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan
McGregor). The line echoes Bush's international
ultimatum after the Sept. 11 attacks, Either you are
with us, or you are with the terrorists.
That quote is almost a perfect citation of Bush,
said Liam Engle, a 23-year-old French-American
aspiring filmmaker. Plus, you've got a politician
trying to increase his power to wage a phony war.
Though the plot was written years ago, the anti-Bush
diatribe is clearly there, Engle said.
The film opens Wednesday in parts of Europe and
Thursday in the United States and many other
countries. At the Cannes premiere Sunday night, actors
in white stormtrooper costumes paraded up and down the
red carpet as guests strolled in, while an orchestra
played the Star Wars theme.
Lucas said he patterned his story after historical
transformations from freedom to fascism, never
figuring when he started his prequel trilogy in the
late 1990s that current events might parallel his
space fantasy.
As you go through history, I didn't think it was
going to get quite this close. So it's just one of
those recurring things, Lucas said at a Cannes news
conference. I hope this doesn't come true in our
country.
Maybe the film will waken people to the situation,
Lucas joked.
That comment echoes Moore's rhetoric at Cannes last
year, when his anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11
won the festival's top honor.
Unlike Moore, whose Cannes visit came off like an
anybody-but-Bush campaign stop, Lucas never mentioned
the president by name but was eager to speak his mind
on U.S. policy in Iraq, careful again to note that he
created the story long before the Bush-led occupation
there.
When I wrote it, Iraq didn't exist, Lucas said,
laughing.
We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him
weapons of mass destruction. We didn't think of him as
an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and
using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in
Vietnam. ... The parallels between what we did in
Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are
unbelievable.
The prequel trilogy is based on a back-story outline
Lucas created in the mid-1970s for the original three
Star Wars movies, so the themes percolated out of
the Vietnam War and the Nixon-Watergate era, he said.
Lucas began researching how democracies can turn into
dictatorships with full consent of the electorate.
In ancient Rome, why did the senate after killing
Caesar turn around and give the government to his
nephew? Lucas said. Why did France after they got
rid of the king and that whole system turn around and
give it to Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany
and Hitler.
You sort of see these recurring themes where a
democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it
always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with
the same kinds of issues, and threats from the
outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a
senate, not being able to function properly because
everybody's squabbling, there's corruption.
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