Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Okay, here we go. I can’t do it without spoilers, so just turn away now if you must. It ain’t all rainbows and flowers and pretty pictures, the following gets scathing and ugly. Because it has to.

Revenge starts off bad, quickly gets worse, tries to redeem itself in small pockets with some great visual moments, but leaves the audience giggling at its bad rip-offs and angry that Hayden Christensen was neither convincing as Anakin Skywalker nor Darth Vader.

Let’s start with the compelling.

Ian McDiarmid as Lord Sidius plays the role of the creepy, manipulative madman to perfection. As scary as Vader is, the Emperor has always been able to put him to shame with all those finger fireworks. And he does it very well here in Revenge – fighting off Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson, who I’ve always believed to be too much of a bad-ass to play the thoughtful Jedi convincingly,) and anointing Anakin as his new apprentice.

Also excellent about the movie: Yoda. Yoda is the only character who does not suffer from being computer-generated. It frees him to fight and to move, and enhances his ability to sagely emote all the things he can sense through the force. While Ewan MacGregor has to portray poor Obi-Wan as clueless and disbelieving in a few scenes, Yoda knows with a twitch of the ear that something is amiss in the young Anakin Skywalker. Search your feelings, Obi-Wan, and you’ll catch on in a few. I’m glad to say, that while my love affair with Darth Vader has come to an end, my love affair with Master Yoda endured all the prequels. Thank God!

Now, on with the upsetting.

All the battle scenes are overcrowded and hard to focus on. There’s just too much going on. Trim it down and you’d have a much cleaner piece of work that would be more enjoyable. There is a scene near the end where Anakin enters the chambers of the Viceroys of the Trade Federation to assassinate them. Before he enters the room, about a half a dozen CG boll-weevils scurry around ahead of him. Why? What are those? It’s DISTRACTING. And symptomatic of Lucas-bloat.

The dialogue is stilted and lacking in finesse. Every line delivered between Anakin and Padmé feels like an anvil is being dropped on your head. It’s painful. I cringed. A lot. This is clearly nothing new. No one expects Lucas to be as skilled with the pen as Homer, but maybe if he’d bothered to make it believable that a beautiful and influential older woman like Senator Padmé Amidala could ever find Anakin Skywalker anything other than a petulant teenager then there’d be a lot less groaning out in the audience.

The movie effects borrow too heavily from others. While the first trilogy seemed revolutionary and far, far ahead of its time, the second trilogy just seems tired and derivative. Obi-Wan spends too much time in the movie gallivanting about on what looks like the Hippogriff from Harry Potter. In the Lord Sidius/Mace Windu/Anakin Skywalker face-off, Sidius shoots thunderbolts out of his fingers until he looks positively like the demon-possessed child from The Exorcist. And by the way, a group of rowdy teenage boys behind me snorted and laughed their way through that entire scene – which I think is telling of just how far out of touch Lucas has become! When what should be your staunchest supporters of the target audience now can’t get through your movie without an incredulous giggle, well, that means you’ve really lost the plot. During the first trilogy, teenage boys were the most enthralled by the Storm Troopers, the Bounty Hunters, the Millennium Falcon and that infamous gold bikini. Now? Now they’re laughing at you, George.

And the worst borrowed effect offense was clearly the raising of Darth Vader à la Frankenstein. When they lower the helmet onto the faded Skywalker and he takes his first breath – that haunting kaoooooo shhhhhhhhh – that part is pure gold. That’s what the whole audience has been waiting twenty-eight years for! Then Lucas goes and betrays us all when Vader stumbles rigidly off the table like a mad scientist’s creation, asks of Amidala and screams out “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” when he learns the answer.

Listen, here's the sad part: everyone loves Darth Vader. Almost thirty years ago, George Lucas created the best damned bad-ass villain the screen has ever seen. All in black, mostly machine, although vaguely human underneath it somewhere, with deep booming voice, with the power to crush you without even touching you, and that—that breath. Kaoooooo shhhhhhhhh. Awesome. Darth Vader WAS AWESOME. Over episodes four through six, the audience slowly found out that he was not born evil, but turned evil. And that subtle distinction, combined with the audience’s wild love of this villain, was the motivation behind actually making episodes one through three. What turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader?

The idea is so compelling. The execution of it, however, has been deeply flawed and messy and a disgrace to the simple dynamic built up from A New Hope through Return of the Jedi. All the audience wanted was a believable motivation for the turn to the dark side. What we got was a hodge-podge, mish-mash, quilted piece of crap. Anakin was what? Conflicted because his mother died? Consumed by his own need for power? Jealous of his master Obi-Wan’s higher standing in the council? Overwhelmed by his talent to use the force? Desperate to protect his wife and the mother of his children? Simply a bratty little kid with mommy issues? All of these? Yes, it appears. So what exactly turned him to the dark side? I CAN’T TELL YOU. Not because I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but simply because Lucas has muddied the waters and Christensen hasn’t played to any of these motivations successfully.

I can’t tell you BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW! And that, ultimately, is what makes the movie stink.