Star Wars, Iraq, and the state of the world

Without Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival this time, it was left to George Lucas and Star Wars to highlight European pique over the state of world relations and America’s 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 yesterday – 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.”

The film opens on Wednesday in parts of Europe and on Thursday in the US and many other countries. At the Cannes premiere last 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 honour.

Unlike Moore, Lucas never mentioned the president by name but was eager to speak his mind on US 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.”