csua.org/u/c2r -> movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20050515/111618582000.html
Star Wars" to piq ue 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 pres erve the peace predate "Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith" by a lmost 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 em peror through warmongering to President Bush's war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
The line echoes Bush's international ultimatum after the Sept. "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 politic ian 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 St ates and many other countries. At the Cannes premiere Sunday night, acto rs 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 f reedom 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 Can nes news conference. "Maybe the film will waken people to the situation," Lucas joked. That comment echoes Moore's rhetoric at Cannes last year, when his anti-B ush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the festival's top honor. Unlike Moore, whose Cannes visit came off like an anybody-but-Bush campai gn stop, Lucas never mentioned the president by name but was eager to sp eak his mind on US policy in Iraq, careful again to note that he creat ed 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 destr uction. We were going a fter Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietn am. The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doin g 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 perc olated 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?" "Why did France after t hey got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? "You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself in to 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 m ore control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function pro perly because everybody's squabbling, there's corruption."
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