Sith

Tiffany and I went to see Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith Sun­day, thanks to the mag­na­nim­ity of Grandma. I was sort of ambiva­lent about going to see it, prob­a­bly because the pre­vi­ous two movies (Episode I: Anakin the Golly Gee Boy and Episode II: Attack of the Wooden Lovers) were so awful. Wit­ness my lack of inter­est: I didn’t know exactly when this movie opened, I hadn’t been fol­low­ing reviews much, I wasn’t obsess­ing over trail­ers. I did real­ize that I would be inter­ested in see­ing it in a the­ater, to get the full effect, and when Tiffany sug­gested we get Grandma to watch Aidan, I thought it was an inspired idea.

So we went to see it. And it was fine. Good even, towards the end. But I’m not one of those guys who can over­look bad act­ing and worse dia­logue just because the action scenes are good, and the movie wraps up a story I’ve been fol­low­ing since I was eight.

I might see it again, though prob­a­bly not in a the­ater. Heck, I might even try Episode II again, because the last (and only) time I saw it I couldn’t pay much atten­tion to the plot for all the hor­ri­ble speak­ing. But is Sith a tremen­dous movie? No.

The good:

• Watch­ing Ewan McGre­gor chan­nel Sir Alec Gui­ness again. He’s so good at that.
• Watch­ing R2 break out the ham­mer, man. We knew the lit­tle droid had it in him.
• The space bat­tle at the begin­ning. The open­ing “shot” is spec­tac­u­lar. I say “shot” because it is all com­puter graph­ics, so it doesn’t quite have the same cachet as some of the mem­o­rable single-camera open­ings of clas­sic film. But it is cool. I haven’t been so immersed in the sheer enor­mity and fury of a space bat­tle like that since I played Rogue Leader on my GameCube.
• The light saber fights, mostly. A lot of them are sort of pedes­trian, and some of the wield­ers are clearly beyond their, um, skill level. Christo­pher Lee, bless him, looks like a wooden mummy when he’s “fight­ing”. And there are so many close ups and CG shots of the Emperor while he is fight­ing that I think Ian McDi­armid could have shot them sit­ting down. Of course, I’m sure the epic strug­gle between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi from _Episode IV: A New Hope_ will seem sim­i­larly staid next to some of the more recent duel stagings.

The bad:

• Oh my God, the dialogue.
• And what is with the five sec­ond scenes? Show­ing Anakin and Padme in a soul­ful embrace for five sec­onds does not make a love story.
• Still no grasp of the scope of this Empire thing… it’s like some­body went loopy with Bryce and cre­ated all these funky plan­etscapes, and made them stand in for the vari­ety and mul­ti­tude of the Galaxy. Was that a pur­ple and pink mush­room planet I saw go by?
• Oh, and the dialogue.
• The act­ing was pretty bad, too.

A cou­ple of review­ers have noted that what this movie really made them want to do was watch the orig­i­nal tril­ogy again. And I echo that. I’ve added Eps. IV, V, and VI (the last one reluc­tantly) to my Net­flix Queue. I espe­cially want to see what Ben has to say to Luke when they first meet, now that I know the details. Also, I expect a lot of the cryp­tic stuff Yoda says in The Empire Strikes Back will make more sense to me.

In the end? Go see Sith, in the the­ater. It is worth your $10. Just don’t expect the world.