Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Part II: The Review

I remember the first two Star Wars action figures I owned were Darth Vader and C-3P0. I hadn’t even seen the movie yet, but I thought they looked interesting, I guess. Anyway, just try to imagine the exciting plots and stories you can concoct with those two:

Vader: I am Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith!

C-3P0: Er, would you like me to translate something for you? Perhaps work out a tricky bit of protocol? I could program your binary load lifters for you.

Vader: Arrr! Have a taste of red plastic death as I slide my lightsaber out of my forearm!

C-3P0: Okayy, maybe later, then. Toodle-pip.

You get the point. Not a lot of possibilities there. But it was still better dialog than just about anything in Episodes 1-3. OK, yes, the dialog in Episodes 4-6 wasn’t stellar, but at least there were some memorable lines (“I happen to like nice men” ,“I’m nice men”) and they were delivered with conviction.  In the prequels, we get seriously laugh-out-loud dramatic dialogue (“You’re so beautiful”, “It’s only because I’m in love”, “No, it’s because I’m in love with you”) delivered with all the emotion of a tax form.

I saw Episode III on opening night, the very first show, 12:01am. We had stood out in line for several hours (see Part I) and the theater was packed with hard-core Star Wars geeks. We cheered when the lights went down. We hooted when the 20th Century Fox fanfare blared. We clapped as the opening strains of John Williams’ score played over the text crawl. And everyone laughed at the “romantic” dialogue.

It is just unforgivable that such a high-profile, big-budget movie with so many talented people working on it could make it through to production with such awful lines. But that’s really the biggest complaint I have about Episode III. Most of the rest of it was somewhat enjoyable. Sort of.

Warning: Spoilers ahead! I know that everyone on the planet has seen this movie twice by now, but in case you haven’t, and there is still some suspense left (Anakin becomes Darth Vader) then you’d best stop reading now. Go join the forums and come back when you’ve seen the movie. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

The opening is classic Star Wars: starts off right in the middle of the action. Even the text crawl was brief and to the point – the Chancellor has been kidnapped, and Anakin and Obi Wan are battling to rescue him. I liked the way the camera follows a single fighter as it flies along the surface of a screen-filling proto-Star Destroyer, only to pan past the edge of the cruiser and be assaulted by the hundreds of ships in combat. I bet if you frame-advance that scene on the DVD (and won’t we all) you can see all sorts of cool stuff going on in the background. I really think the animators had a blast with this movie. As well they should, for the animated stuff was much more convincing than the live actors.

One of the problems I had with the prequels was all of the references to the original trilogy. Example 1: R2-D2 and C-3PO. Even though there were some nice R2-D2 moments in the movie, I still think the two droids did not belong in the prequels. It was just too much of a stretch. Sure, I guess it explains a few lines from Episode IV, but it just seems cheap. The same goes for Chewbacca.

And speaking of Chewbacca, the scenes on Kashyyyk were somewhat disappointing and brief. Lucas finally had the chance to make up for the Ewoks by showing the Wookiees kicking serious butt, and all we get are a few quick moments of them swinging on vines (again with the silly Tarzan yell) and shooting at the lame robots. It’s all well and good to show Yoda talking to Chewbacca and other references to the original trilogy, but mostly those scenes just server to remind us of how much better the originals were.

After the opening action sequence, the movie settles into the plot, which is the crux of the whole prequel trilogy: Anakin’s fall from grace. The problem with it is that we all know what’s going to happen: Anakin lets his emotions get the better of him and is seduced by the Dark Side, he kills all the rest of the Jedi and Palpatine becomes the Emperor. Since the audience is well aware of the outcome, the movie has to sell the slide into evil with acting and emotion. Sadly, we get Hayden Christiansen’s hideous mullet for two and a half hours.

I will give George credit for some passable writing for the scenes in which Palpatine manipulates Anakin toward the Dark Side. It’s not great, but it’s almost believable. In my opinion, though, Anakin’s transformation should have begun a lot sooner, like Episode I. This sort of epic, cataclysmic character arc deserves a lot more detail and drama than it got, and it all got squeezed into the third movie. To me it felt rushed. Sure, Anakin was whiny and impatient in Episodes I and II, but they should have shown him doing more evil stuff, like the slaughter of the Sand People. They needed to show more of Palpatine’s influence on him.

The Chancellor/Emperor himself was very well done in this installment. He was kind of in the background in the first two (you know, the “Phantom” Menace) but in Episode III, he’s most definitely the main bad guy pulling all the strings. Pretty much everything that happens in the whole prequel trilogy is according to his plans. And, when you think about it, perhaps he even created Anakin. He tells Anakin the story of the old Sith Lord who discovered the secrets of prolonging life, and even creating life, using the Force. Let’s see, Anakin was born without a father, and he pretty much has Midichlorians instead of red blood cells, hmmmm… Almost explains that whole virgin birth thing.

