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Review: Star Wars Episode III
The special effects question is easy: This is quite simply one of the most gorgeous films ever made. Everything is superb. Lucas has an incredible visual sense; he is a truly visual filmmaker, and his images hit home, are beautifully executed, and are technically stunning. Of course, we really and truly expect perfection here from Lucas, so this may not seem like news.
You are deceiving yourself. Lucas has frankly outdone what I thought possible. My jaw was on the floor the entire time.
But what about those tattered remains?
I myself am not a huge Star Wars fan. I enjoy the films, but I wasn't raised on them, didn't see any of them (except Episode II) in the theaters. I was one of those kids who knew Darth Vader was Luke's father before I had heard of Star Wars, because I saw the parodies before I saw the originals.
I will say this now. Episode III proves that "A New Hope" was a mistake. A freak accident of success, because Lucas seems incapable of doing fun action. How he managed to make "A New Hope" a delightful, playful, fundamentally fun movie is beyond me. Because when Episode III starts, it falls flat on its face, continuing the sad attempt in Episode's I and II to make the kind of joyous space opera that, of all six, only "A New Hope" managed to be.
Lucas however, can do myth very, very well. And once Lucas gets around to telling the Myth Of Anakin's Fall, the real story that Episode I and II have been leading to, everything works. Here we have the George Lucas of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi." Hayden Christiansen goes from a pretty (if ineffectual) actor to being the tragic Darth Vader, and you believe. Darth Sidious is the villain that Darth Vader was in the original trilogy. Better perhaps, more sinister. The fall of Anakin is completely and utterly believable. I was shocked. I understood why he fell to the Dark Side. It's called the freakin' Dark Side for goodness sake! How could you freakin' fall?
Because of a tempter. Because of dark dreams. Because of love.
I don't want to spoil anything for those of you who, like me, went in not knowing exactly how it all happened. Some have always known the story, and are just watching it play out; some of us have willfully ignored the spoilers, and waited.
But I will say this for those who do know what happens. When order 66 is given, my breath was taken away. When the final battles occur, I was truly fearful. In other words, he doesn't screw it up.
I'm going to see it again.
Jamie also saw Revenge of the Sith, but it doesn't seem like he saw quite the same film. His thoughts:
I heard it might be good, so I tried to like it. I really did. Revenge of the Sith is one of the worst movies I've seen recently. It's Battlefield Earth bad.
It's not just that when Lucas tries to "do" myth he generates a world populated by generics. Nor is it just that the plot is absurdly thin (the movie exists to showcase the galaxy's most complete betrayal ever, brought on by two dreams and a promise from someone who couldn't be more obviously untrustworthy if he were twirling a mustache).
This movie is terrible first, because Lucas writes unbearable dialogue, especially in romantic scenes. And since the motivator is romantic love, we get a lot of bad lines. Remember "I don't like sand"? Episode III one-ups that. The climactic emotional moment, I swear to God, is a rip-off of Homer Simpson.
And second, Hayden Christensen is a lousy actor. There, I said it. Even with the silly script, Ewan McGregor is fine, and Natalie Portman brings life to a few scenes, but Anakin gets not a single believable moment. Even when all he has to do is look sideways, he's more fake than a losing high school forensics team. He's wooden like community-college Acting 101. I could go on.
Best I can say is that Jar-Jar doesn't speak. The special effects are there, and since they cover every square inch of the screen constantly, you will get many per unit time per dollar. If you like that kind of thing, you're going to go see it anyway, so enjoy.
Thanks go to erikharrison for his take on the movie.
... an interesting quote from the author of Darthside:
When we were kids we used to "play Star Wars", which is a kind of no-fee intellectual property union we entered unto with Lucasfilm whereby our imaginations were ignited in exchange for our fealty as future consumers.
-- i drop mine in braille so you blind cats can read me
To Harrison: It wasn't THAT good.
to Jamie: It wasn't THAT bad.
I saw it. It was worth the price of admission, a soda and nachos. More importantly, it was worth my TIME, which to me is infinately more valuable.
While I thought the special effects were astounding in Episode III, I felt something was sorely lacking with the physics when applied to humans. It seemed as if he didn't even try to make it seem realistic.
For example, when Obi Wan and Anakin were fighting Dooku near the beginning, Dooku decided to do a flip off of a balcony type thing to get to the lower level. This looked horrible. There was no acceleration invovled in his fall, and his flip randomly sped up slightly while in mid air. Of course, he was a Jedi master, so he can probably do that, but I really doubt they had that in mind when creating that scene. Did anyone else notice examples of this?
This is what Lucas had to say about Yoda, when they introduced him in The Empire Strikes Back:
That was like a real leap
beacuse if that puppet had not worked
the whole film would have been down the tubes
it just, you know woulda been a disaster, it would've been a silly little muppet...
the whole movie would've collapsed under the weight of it.
(quote from the bonus feature DVD in the original trilogy box set)
Now, apply this quote to what Hayden Christensen has done to Darth Vader, one of the most memorable and recognizable villains in all of cinema history, and what do you get?
Is it me, or is the Death Star shown at the end of Episode III way too complete? At the beginning of Episode IV, there is some doubt about whether the station is fully operational, but there is a full skeleton of the Death Star visible at the end of III. Surely this is a mistake, just for continuity's sake. The DS could not have taken 16-18 years (as long as it takes Luke and Leia to grow up) to complete!
didn't like it.
I knew before going in, from what other people told me and from what I read online, that the acting was very bad, to the point of laughing during drama scenes, but I went to see it anyway just for the effects and the lightsaber battles.
Generally speaking I found the lightsaber duels too cluttered, without much definition in each move sequence.
A Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon Jinn style of fight choreography should have been used... IMO it's the best lightsaber duel of them all.
Both of these reviews are terrible. They're worse than the movie. See the movie; it's good. It doesn't redeem Lucas's transgressions against the original trilogy when he Special-Ed'ed them, and it doesn't quite make up for the first two episodes of the new trilogy, but standing on its own, it's pretty decent. Not a perfect movie by any means, but no more flawed than either of the three original films.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Being a VFX artist myself, I felt the movie was extremely lacking in certain respects. The first battle scene was amazing, without any doubt. However, Lucas, for some reason, put way too many blue screen shots towards the middle and end, where he relied heavily on CG imagery to back landscape shots.
For example, Palpatine's room had a backplate entirely out of CG, and at times, the room itself changed from a live action plate to a CG plate when him and Yoda were fighting.
I felt a lot of it was just too synthetic. I hate to say this as a VFX artist. It would have been nice to see more sets and a more hands-on approach towards the overall look and feel --It was just too clean.
As another example, when Obi-wan and Anakin are fighting Count Dooku in that room, it was a in a movie set where everything was constructed except the back drop of the space battle. This was a similar set up that they had on Return of the Jedi during the fight between Luke and Anakin.
CG has to have a job of supporting the movie, not making an integration between CG scenes and live action scenes.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen great CG/live integration pieces. However, they were great because they were subtle and supported the concepts and ideas.
No, Vader destroys Sideous and himself in one selfless act. Vader does fulfill the prophecy, and destroys the Sith, bringing balance back to the force. Luke was almost dead when this happened, and without Vader's interference, would have died.
Anakin was the one.
And how does removing half the force bring balance? With Lukes "less stuffy" ethic, he practices both light and dark side, and through one set of monks that embrace everything, there is balance.
A lot of people were (and are) reluctant to see it because the previous one was such a God-forsaken disgrace.
Effects rating
Episode I looked fairly realistic most of the time. While Jar-jar was an unpopular character, he was rendered fairly well most of the time. The biggest weakness was that the CGI was perhaps a little to sparse and too uniform. The battle-droid "pez dispenser" scene in particular didn't look quite right.
Episode II was a complete mess. Shot composition and cinematography were simply discarded and ignored in favor of making things look "high tech." The cartoon shots of Tokyo in "Ghost in the Shell" looked more realistic, and certainly less distracting from the main action. There were a lot of shots which simply could not have been done with stop-animation or puppets or other techniques, but it seems like they were done that way for no other reason.
Episode III... From the opening battle scene in the very beginning, I think you will agree that this time Lucas finally got it right. He begins with a nice close-up of a couple fighters skimming the surface of a larger ship, so when the "camera" pans back you have a much better sense of scale. (He also included one of those robot controller satellites in the shot, which not only helped the eye grasp the scale of the shot, but also reminded the viewer who they were fighting against.) Later scenes in other landscapes were also fantastic. At no point while watching the movie for the first time was I suddenly reminded that I was watching CGI characters or backgrounds.
Story review
God, what a fuck-up.
One of the things that made Star Wars so cool was that Lucas decided to make it feel like a 1930's 15-minute serial, in which most of the audience was not likely to have seen the beginning of the story. He wanted it to "come in at the middle", so he wrote an elaborate back-story which he never seriously thought he would get to film.
Having that untold back-story made the entire world seem bigger and more well thought-out.
When making Episodes 1-3, he did not have benefit of all that extra story, and it really shows.
Also, all the precious little inbred tie-ins to the the original series (C3PO was built by Anakin, "Red Five" was Obi-Wan's call sign, Chewbaca fought along with Yoda, etc. etc. etc.) were really tiresome, and had the impact of making what should have been a large-scale saga about a galactic struggle of mighty armies turn into a story where the fate of all civilizations for two entire generations were married to the actions of the same small small handful of people, many of whom were directly related.
Would it have hurt the story to have had Mace Windu (or some other Jedi) be the one who discovers the clone factory in Ep 2, instead of Obi-Wan being the only Jedi who ever does anything that matters? Did it really need to be Boba Fett's dad who was the genetic source of the clones? Did Chewie really need to be in the Wookie battle scene at all?
Why did Lucas think that all of these little "wink wink" connections would make the films more entertaing? If anything, they guarantee that children down the road who watch these films in 1-6 order will not enjoy 4-6 half as much as we did.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The flashback after "Empire" is indeed good. But all you need is Episode III. Episode II has too much nonsense about flying R2 units and bounty hunters and 50's diners. Episode I proves that little kids can only be the hero in little kids' movies, in addition to just having too much Jar-Jar.
The best viewing order is 4.
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I've always been bugged by this as well.
"There. Plug in. He should be able to interpret the entire imperial network!"
On the Death Star, in a control room overlooking a hangar bay where you berth captured freighters -- no, you reply completely on physical security. The assumption is that untrusted clients will never physically be able to access the network port.
This is the understandable hubris of the empire. It is inconceivable that enemy forces will be able to board your small-moon-sized space station and start poking around looking for the location of defense controls or which prisoner is where.
This is the same kind of thinking that leads to fatal-flaw design like a physical defense that assumes large-scale assault where smaller ships can easily slip through. What? A thermal exhaust port leading directly to the main reactor? Oh, don't worry -- the concept that enemies would attack with small fighters is so far-fetched that we don't have to worry about it.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Your commment about the story focusing on Anakin/Vader is abdsolutely correct. I've read the books, seen the movies and it has always been my impression that Star Wars is mostly about father Skywalker's life and how he is saved by his son then it is about just Luke. Luke the son is important, but the story is about the father's fall and redemption.
I see the important central idea around Star Wars in how Darth Sidious's attempt to turn Luke, ends up saving Anakin's sole.
If you look at how in episode VI, Luke is in the place against Anakin that Anakin was in episode II with Count Dooku.
That was where Darth Sidious realized he could control Anakin and make him his apprentice by having him kill Dooku.
That step was Anakins last chance to resist. The difference is that Luke stops short and refuses to fight.
It drives the Sidious to start killing Luke and it gets Vader to recognize and correct his mistake years later.
Look at Luke and Anakin when Sidious tries to convert them, they are both roughfully the same age, in extremely similar positions.
I think it adds to the whole experience.
Respect the Constitution
Some of the effects were decidedly ropey - the giant lizard ridden by Obi Wan was not that good (I'm not sure any CGI yet is good enough to create 100% convincing living beings yet) & the bit where several of the clones had their helmets removed so you could see their faces was atrociously bad - why Lucas didn't cut that scene I'll never know.
As to the vehicle animations, I have nothing but admiration for ILMs ability to do what they have shown they can do but the ship battle at the beginning was just too busy. I really get the impression that as many new vehicles as possible were crammed in just to generate toy sales meaning we had a battle scene that was confused and kept drawing your attention all over different parts of the screen.
