A relentless technical innovator and a visionary with a taste for obscure art films, George Lucas is arguably the world's most successful independent filmmaker. If his interest in "Star Wars" had been purely commercial, it would have been easy to milk the franchise by churning out cookie-cutter sequels. Instead, he stuck to his ambitious scheme which culminates in "Revenge of the Sith," the saga's darkest chapter. The film is guaranteed to make mad box office, but how much more could it have earned if Anakin triumphed?
Lucas' epic scheme is one of the things that make "Star Wars" unique. No other movie series I know of weaves a single plot over six films. In "Star Wars," everything has a story arc: the heroes, the villains, the robots, even the spaceship designs. Lines of dialogue are echoed and repeated, little hints gain meaning, and each viewing reveals new connections between the films. The tightness of the structure is one of the saga's main pleasures. It's a universe that can be inhabited fully, made cohesive by a web of cross-references at once sprawling and tightly woven.