The two best aspects of the movie, in my opinion, were the ships and the lightsaber fights. Growing up, I knew the name or model number of every ship in the original trilogy, even if I didn’t have them all as toys. Much like the rest of Star Wars, they were cool because they were dirty – no shining white star cruisers here. No, the X-wings are all dirty and battle-damaged. The Millenium Falcon is constantly on the brink of complete failure, and even the Empire ships look mean and purpose-built. The ships in Episodes I and II are sleek and rounded and look like candle drippings. Finally in Episode III, they had cool ships again. Probably because they were trying to make them look like prototypes for the X-wings, TIE fighters and Star Destroyers that we know and love. Whatever the reason, they were a big improvement.

The other cool thing was the lightsaber fights. Episode III is packed with lightsabers, just stuffed to the gills with Jedi twirling their glo-sticks around. So much so, in fact, that it got confusing watching them. In the first trilogy, you had one lightsaber duel per movie, with perhaps some other random lightsaber action thrown in. Kind of made it something special. But of course, the prequels take place during the time of the Jedi, so everybody and their brother has a flashlight hanging from their belt. And, with movies like Crouching Tiger and The Matrix released in the interim, along with countless Jackie Chan movies, Lucas had to up the ante a little on the saber-fu in this trilogy.

And, just as with Episode II, the award for best lightsaber battle has to go to Yoda v. Palpatine. Once again proving that Lucas is much better at directing animation than live actors. Maybe he should team up with Disney or Pixar for his next movie. No, scratch that – Pixar is turning out consistently good movies with decent stories and dialog, let’s not ruin that.

Notice I didn’t give the award to the duel we’ve been waiting twenty years for: Obi Wan v. Anakin. Well, I don’t want to ruin the Space Opera with anything like logic or physics but let’s just examine the final climactic battle a little.

First off, it’s a planet-wide volcano. The entire planet is covered with molten lava, a sort of permanent slow-motion eruption. So, he gets points for making it an energy source, but minus several thousand for actually having people on the surface. The temperature there has got to be in the thousands of degrees (whichever scale you use), and Anakin’s just walking around in heavy black robes, barely sweating. Oh, not to mention that all the oxygen had to have burned up long ago, so there wouldn’t be anything to breathe that close to the surface. OK, enough scientific nit-picking, on to the fight.

It starts off well enough, with Padme dumping Anakin for being too evil, which is probably the worst decision ever made in the entire saga, so he chokes her until she passes out. This is good – the final step in Anakin’s slide toward the Dark Side. Lightsabers light, tempers flare, lame dialog is prattled off, and the battle is joined.

Obi Wan and Anakin proceed to duke it out, to greater or lesser effect, for the next ten or fifteen minutes. By the time they’re riding little jet skis on the lava, it had gone too far. If there were a lava shark, it would have been jumped. Now for the tricky part: Lucas has spent three movies showing how Anakin Skywalker is the most powerful Jedi ever — and now that he’s given into the Dark Side, he should be even more powerful – how does he lose to Obi Wan, who, let’s face it, is getting on in age? Oh, silly me. The answer is simple: Obi Wan gets the “higher ground”. What? Does that give him a +20 to hit or something? That’s almost as bad as Darth Maul’s death in Episode I.

At that point, the rest of the movie writes itself: Padme has the twins, Luke & Leia, then dies on the table (by the way, I thought the delivery droid with the forcep hands was rather humorous). Palpatine scoops up the charred remains of Anakin (I guess he’s Darth Vader by now) and pours him into the famous black suit. Obi Wan takes Luke to Tatooine, and puts a down payment on a hermit cave. Jimmy Smits takes Leia back to Alderaan, creating the only provable plot hole (i.e. in Jedi, Leia says she remembered her real mother a little bit, but she couldn’t have because she died in childbirth. Whatever. Kids have wild imaginations, especially orphans).

Now, I saw this movie at 12:01 on opening day, the very first showing. I came out rather disappointed, as you can tell. But I watched it again a few weeks later, and for some reason I liked it better the second time. I’m not sure if I had my hopes up too high for opening night, or whether I just knew when the bad parts were coming and could ignore them.

The bottom line is I treasure my VHS and DVD copies of the original trilogy (even with all the Special Edition crap they put in), but I don’t think I’ll even rent the prequels, much less buy them. Could this be because of the age at which I watched them? Perhaps. But even at that age, I knew that the Ewoks were crap.

After watching Episode I, a friend of mine remarked that the only way Lucas could make up for that debacle would be if in the opening seconds of Episode II, Jar Jar choked to death on an Ewok. Well, that didn’t happen, and Lucas hasn’t redeemed himself. If you want to watch what he should have done, click here. Me, I’m going to go play with my C-3PO and Darth Vader dolls.