I succumb to the hype

Well, not really. I'm only posting Stephen Hunter's review of the final "Star Wars" movie here because Hunter is not only my favorite reviewer, he's also one of my favorite writers.

You can't overestimate the value of someone like Hunter, who does two things with his review. He contextualizes the movie by showing us how it shares a theme and follows the same narrative pattern of other great works of art, like Moby Dick, MacBeth, Crime and Punishment, and Dr. Faustus.

Each of these stories, like "Revenge of the Sith," has a central character "of power and strength and charisma and intellect, all of it invested in madness and destruction," and forces us to question how they got that way.

Hunter is also able to articulate the cultural significance and impact of the original Star Wars movie, and the series of movies as a whole.

In 1977, "Star Wars" blew my generation away, re-creating for us lost pleasures of our youths in crummy B-grade bijoux in small towns and burbs, filling us with the hope that the kind of soaring, enabling narrative hadn't been lost from movies that were just then coming out of a deep and morbid period of political unrest and self-questioning that led to great but disturbing films. As a generation, we needed a drink or a vacation or a wallow. "Star Wars" provided the latter, returning us to a childhood we didn't realize we missed.

So for my generation, "Revenge of the Sith" is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.