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Roger Ebert Answers Star Wars Questions
pamri writes "Roger Ebert, in his weekly answer-man column, answers Star War related questions, chief among them being, why he gave the "Revenge of the Sith" 3.5 stars despite his criticism of the acting and whether George Lucas be faulted for violating his own work?"
There seems to be a disconnect between critics and just about everyone I've talked to about the movie. Just about every review has overlooked the awful dialog, bad editing, and crappy sructure/pacing and praised the movie as one of the best, I'm sorry but in a post-B5, Firefly world, my Sci-Fi (or Sci-Fantasy, if you prefer) requires MUCH better dialog than 14 characters commenting on how much STRESS Annakin is under. F-in STRESS! As though the Republic could have been saved if the Jedi had had a better insurance program that had covered counciling!
Someone needs to stand up and hit Lucas with a rolled up newspaper, hopefully it'll be #2 this weekend and some lesson will be learned (though they'll probably blame it on poor elitetorrents and their crappy workprint).
> Translation: "My job is so easy
Ebert has always said that he hates the "star" ratings, but his newspaper makes him do it. Unfortunately, most readers just want to quickly glance at a rating rather than read a review and draw their conclusions.
Ebert has said before that the ratings are relative in that if the movie is intended to be a popcorn action movie, then he rates the movie compared to that. If it is expected to be art, he rates the movie against that.
Ebert is a very good reviewer, and he really knows his stuff about movies, although the wearing a sweater on TV and doing the thumbs up thing may mask that. I watched the DVD for "Dark City," and he did a commentary for it, and it was amazing what he drew out of it. Watching it and listening to it, I felt like I was sitting in a graduate level film class.
I think one problem is that Ebert is that he watches too many movies that he must review, and sometimes he glosses over a movie because he expects that he doesn't need to study it at a deeper level.
For example, Ebert's review of Episode II was very superficial (to the point that he even misquoted some key dialog in his review). However, on the whole he is probably correct that Episode II does not stand alone as a movie, and must be viewed in the context of the other movies, and his reviews rate movies based on how they stand alone.
In contrast, someone on Slashdot linked to another review of the movie by David Begor where he draws out the symbolism in the movie. The review is quite enlightening, and it changed the way I viewed the movies, as I could recognize the symbolism.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
From Wikipedia: The Dragon Quest series is so popular in Japan that, following the release of Dragon Quest III in 1988, the Japanese Diet passed a law forbidding the release of new installments of the Dragon Quest series on any day other than a Sunday or a holiday, to prevent children from skipping school to wait in line for the latest Dragon Quest title.
Buffy - "I really thought that you were a nice, normal guy."
Riley - "I am a nice, normal guy."
Buffy - "Maybe by this town's standards, but I'm not grading on a curve."
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Like Buffy's love life, movie reviews should be on an absolute scale, not comparing a film to previous films of the same series. Because, quite frankly, I'm sure ROTS is f**king brilliant compared to the previous two. That doesn't make it a good movie, it makes it "less sucky".
Freedom: "I won't!"
...His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking....
One possible explanation: NiCad battery in the head, charger in the torso (where there is some kind of generator.) The battery got fried when he was shot in Empire, so he needed the juice from the charger to power up.
Another: The torso has nothing to do with head power. Chewie just happened to close a broken circuit (or open a short) when he put the head on.
Of all the possible nitpicks I've heard, this isn't really a very big one.
Watch any version of Star Wars prior to the DVD (including a bootleg of the theatrical "Special Edition.")
After killing Ben, Darth walks toward the Falcon and the iris doors close in front of him... They forgot to animate his lightsaber! He's carrying a metal stick.
Not good enough for you? Try this one: In III, Obi-Wan says goodbye to R2 after all they had been through together. In IV, he doesn't recognize him at all. "I don't remember owning a droid."
Still want more? Leia tells Luke about her childhood memories of their mother... but now it turns out that mom died on the delivery room table. Either Leia was never told (and never suspected) that she was adopted, or she sees dead people.
There. That should be enough to fuel your nitpicks for a while.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
> Anybody else remember in Empire when Ghost Obi Wan is
> talking about "he is our last hope" and Yoda says... "No, their
> is another". Exactly why was Obi Wan so clueless!!!! That was
> the first thing that popped in my head when I saw Obi Wan
> hearing the names of the two kids and seeing them off.
