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Tue, 24 May 2005

Movie Review: Revenge of the Sith

The trend from pretty much everyone across the blogosphere over the last few days about the final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy has been words to the effect of “Yawn…”

Sorry, guys, but it’s rather obvious that everyone is just trying to be cool by acting like they didn’t enjoy it. Forget that! Episode III rocked! “Save your money for another film?” Huh? Who are you kidding? To anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat.

The film critics generally said “it’s better than the first two” and “more in the style of the original trilogy.” Easy enough — frankly, being an improvement over Episodes I and II wasn’t going to be that taxing, but Revenge of the Sith is quite a ride. Any movie where the introduction starts off with “War!” and whose opening sequence is a massive space battle where cruisers are slugging it out with each other can’t be all bad. The difference this time is that the action pretty much keeps going the whole film — and that put it in the tradition of the original movies.

It was notable this time that when something amusing happened, you had a chuckle, but it was just that, fun, without being corny. (No, don’t worry, I’m not a closet Jar-jar fan. Wait till you see R2D2 kick some other droid’s ass. Good stuff). Unfortunately, George Lucas just can’t seem to get the hang of writing romantic lines terribly well. The few “I love you”s between Anakin and Padme still have the familiar oh god, please make it stop feel that made us all cringe in Episode II. It’s not so much that the lines are bad (nothing wrong with saying I love you, after all) but it comes across a bit, well, abrupt. Maybe it’s because we missed out on the tender interludes (I rather suspect it’ll be a while before the X rated directors cut comes out. Oh well).

It is absolutely amazing how far the animation technology has come. In The Phantom Menace, everything had a bit of a plastic look to it. I mean, the background green hills they used for the final battle between the gungans and the droids looked like the stupid default image from the Windows XP desktop. Lame! In Attack of the Clones the realism was up, but it was all still a bit faux neon. The clone troopers were awesome, but they looked more like characters from “Finding Nemo” than men dressed in armour. The technology has obviously finally come into its own, though. The progress that they’ve made in Revenge of the Sith, especially with textures, is incredible. One place it jumped out early on was the destroyer droids (remember the wheel shaped battle droids that roll themselves down the corridors and then unfold into scorpion looking creatures with shields and laser guns?) — they were always cool, but this time they had a certain dirty grit about them - in short, they looked real. Wow.

Lucas describes his approach to movie making as “going out and getting elements” and then knitting those elements together. Blue screen footage of a character jumping off a platform… which turns out to be some impossibly high bridge (perhaps a painting by a matte artist or generated from pure CGI). I think this obsession with the individual details led him to somewhat loose the forest for the trees. I think that’s what got him in trouble and might explain in some measure why we were all a bit let down by the first two films. They were choppy. Almost every sequence was visually stunning — but at the end of the movie you were left a bit confused because although there was a story there, it wasn’t really told as well as it could have been.

Finally, however, almost all the loose ends are tied up. Episode III was a terrific movie, and I think worthy of lot more praise than all us jaded pundits have been giving it. For those who are inevitably going to disagree with me, all I have to say is this: remember that Luke guy? You’re trying to tell me that you didn’t find his lines as annoying as Jar-jar’s? Shit, I fast forward past almost every scene Luke is in when I watch Star Wars. No. As a cinematic accomplishment, Revenge of the Sith represents the culmination of a story over 30 years in the making. In any frame of reference, that’s quite an accomplishment, and I’m glad to have to have seen its conclusion.

AfC

star-wars-III, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/reviews/movies at 19:58, 24 May 2005.

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