Let’s get this out of the way right now: There Is A Twist. I’ll spoil it a bit by saying that it’s ripped directly from Secret Window. I didn’t figure it out in advance, probably because I was having too much fun MSTing the suspense-movie cliches to take it seriously:

• Disturbing crayon drawings: check.
• Mutilated dolls: check.
• Dead pet: are you kidding me?
• Murky bathtub: oh come on now.
• Dark cave climax: you can’t be serious.

After the end, I did the obligatory skim back through the movie to see if the plot supported the twist. There was a bit involving a boiling kettle (yes, rote Hitchcock) that should have given it away. However, director John Polson cheats, in very un-Shyamalanian fashion, by placing David in at least one scene that he turns out to have imagined. No fair.

Not much can be said about the acting, either. De Niro phones in the Bruce Willis role of a distant psychiatrist who couldn’t diagnose his daughter, or himself, out of a paper bag. He plays the role a little too straight, so that we get absolutely no hints as to David’s true nature — but maybe he was resting up from Meet the Fockers. Fanning turns up the Wednesday Addams dial to 11. Her shtick is annoying through the first two-thirds of the film, but becomes completely sympathetic in retrospect, after you realize what poor little Emily was going through. Creepy-character specialist Dylan Baker, playing no one at all creepy here, is actually a relief.

The best thing I can say about Hide and Seek is that The Twist gave me some things to think about. Complete spoiler below, if you haven’t figured it out and don’t care to watch:

David has multiple-personality disorder. His Evil Personality is, natch, Emily’s not-so-imaginary friend. Fanning’s character has endured life alone with her two dads for months. This is why she always eyes Dad with shell-shocked distrust, and why our opinion of her does a complete 180. There is absolutely no chemistry between De Niro and Fanning, though, which would have made the truth much more gut-wrenching.

The other thing that struck me was how everything goes south when Mom dies, and stays that way until Emily is reunited with a kind, caring, female guardian. Maybe I’m being a bit of a Rebel Dad here, but this plays up that safe old stereotype — that fathers are unsuitable caretakers of children — in the worst way. If that’s something you really want to see, don’t rent this one; pick up The Shining instead.

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What I liked:

• Four years after September 11, disaster films seem to be back in style, or at least tolerated. The destruction shown here is on a smaller scale, though. Steven Spielberg skips the pulverizing of landmarks for the most part, instead sticking to mob scenes, flung cars, and traumatized children. This works for a couple of reasons: it stays away from 9/11 territory (except for a few shots of bulletin boards covered with photos of the missing), it sets Worlds apart from last year’s The Day After Tomorrow, and it humanizes the apocalypse.

• Spielberg shifts back into Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan gear to capture the trauma of the alien invasion. There are no dismembered limbs or gunshot wounds in this invasion, though; victims are vaporized right out of their clothes. There is a positively eerie scene where said clothes float down out of the sky, amid the ashes of their owners; there is a spooky tableau involving a wrecked airliner that is straight out of Lost.

• Tom Cruise makes his character’s transformation to likability — from deadbeat dad to role model — believable and subtle. Cruise has considerable skill but, as a big-movie actor, is generally underrated. A lesser actor would have picked one of the character’s several turning-point scenes and beaten us over the head with it. I barely remember Born on the Fourth of July, the movie for which Cruise received the most acclaim, but I seem to recall that he pulled off a similar transformation in that movie as well.

What I didn’t:

• The aliens (when we finally catch a glimpse of them) are barely distinguishable from the aliens in the inferior Independence Day. Maybe after we beat them with a computer virus in the first movie, they came back five years later, only to be wiped out by the biological version.

• No summer sci-fi extravaganza is complete without plot holes. Cars, boats and electricity failed when required by the plot, and conveniently worked at other times.

• Dakota Fanning was really the only choice for the role of the daughter. Like Kirsten Dunst before her, she’s been typecast as the spooky-quirky-cute little girl. She’s handicapped by the script, which gives her a lot of screaming and saucer-eyed gasping, and not much else. She’s dangerously close to becoming an underutilized blockbuster actor along with Cruise. Let’s hope she survives the transition to adult roles as Dunst did.