It's the difference between hope and despair.
I know that some people are desperate to find plot continuity errors between Episodes I/II/III and IV/V/VI in hope to justify some sort of emotional reason to reject the latter produced episodes -- "See! Obi-Wan has a different mole in Episode IV than in Episode III, so the prequels don't count!!1!" However, this isn't the case.
This isn't simply a matter of hunting down the second twin and starting her training. Remember, Palpatine and Vader killed all the other Jedi. Palpatine defeated Yoda who was the strongest Jedi (after Anakin lost his limbs). Vader struck down Obi-Wan. In short, Sideous and Vader were tough to beat.
Obi-Wan had lost hope and he really thought that Luke was going to fail. Just like Anakin's love for Padme sent him to the Dark Side, Obi-Wan thought that Luke's love for his friends would send him to the Dark Side. Obi-Wan was feeling despair and he couldn't imagine they would succeed by starting over with the other twin. He had simply given up hope.
Yoda clearly was upset, but he was optimistic enough to at least try to start over. "There is another." I guess when you're ~800 years old, you have tremendous patience, and you're willing to fail 99 times and still start over for the 100th time. So while Obi-Wan lost hope, Yoda didn't.
However, in Episode V, Yoda and Obi-Wan both failed again the same way they did in Episode III; they gave up on their friends too easily. Remember how Yoda told Luke it was okay to let his friends die? Didn't he tell Anakin the same thing in Episode III? That's one of the things that drove Anakin to the Dark Side.
The reason for this is related to a flaw in the Jedi order. The Jedi knew that passions (like hatred and anger) lead to the Dark Side. Their answer was to eschew emotions. I believe one of Lucas's themes is that their choice was wrong.
Jedi weren't allow to have attachments or to love (Episode II). The Jedi were so afraid of using the Dark Side, that they went the wrong way and became unemotional. Lucas's point is that is wrong. Love and friendship were the right course of action. That's why the Force had to be brought back into balance. In their own way, the unemotional Jedi were as bad (okay, almost as bad) as the hate-filled Sith.
Luke on the other hand felt emotion. His love for his friends brought him to rescue Han Solo and eventually save his father. So emotions were not to be eschewed, but were to be used constructively. Was there a danger to allowing love to lead to the Dark Side? Of course (case in point: Anakin). But the risk of not feeling love at all was worse.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Please. Star Wars was always about special effects and nothing else.
The first Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars of that year. It did not do so because of only technical acheivement. It was because it had compelling story and characters.
Look at Chewbacca. He can only speak in unintelligible grunts, yet he is a complex character with conflicting traits whom we end up caring about by the end of of the movie. Look at Jar-Jar Binks. His only trait is that he's annoying, and by the end of the story the audience wants him dead.
There are scenes in Star Wars that are so memorable that they've become shared cultural cliches. The garbage-smasher scene. Luke's swing across the abyss. They Cantina scene, or Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. These scenes have been parodied countless, countless times in other contexts. It's hard to imagine any such equivalent in the Phantom Menace.
Look at the Imperial Walkers. We first see them as tiny, blurry ants through the underpowered lens of a rebel infantrymen's binoculars. We see them growing larger until they're huge and seemingly unstoppable, all the while moving slowly and formidably. This is dramatic structure. You find yourself caring about whether or not the rebels win, you feel their frustration along with them, and the slow unveiling of the walkers makes it more believable -- not the beautiful CGI. They're actually ugly, industrial-looking, rigid and inflexible.
Try to think of anything like this in the prequels.
The millenium falcoln. The Death Star. The Imperial Walkers. They are cool not because of the fantastic rendering. They are cool because they are scary, or dramatic, and their properties are interesting and novel even if only in a purely theoretical way, not simply because of how realistic they look.
Star Wars was always about the human imagination. The special effects were always only a medium for that imagination. You cannot capture the human imagination with wooden characters doing uninteresting things. Chewbacca is a 8 foot tall hairy monster that can't speak English but we end up caring about him because of his human-like complexities. Without stuff like that, all that animation is like a math textbook with a pretty dust jacket.