Friday, May 20, 2005

Evil

"So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear. Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my Good." -Milton, "Paradise Lost"

My journey is now complete. I have seen the Dark Side and it is, well, Dark.

After six hours in line, with a cold I might add, the movie needed to be good. Really, really good. It met my expectations. It not only tied all six (count 'em, 6!) movies together, but actually managed to make the last two better. The music, costumes, editing, cinematography...all excellent. Even the dialogue and the acting was much better. But this one was all about story. And what a story it was.

What would make a good-looking, powerful young man make a decision to do pure evil? And did he become evil...or just a person for whom evil was easier and easier to do? Vader is such a caricature, evil incarnate, that it's easy to say he was evil. But this movie helped me analyze that approach we take to classifying people as "good" and "bad." After all, bad people are lost and, as such, a waste of time. We spend far too much time (and if we spend any time it is too much) trying to decide who is good and who is bad, who is "save-able" and who is lost. And in doing that, we lose sight of the fact that sin is not just a choice, and a new choice every time, but that it is present in all of us. We all fall short of the glory of God, and God loves the world just as much as he loves the church. Redemption is possible for anyone at any time.

Darth Vader, in a recent poll, came in behind Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter as the "best" movie villain of all time. If the poll were taken now, after "Sith", he might be even higher. This movie portrayed how a good person, with good intentions, can walk down that path so easily. Someday, I hope to watch all six episodes from I through VI. Because the point is that, at the end, the Jedi returns. Redemption happens. Even if you're the third worst bad guy of all time.

1 Comments:

At 1:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Glad to see you made it back to your online friends. I was afraid you were still at the movies trying to beat your old records.

So, do I take the 9-year-old boy to see the movie?

Speaking of Darth, he has his own blogspot:

http://darthside.blogspot.com/

enjoy

 

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