So I went and saw “Star Wars 3 Revenge of the Sith” at the theater two days ago. I thought it wasn’t so bad, but now that I think about it there were a lot of problems with it. It was better than “Star Wars 2” in that the special effects computer graphic stuff didn’t look so terrible against the real action- they got it to blend better. There was a fairly exciting story line and some really nice fighting scenes. My favorite battle was the one between Yoda and Chancelor Palpatine. Yoda was the best I have seen him since the original trilogy. The animators finally got the CGI really dead-on and Frank Oz of course was brilliant with the voice. Everything matched up well. That is the end of the good stuff though. All the other aspects of the movie had me severely disappointed.
I thought the swiching from scene to scene was done too often and sometimes unnecessarily. By the end of the movie I was so tired of seeing the screen windshield wiper effect. Another annoying part was when the camera would “sweep” the landscape. This was one of the only problems I had with the Lord of the Rings movies too. The sweeps are always just a little too fast and blurry and I don’t like watching them because they hurt my eyes. I thought a lot of the dialogue was terrible as it was in “2”. The movie had too many cheesy lines and not enough meaningful ones. In the original trilogy the lines stick in your mind because they really “punch”. By this I mean the delivery is timed just right and they sound clever but also normal enough so someone might actually say them.
There were definitely lines that were supposed to be the memorable ones. This type of line a character would say to himself out loud when all alone with absolutely no reason other than for the benefit of the audience. Such as Obi wan looking at the blaster he just used to finish someone off with and saying, “How uncivilized.” And that’s the ONLY one I can remember from the movie. I could recite half a dozen lines from EACH of the trilogy movies.
Now for my complaints on actor chemistry; I have so much to say here. I feel like they didn’t bother putting Anakin and Padme in the same room before casting the adult Anakin. Maybe they said to themselves, “Lets just see him beg and whine and that should be close enough to acting love.” Padme had better chemistry with the child Anakin from Episode 1. I just feel so cheated in terms of their romance. With Han and Leia in the original you always had that romantic tension and no words really needed to explain what was happening. The Anikan/Padme romance is so UNobvious they have to resort to sappy dialogue to let you know they have feelings for each other. I had to look up this quote from Anakin to Padme in “2” since I couldn’t remember any of them:
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… [begins caressing her] and smooth…”
GAG!
In “2” Padme originally seems repulsed by this behaviour but later confesses her love to him while they are in a life or death situation. The love seems so out of the blue on her part. In “3” both Padme and Anakin seem to be whining at each other a lot. Anakin is always having fits of anger and giving Padme the silent treatment. She responds by telling him, “Don’t be this way. Don’t do this.” And that is their entire scope of emotions to each other.
My last big complaint here is about Anakin’s fall to the dark side. You could see how enticed he was by the saving-people-from-death thing Palpatine offered him but he seemed to still need convincing. So then as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing changes and suddenly he wants to become a sith and devote his life to evil. If he had really been so close to turning when Chancellor Palpatine revealed that he was the sith lord, why didn’t he join him then? Anakin is still loyal enough to warn the Jedi of the Sith, then alters course and saves Palpatine to pledge his life to the dark side. The whole transition doesn’t make sense. It was far too quick for me. Anakin feels some remorse about letting Master Windu die when he asks, “What have I done?” but a minute later he gives unwavering aleigance to Darth Sidious. It’s like he said, “Oh my God what did I just do? Ah well what the hell. I might as well join the guy I just saved.” A life changing decision like that is not going to be made on a whim.
To me this movie was a letdown. There are no more prequels to expect and this was supposed to be an amazing ending (or middle) to the Star Wars saga. I feel jipped. It was nowhere near the magic of George Lucas’s first three. None of the Episodes 1-3 were. I want to ask him what changed from the first set to the second set. Did his own expectations of himself drop? Did his ego overshadow his talent? Was he too obsessed with special effects to notice anything else? For all three new movies especially 2 and 3, I have to say in my best Alec Guinness voice, “These are not the prequels we’re looking for.”