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Ebert Gives 'Sith' Positive Review
emerald demon writes "The world's authority on reviewing movies, Roger Ebert, has released his review of "Star Wars--Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." I noticed that Ebert & Roeper gave it a two thumbs up, but I assumed that Ebert was going to go for the minimum for giving his thumb up--two and a half stars. I was delighted to read his three and a half starred review. It seemed like he let a few things slip, but it's obvious that he enjoyed it. '"Episode III" has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular.' Bad dialogue as usual: 'To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.'"
But clicking on the submitted link is worth it just for the headline picture and the funny caption.
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From the Guardian:-
"Henceforth you will be known as Darth Vader!" These dire words, addressed to a tormented Anakin Skywalker as he crosses the threshold to the much-mentioned Dark Side, mark the definitive moment of his Luciferian journey, which will end with him in a black, neo-Wehrmacht helmet-mask, with incipient emphysema and a walk that makes him look as if he has had concrete hip replacements.
It supposedly forms the mythic heart of the gigantic Third Episode of George Lucas's colossally inflated Star Wars prequel trilogy. Yet when this moment happens - after what seems like seven hours of CGI action as dramatically weightless as the movement of tropical fish in an aquarium - I looked blearily around the cinema and sensed thousands of scalps failing to prickle. We had all been bored into submission long ago.
George Lucas is now not so much a director as chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option. And within this empire's boundaries, Lucas is so mind-bogglingly powerful that none of his lieutenants dares tell him the truth: that yet another Something of the Something title, after Attack of the Clones and Return of the Jedi, is pretty annoying. (It's actually his fourth, if you count the original script title to the first Star Wars: Adventures of the Starkiller.) But here at any rate, finally, is the end of the road, or rather the middle of the road - the moment in 1977 where we came in. Lucas has taken three pointlessly long and artificially complicated movies to get to the point: precisely how did Luke Skywalker's father come to embrace the forces of darkness?
Hayden Christensen is Anakin, the talented but mercurial Jedi pupil of Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which role Ewan McGregor wears a big and bushy beard, to indicate the aged wisdom that we know is his destiny. Their mighty contest is to be at the centre of this movie, during which in quiet moments leading characters will gaze out over massive futuristic cityscapes resembling the photorealist artwork once used for 1970s sci-fi paperbacks: pointy buildings with swarms of pointy aircraft criss-crossing overhead, often bathed in crimson sunsets.
Once again, McGregor speaks in a simperingly lifeless Rada-English accent, a muddled and misconceived backdating of the Guinness original - the young fogey with the light-sabre. In boringness he is matched by that Jedi master of woodenness: Hayden Christensen, the flatliner to end all flatliners. As an actor Christensen must show the terrible embryo of future wickedness within himself. And how does he do this? By tilting his head down, looking up through lowered brows and giving the unmistakable impression that he is very, very cross. If Princess Diana had gone to the Dark Side, she would have looked a lot like this.
So why does Anakin desert the forces of light? It is his passionate love and concern for his pregnant wife, Princess Amidala, coupled with a sense of his own slighted dignity that are to be the tragic and fateful factors leading to the most unconvincing evil act you can imagine, an event weirdly neutralised by the bloodless unreality that surrounds everything. The vicious Anakin massacres - oh, horror! - a bunch of innocent Jedi children.
But that is not how Lucas's solemnly high-flown script chooses to refer to them. With sub-Shakespearian gravitas, McGregor intones: "Not even the younglings survived." I'm sorry, not even the what? Is that their surname or something? Are Mr and Mrs Youngling going to come home to find a nursery bloodbath?
One of the things about the previous film, Attack of the Clones, that made you think things might be looking up was the terrific performance by Christopher Lee as the sinister Count Dooku. Almost the very first thing Lucas does here is kill him off. It is a crippling blow that leaves us with a range of scandalously dull secondary characters. People such as Senator Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L Jackson as the fiercely uninte
Alexandra DuPont
It's a girl, not a guy.
Random is the New Order.
Google has a very good non-biased, objective review system in place. Check it out for this movie:
9 &oi=showtimes&fq=Star+Wars--Episode+III:+Revenge+o f+the+Sith/
http://www.google.com/reviews?cid=ba601666fe1a2e7
It pulls from many different sources
Single reviewers are often unreliable, having bias and agendas of their own. If you want a more objective approach to the popularity of a film, you should look at sites that provide an overview of all reviews for a given film.
Rotten Tomatoes is one of the best examples of this. They simply assess a review as either favorable or unfavorable and do away with the less empirical ratings. They count up the total number of positive versus negative reviews, and give a percentage. They'll link every review, include a blurb from each, and pick the most well written ones (positive and negative) and put them in a sidebar.
Their film ratings so far on Star Wars are...
A New Hope - 93%
Empire Strikes Back - 98%
Return of the Jedi - 80%
Phantom Menace - 62%
Attack of the Clones - 65%
Revenge of the Sith - 84%
Looks like it's on par with Jedi in the opinion of most critics.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
If you watch the behind the scenes jazz on the fourth disc included with the Trilogy DVD set, that dialog was changed by Empire's director and Harrison Ford, on the fly. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I was at the Star Wars saga marathon on Monday at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London, England. we saw all the SW movies, including Sith, starting at 7am and finishing at 11.30pm.
;"Absolutely not...but I am working on Indiana Jones", which got a pretty bid roar from the crowd.
George Lucas and others came in before Sith. The film was good, very good.
Anyway, George snuck back into the cinema and stood at the back watching our (very positive) reactions to the movie, he then also came back at the end of the film. This never happens at these kinds of showings and remember, the PREMIERE was happening not 100 meters away at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square.
So, in answer to the chants of "we want 9", he said
Remember, there is to be a live action SW in the future, so the next film, if there is to be one, (my guess is that it) will be spun from that series.
John Podhoretz [NY Post] hated it:
Jason Appuzo [Liberty Film Festival] objected to the needless insertion of politics: