Review: Star Wars Episode III

erikharrison writes "I just watched Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. And it is good. There are lots of things I would like to say about it that I won't, as Slashdot isn't the place. Slashdot is the place to ask two questions, however. 1) How are the special effects and 2)What has Lucas done to the possibly tattered remains of my childhood?" Read on for Harrison's answers to those questions, and for Jamie's quite different impression of the sixth (and final?) Star Wars feature film.

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.

Comments

Viewing Order

[XanC]

You can't start at the beginning, because all of the others rely on the introductions in 4. Episode 1 assumes you know what the "force" is, for example, whereas Obi-Wan explains it to us in 4. And many of the twists in the original trilogy are presented neatly and cleanly in the prequels. My current thinking is that the best order is:

4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6

So that after "Empire", at the end of which Vader reveals he's Luke's father, we take a detour and get to the back-story: where he came from, the source of the Rebellion and the Empire, and his fall to the dark side.

It's all leading up to the climactic finish where the prequels allow us to better appreciate the scope of the triumph: the Sith destroyed, republican government reinstated, and Anakin redeemed.

See it dubbed!

[OblongPlatypus]

Spending the year studying in Barcelona, I ended up seeing Episode III dubbed to Spanish, and I truly and sincerely believe this made the experience better.

Most noticeable was the improvement in the scenes with Anakin/Vader, because Jamie is exactly right - Christensen in an awful actor. And much of this awfulness lies in the horribly wooden and monotonous delivery of every single line of dialogue, which means having it replaced by an experienced Spanish voice actor is a real blessing.

But the improvements weren't limited to Anakin's lines, and my theory is that this can be explained by the extreme use of blue/green-screen photography in these films. The actors are used to delivering their lines while at least in some sense being there in the environment of the film's story, and end up floundering when forced to work with the nothingness of a green screen. The voice-actors that do the dubbing, on the other hand, have years and years of experience in putting emotion in their lines without any sort of environment except the recording studio.

Maybe those of you in the right parts of the US can take a trip across the border to Mexico and see it there? Do they even dub films there?

Re:Death Star

[BoneFlower]

Possibilities:

That wasn't the Death Star, but a smaller scale prototype device to test out some of the technologies and construction techniques.

It was the Death Star, but due to the newness of the technology involved, it took a great deal of time to construct, much more time than Death Star II, which was simply a somewhat bigger example of the same technology. Real world parralel here- the first time you built a computer, it probably took a lot longer than it would take you now right?

Possible parralel with the Babylon project in Babylon 5- it took them quite some time to get a working station. Perhaps the Death Star was beset by engineering failures and sabotage along the way before they finally got one operational? As mentioned above, new things take longer to build than new examples of old things, simply because it is new. Compound this by running into unexpected engineering or construction failures, or sabotage, and things can take very long indeed.

Palpatine didn't disband the Senate until A New Hope. Presumably, the Senate did have some power over the budget and policy until then- not as much as it used to, but some. To divert funds for such a large secret project would raise lots of questions among fairly powerful individuals. They simply couldn't divert funds to get it done any faster than 15-20 years without tipping off the Senate, which may have still had the authority and/or influence to take down Palpatine, or at least make his rule more difficult. The second Death Star, however, would not be created under those restrictions. Palpatine had unlimited authority by that point, and if he wanted to divert fifty billion credits for a battle station, he could do so and just kill anyone that asked why.

It was the Death Star, but not right after the previous scene- a flash forward scene to the construction project a few years prior to the Battle of Yavin.

Re:Extremes...

[WaterBreath]

Again, no one in the theator seemed to notice.

I'd guess no one else in the theater cared. Let's face it, if you were so disappointed by episodes 1 and 2, why did you even bother to see 3? Same reason everyone else did: closure. The difference between you and everyone else in the theater though was that you were determined going in that this was going to be a bad movie and you just wanted to get the last few story elements out and be done with it. Going in I was scared it was going to be like ep. 1. But I came out more than relieved. Fully satisfied, one might say.

Personally, I was less than impressed with ep. 1, but I didn't think it was terrible. I thought ep. 2 was better. The romantic scenes were very annoying, because Lucas can't write good emotional dialogue and Hayden Christiansen can't emote realistic emotion (except for whiny discontent). However, I loved everything else about ep. 2. And after seeing ep. 3, I have a new appreciation for the romantic scense. Ep. 3 wouldn't have made any sense at all without them. It's utterly necessary that Anakin actually has a reason for his fear.

Ep. 3 was awesome, IMHO. On par with the first 3. Maybe better just because it was dire, so tragic, and looked so good. Moreso of all three than eps. 4-6 were able to achieve. Plus, it answered so many questions I hadn't even realized I had! Now I know why the Jedi shun emotion and attachment. Now I know why the Sith are so dangerous, and why they can get rational people to support them despite that.

Anyway, like I said, it was awesome. I may have to go see it again in the theater, which I don't do often.