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I don’t really aspire to be a movie critic. I usually have to read other reviews before I make up my own mind. Others have sufficiently beaten the dead horse of Lucas’ dialogue. There are bones to pick about the pacing and acting — but I’ll leave that stuff to the pros. McGregor and Christensen, though, did a fine job mimicking the speech patterns of Alec Guinness and James Earl Jones respectively. Christensen even resembles Mark Hamill circa Episode VI.

Plotwise, I thought Anakin’s downward spiral could have been drawn out a little longer. We cheer for him in Episode I’s pod race, but find him insufferable and whiny in Episode II. He seems to have his act together (if a little misguided) for the first two-thirds of Sith. However, because the end happens so suddenly, the audience feels more sympathy for Anakin than he probably deserves. Palpatine tricked him, Obi-Wan abandoned him, Windu alienated him and Yoda blew him off. It’s like Lucas is trying to absolve him of responsibility for his own actions. But the tragic hero has to take some of the blame. We need to hate him a little, and not just for his whining in Attack of the Clones.

Speaking of Episode II, let’s toss it out and replace it with the expanded first half of III. Most of Clones is just exposition for Palpatine’s plotting, anyway. That would allow for the events in the final thirty minutes of Sith to be paced out better. In particular, I’d have loved to see more pre-mask Vader. So let the big showdown with Obi-Wan build up over weeks or months of plot time, as a mullet-haired, red-eyed Anakin spews angst across the galaxy. Once the mask goes on, his character development is done until Episode VI.

After all the nitpicking, the question I’d like answered is this: Why does the movie work despite all its faults? Why are we gripped by the last thirty minutes, despite the clunky lines and stiff acting? I think it all comes down to the Big Moment. We have to see Anakin dumped in the lava, and we have to see the mask donned. How the Big Moment is implemented, in detail, is not that important. The Star Wars macro-story transcends the script. Now that the macro-story is complete, we have to go check it out for ourselves, to get closure.

We’ve heard for years that Star Wars is really about Anakin. I went home and watched A New Hope on DVD to see if I perceived it any differently. Sure enough, it really hit home this time that Vader — his rise, fall and redemption — is the story. Luke, Han and company are the epilogue. I’ve always loved the idea of a nice round nine Star Wars movies. It seems to me now, though, that the story has been told, the gap closed.

Lucas came up with a killer framework for his myth. The books, games and action figures sold will number in the thousands. Fox will eventually crank out a third Star Wars trilogy, with or without Lucas. They’d be fools not to. But the framework is not the point. I think Lucas (for all his faults) understands something that Tolkien (for all his gifts) never did: it’s nifty to build your own universe, but that universe should serve the story. Not the other way around.

I started this post convinced that building a universe — in a series of doorstopper novels — was something I would love to do. I enjoy the writers that are good at it: Tolkien, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, Asimov’s Foundation series, and others. But the brilliance of Star Wars is not the universe alone, but the macro-story: the myth that resonates with us even if it’s not so deftly told. We’ll still tune in to see what happens next.

Appendix: a couple of “what were they thinking?” rants, because I just have to get them off my chest.

• What was the point of the whole General Grievous subplot? The only thing Obi-Wan accomplished by riding around on a big lizard is the sale of big lizard action figures.

• I almost laughed out loud when Palpatine’s face melted. He has to be pushing a hundred by the time we see him in Return of the Jedi. Isn’t that (plus a hundred years of smoking the Dark Side crack) enough to ugly up his face? The lousy makeup job almost ruined the dramatic climax of the movie.

• Space-geeky nitpick: While crash-landing Grievous’ cruiser, Anakin says “Now we’re really picking up speed!” during reentry. Any freshman physics student could have told George that spaceships slow down when they hit the atmosphere. They’re going thousands of miles per hour and then they start plowing through air. That’s where the heat comes from. It’s called friction, George. Look it up.

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