Lucas however, can do myth very, very well.
I won't argue that he can tell a good story but his pace and directing leaves much to be desired in the first trilogy.
Child Anakin should have been the first half hour of episode 1 and Hayden's Anakin standing on a balcony arm-in-arm with Padme should have been the end of that same episode.
Episode 2 should have shown the gradual fall of Anakin and ended at a point where Palpatine has already placed some doubts in his mind so that he has his first piece of internal struggle at the end of the movie - this would have mirrored Luke's struggles at the end of Empire Strikes Back very well.
Episode 3 should have just been about the fall of Anakin and the rise of Palpatine. This was done far too quickly in episode 3 and lessened the effect as a result. We should have been aching to see Episode 3 just like we were with Episode 6 when Han was left encased in Corbomite.
In summary, the movie is the best of the first trilogy but not a patch on any of the second trilogy movies. And before anyone mentions Ewoks, at least in Return Of The Jedi we were all rooting for the Rebellion and the little bears because we had saw real people.
In the case of "droids vs clones", who really cares how many were killed on each side because more could always be wheeled on - the first trilogy turned warfare into something very sterile and remote whereas in the second trilogy we saw and felt genuine loss, whether it was an X-Wing pilot, Hoth infantryman or an Ewok.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I thought the balance was that once Annakin kills off everone, all that's left are:
Dark Side: Palpatine/Vader
Light Side: Yoda/Obi-Wan
Thus being perfect balance.
I see many posts saying how bad the actors were. Most of them are some of the best actors around. In other movies they are extremely talented.
The problem is with the directing. Lucas seems to MAKE them do such a bad job.
Elsewhere in the posts there is discusson about how good the Spanish version is compared to the English version. I'm sure that was because the voice actors didn't have Lucas directing them.
Does anyone know why the acting is so bad in 1-3 and decent to good in 4-6? What made him go this route?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Would it have hurt the story to have had Mace Windu (or some other Jedi) be the one who discovers the clone factory in Ep 2, instead of Obi-Wan being the only Jedi who ever does anything that matters? Did it really need to be Boba Fett's dad who was the genetic source of the clones? Did Chewie really need to be in the Wookie battle scene at all?
You miss the point of the entire Prequel Trilogy. It is the backstory to the Original Trilogy, not just the story that came before the Original Trilogy.
Why is Boba Fett from the original trilogy the best bounty hunter in the galaxy? His dad was once the greatest; he happened to be chosen to be a source for clones.
Why is Obi-Wan depicted in the original trilogy to be one of the best Jedi; what accomplishments led him to this title? Back in the day, he did this, that, and some of those things.
Why is Chewie a famous wookie? He fought hard back in the Battle of Kashyyyk, his name known all around.
Why did Lucas think that all of these little "wink wink" connections would make the films more entertaing?
They are the connections that tell us why we love the characters from the original trilogy so much: the Prequel Trilogy is their story.
Well then, welcome to the demographic of 'general viewing public'. You're an entertainment advertiser's wet dream. Let's see....
You don't seem to think art needs to be good, you don't think it's important whether or not it's a positive or negative contribution to American culture, and you apparently think we should stop thinking so hard with our brains and just watch what whatever a commercial can convince us (or our friends) looks cool.
If you don't think that art should aspire to greatness, or that people should view it from a critical or inquisitive state of mind, and collectively push our culture towards more inspiring and meaningful works, then maybe you should just watch Survivor? Or maybe you'd like to play with this keychain? They shine in the light....*jingles keys*
Or maybe you don't "give a flying fuck" because our entertainment culture is so dismal that calling it art is almost instinctively difficult to accept. I would agree if movies and television didn't hold so much potential, but they do, and so standards are important. It's difficult to take them seriously without imagining that it's somehow comparable to a tall slender man is standing in an art gallery, dressed in black with a goatee and non-prescription eyewear, pondering the significance of a pile of shit on a pedestal in front of him. Now maybe you missed Kangaroo Jack or the thousands of equally shitty productions out there that we call works of creativity, but either the implications of our particular pile of shit are of concern to you, or they are not. But you can't really argue that they shouldn't be.