Movie Review 1: Revenge of the Sith

First a brief synopsis: Lucas throws his traditional-trademark gold letters at us "STAR WARS" and gives us a bit of a prologue. This is acceptable because that's how all Star Wars movies have been, but it isn't particularly impressive. The story isn't much but maybe the movie will redeem the bad prologue, wait and see...

We remember from the last movie that the "Army of the Republic" authorized by the soon to be emperor, which would then become the storm-troopers, was something like 100,000 men. That isn't much, it's roughly one seventh the size of the Chinese army today. And that's only one country on one planet, not enough to invade hundreds or thousands of planets I think. That aside... let's jump back into the war.

We are immediately thrust into what is supposed to be some kind of epic space battle, though in a planet's atmosphere, with, literally, thousands of flashing lights everywhere we look. It's a battle of "epic-proportions" except that we simply do not care what is going on. We can hardly tell the good ships from the bad ones. or rather, the bad ones from the other bad ones. It's boring and it's overwhelming. And any audience member is hopelessly lost if he/she wasn't to soak in what is actually happening, so we have to play catch-up from the first scene. To make matters worse Lucas throws some droid heroics at us. Which is simply stupid.

Our heroes demonstrate quickly that they are nine parts stupid and one part extremely lucky. Somehow they clumsy their way onto some kind of command-ship. Where they screw around until they find a Christopher Lee and kill him. They release the "captured" soon-to-be emperor, but they find themselves in trouble quickly and are taken captive by a robot who not only commands a starship but he coughs too, but most importantly we've never met him before and we simply don't give two craps about him. He is guarded by other robots with lightsaber poles, again, which we've never seen before. (Who makes these robots?) So the emperor, as part of some "well-calculated" scheme, throws himself extremely close to death, but luckily Anakin manages to crash "land" the falling ship and they are saved.

We learn from Anakin's bimbo Padme (which, incidentally, isn't her name so why does she go by it?) that she is pregnant with Luke and Leia, no surprises there. But what spoils their fun is that Anakin is having bad dreams again. No not the naughty kind, instead his night-fantasies are about his wife's imminent death.

Obi-Wan and the Jedi want Anakin to spy on the Chancellor because they fear he is corrupt. Maybe they should have though of that before they "rescued" his butt from the separatists, (who continue to not make any sense.) The Emperor then "subtly" manipulates Anakin to doubt the Jedi. And by subtly I mean obviously and blatantly. Crappy dialogue from top to bottom.

Meanwhile Obi-Wan is screwing around and runs into our friend again, the coughing robot. Remember, the one we didn't care about before, well, we still don't give two craps about him. he pulls out four lightsabers, for no apparent reason, but we think "well he's a stupid non-sensical character but maybe this will be a cool fight so I'll forgive Lucas for his terrible storywriting," but Lucas, as is his style in this movie, never misses a chance to disappoint us. Our coughing robot jedi gets his but kicked quickly, losing his extra sabers in the process. Not to mention the ambient fighting all around, again between bad guys in armor and other bad guys, the robots, and that creature Obi-Wan was riding annoys the crap out of us with the terrible noise it makes. It's another glowy flashy thoughtless battle scene where we have literally nothing at stake, except for Obi-wan who we aren't worried about in the slightest.

The Jedi decide to take down the evil emperor, and by that I mean they think four of them will arrest him and that will be that. Lucas throws a scene at us of four Jedi against the Emperor, we've been looking forward to this since we saw a glimpse of it in the movie trailer. And, in Lucas fashion, he ends it quick. Killing three of them in fewer seconds than there were Jedi. (probably out of laziness and to save choreography costs) Leaving Samuel L Jackson, of course, and they fight for a bit. But it seems that the Emperor had planned things too perfectly and just as our favorite black jedi is about to pay him his due Anakin comes in and--basically--kills Samuel L Jackson. And at this point Anakin has turned to the dark side officially.

So let's recap. Anakin is a powerful but passionate rogue who has a pure heart and loves his wife, that he secretly has, and wants to preserve her life and raise his kids. That's his initial motivation. Then when his pure heart and desire to preserve his wife's life come into conflict he kills an innocent man, who he's learned to respect over the past several years, in the very blink of any with barely a second thought. Pretty big transition. And to make the transition as bumpy and unbelievable as possible Lucas decides to have Anakin killing kids in the very next scene. Apparently one good people become slightly bad, they go bad all the way. There is no such thing as a half-rotten apple in star wars. So, what the hell, let's have him kill some kids. This is the part of the movie where you decide whether to throw your popcorn or your coke at it. And just to be safe you throw them both.

The Emperor then sends our "hero" to go kill the separatist leaders (whose motivations STILL don't make any sense) and he sends of the pre-programmed directive to kill all the jedi. Order 66. (It looks like Lucas forgot a six, and after he typed that on his typewriter, in his underwear, he thought to himself about how clever he was.) It's just pathetic that every last stormtrooper knows what Order 66 is, and that they do it without hesitation. Funny that a whole bunch of Jedi never had the faintest idea what every single footsoldier probably learned at basic training. "Um, if order 66 comes down the line, start killing Jedi." Well apparently Yoda knew what it meant, because he doesn't go down easily. Too bad he never shared his wisdom with the other Jedi, who died unexpectedly. Although this was my favorite scene, pretty comical indeed watching those Jedi leading soldiers who betray them. How very stupid they seem.

Lucas continues to dazzle us with his understanding of political intrigue by having the emperor march into the senate and tell them that the Jedi are planning to take-over the republic. "Oh crap!" They must be thinking, "why don't we arrest the jedi and put them on trial, afterall there's barely more than six of them." But no, palpatine goes on to say "so..uh...we're organizing the Republic into the Galactic Empire." Hmm.. So the Senate would rather prevent the Jedi from taking over, to which they've seen no evidence and had no suspicions, by letting the Emperor take over. Okaaaaay, that's like having President Bush say "We're afraid greenpeace is going tot ry to take over the country, so to be safe we're dissolving congress and giving me absolute power." I just don't see anyone going for it. And I don't see that as being very clever writing, more like convenient. I guess people are just stupider in the star wars universe, something about that "a long time ago..." bit, maybe they're just less evolved than we are. Aterall these people let jar-jar be a representative.

Another pathetic high for the movie is just around the corner, and as Padme and Anakin meet up again we see a drastic change. Anakin suddenly has no motivation whatsoever. He goes from wanting to save padme to killing her, starting to, and he also offers her the chance to join him to rule the galaxy. Which, wanting to kill her and ruling the galaxy with her were never part of his character up until this minute. Damn convenient.

At last it is time for the epic lightsabers duels. Yoda against the Emperor, and more importantly Anakin vs Obi-wan. After 6 movies this should be good, Lucas has had more than enough time (and money) to make this the coup-de-grace of his film saga, we can't help but be excited. Unfortunately this is a spectacular let down.

The Emperor throws a bunch of chairs at Yoda, who looks flat and animated. A let-down from the superior Yoda of the classic films. Despite his digital prowess he loses the battle and gives up. Heads for seclusion, presumably, with simply no clear motivation. "tried once to beat him I did," Yoda thinks to himself "now give up I must, try again I cannot, why, I know not, said so Lucas did..."

As for the fight between Anakin and Obi-wan, it brings us back to the good old days of "A New Hope" and we get to see that the skill in their Vader/Obi-wan duel doesn't change very much, regardless of whether its Ewan McGreggor or Alec Gueniss behind the blade. The fighting simply sucks. The sabers are the same color, for starters. Which makes distinguishing them almost impossible. A huge advantage for the choreographer who has them run around a bit, spinning at odd times, and worst of all swinging their weapons around madly, nowhere near their opponent. (I thought the goal of each swing was to kill your opponent, or stop him from killing you, not to twirl and twirl your sabers, harmlessly, much like a baton--I didn't know Vader and Obi-wan were part of a marching-band...)

We haven't seen good choreography since the Phantom Menace, and we never see it again. Lucas ends on this low-note, with our heroes fighting each other wildly and stupidly, with silly displays of "force" attacks on each other, that make them both look like prancing ninnies. What makes matters worst of all is that very little money or time was poured into the actual fighting part of the duel. Oh no, instead Industrial Light and Money focused obsessively on the background, which totally upstages the foreground, and when you have a duel to the death as the foreground, well, that's simply hard to do. Hard in a bad way, though. We are distracted from the bad fighting by massive explosions and pouring lava splashing everywhere as this facility starts crashing down. Falling apart on itself with the slightest effort. Whoever designed this facility simply had no idea what he was doing. The place basically blows itself apart...oops...better fire that engineer. So much for interesting fighting, when the choreography isn't looking terrible it's because our heroes are too busy surfing on melted girders and walking on steel tight-ropes to get at each other. (If I wanted to see the circus I wouldn't have come to the movie theater!)

The movie ultimately ends with the death of Padme, who dies of "no medical reason," and all this time she had a superpower. The power to die at will. Talk about a push-over, what kind of mom chooses to die the same day she gives birth to twins? Talk about an early onset of postpartum depression. Either that or Lucas just doesn't understand mothers very well. I'm going with theory two. With her death at the birth of the twins (interesting how in Return of the Jedi Leia claims to remember her mother---must be the force... or some other bull, maybe its midichlorians again) all that is left to resolve is our other main characters. The Emperor is the emperor, probably thinking to himself "that was surprisingly easy, I didn't have to be clever even once." And now Anakin is Darth Vader. "I don't really know what I'm doing, or why, so I may as well be a tool for the Emperor. Afterall I've always been a tool to plot-convenience" and he gets his new suit. Kudos to Lucas, however, for making the ships somewhat begin to resemble the classic ones we recognize and love. And especially for making the young officer on the bridge look like Peter Cushing. As for Yoda he's given up after his one try to stop the Emperor. And I suppose he doesn't think his continued efforts would help anyone. Better to rot on Degobah and get high for the next 900 years of his life then try to undo things. And Obi-wan adopts a similar course. But he gets the shaft even worse then Yoda, he gets tatooine. Where he has to watch over a whiner and wander the deserts, becoming senile before the next movie begins. Why is that worse than the swamps of degobah? No weed, that's why. And the only thing that could make you enjoy this movie is lots and lots of weed.

In review, Lucas doesn't seem to care much about character motivation, that's just something he explains in tidbits, if at all. Unfortunately the politics, when they are coherent (which is rare), are simply unbelievable. Characters seem to be motivated by randomness. Or rather, motivated to do whatever the hell is most convenient for the film to look as flashy and computer-animated as possible at any given time. Character depth is more shallow than an empty puddle, and the supposedly complex politics between the separatists (whose desire to separate was never particularly clear) and the soon-to-be-empire, whom we care nothing about--was just a hodgepodge of gibberish. Way to go Lucas, you've proven that all your fans every really cared about was a bunch of flashy lights. A huge 100 Million Dollar letdown. What better way to end the saga known as Star Wars.

Stars: 1/2