If Revenge of the Sith is about the past – tying up the loose ends of the Star Wars series and creating the long-awaited payoff for the new prequels before they have a chance to go down in history as the worst shit ever – then Revelations is about the future. Indeed, I believe the future of Star Wars will entail many, many projects like this one, which comes off (not in a bad way) like the pilot for a proposed USA Original Series drawing from the interstices of the Star Wars galaxy. I've long been fascinated by the many Star Wars novels on the market – official fan fiction, essentially – but actually sitting down to read, like, the randy memoirs of Boskk the Bounty Hunter inevitably shuts me down completely. The thing is, film is much easier to fake than literature. Just ask Jack Kerouac!!! Revelations, made on a slightly-more-than-shoestring budget and more or less "approved" (that is, not immediately slapped with a cease-and-desist order from Skywalker Ranch), endeavors to document the travails of some fourth-string Jedi during the big "Kill them … all of them" campaign (remember 2005? Ha, ha). 'Cause it's fun to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, but for a full understanding of the Empire's first days, you need to know what happened to, say, "Declan." Amazingly, the film feels almost like one of the prequels. The digital animation is impressive, the costumes seem reasonable, and the acting is, for the most part, no worse than any of the recent SW films. The plot is curiously woman-focused, which actually made it more interesting to me, since a) I like women (contrary to recent Drudge Reports) and b) who wants to see the SW equivalent of "Degrassi: The Next Generation"'s foolish attempt to create a character as singular as Joey Jeremiah? Er, that is, who wants to see a cut-rate Anakin Skywalker? I can't say I wouldn't watch this kind of thing regularly if it were on USA all the time. I kind of hope the Star Wars fan-film genre becomes as ubiquitous a genre as the Jay-Z mash-up genre … although my support is at least 40% ironic, the other 60% is pure fanboy admiration for anyone pulling off a fake SW movie so true to the Coughbot heart George Lucas lost long ago.
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