Author: EVula
Date: 8/1/05
Rating: 8.9
Movie Rating: PG-13
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Okay, surely by now you've all seen the movie. Honestly, I can't imagine that anyone that is a regular visitor to evula.com isn't in some small way a Star Wars fan. It's the biggest geek-out event of the year!
Pseudo-spoiler warning! I guess that this review has some spoilers, but spoilers for prequels are a bit of a gray area; ultimately, you know that Anakin becomes Darth Vader, and that eventually Obi-wan and Yoda are the only Jedi that don't shuffle off the Force-sensitive coil. So, you've now been kinda-sorta warned. And if you didn't know... uh, well, you do now.
All seriousness aside, post-release it seems like most people are in one of two camps when it comes to the movie: there is the "holy shit it was awesome," camp, and the "He may not have said anything, but Jar Jar was still in the movie, so it sucked by default" camp.
I am in the first group, and I think I know why. I wanted a movie that showed:
Keeping that in mind, I came away from the movie quite pleased. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's still enjoyable. However, let's take all the various aspects of the movie one at a time, shall we?
Right off the bat, the first thing you'll notice are the incredible and oh-so-obligatory special effects. The two Jedi fighters swooping around were impressive; when they come around the edge of the ship to show the massive fight raging above Coruscant, it's quite cool.
Some of the lightsaber battles were excellent, I felt. My favorite part of the prequels has been the swordplay, and this one certainly didn't disappoint. Dooku vs. Obi-wan and Anakin was good (and ended perfectly); though I thought Obi-wan getting knocked out was a bit cheap (I wanted to see Dooku fight them both more than he did), it had to happen at some point for Anakin to move even further towards the Dark Side.
The climax of the movie, the Anakin vs. Obi-wan battle, was excellent as well, with the wonderfully perplexing "lack of noting your friggin' environment" behavior that is in all the Star Wars fight scenes. It always works, though; the fighters are so engrossed with their duel that everything around them becomes less important, and they're concentrating on besting or destroying (depending if they're Jedi or Sith, respectively) their opponent. That was just taken to the next level with the lava fight, with Anakin paying the price for not paying attention. Whoopsie!
That brings me to something else I thoroughly enjoyed about the movie: seeing Darth Vader being built. Everyone has been waiting to see that happen since Empire Strikes Back, and getting to see through Vader's eyes was equally momentous. You could feel the excitement in the theatre when he took his first labored, assisted breath. Makes you feel like a kid again. :)
As I said above, one of the things I was anxious to see was how the Jedi Order was destroyed. I certainly didn't see Order 66 coming at all. I mean, damn. It's one thing to have one of their own, Vader, betray and destroy them, but I wasn't expecting the clones to have been trained from birth for the express purpose of betraying their generals. That's just cold. It was done quite tastefully, I felt; you saw it enough times to realize just how devastating and unexpected it was, but without too much repetition. They also showed just enough of Anakin's Jedicide to drive the point across; I'm really glad they didn't actually show him killing younglings.
Palpatine's full rise to power was both enjoyable to watch and rather well done. The entire manipulation of both sides of the war was a masterful plot point, climaxing with making the Jedis out to be enemies of the state and then eliminating them altogether. Brilliant strategy, grandiose on a scale not seen in the Star Wars universe before.
Something else that I enjoyed, and was quite surprised about, was the amount of humor (at the beginning of the movie; not so much when Jedi were getting killed left and right). It was completely unexpected, but fairly appropriate for the moments. For example, R2's setting the battle droids on fire was funny, but made perfect sense, in as much as a small droid covering two bigger droids in oil and then lighting it with booster rockers can make sense.
The weakest part of the movie was unquestionably the writing. The story was good, but the dialogue was piss-poor. Some of it was redundant; a good example would be the whole "younglings" thing. Younglings are the base level of the Jedi Order (it goes youngling, padawan, knight, master). There was a point in the movie where they must have said "younglings" four times in the span of 5 minutes; words don't need to be repeated like that. Eventually you can move on to other words. When you're talking about how Anakin slaughtered them all, you can use the word "children" for one of those times and it'll still have all the emotional power.
Another instance of unnecessarily redundant repetition happens at the very beginning of the movie, where Grievous tells one of his droids to "raise the ray shields." Then you see some sort of energy field, presumably shields of the aforementioned variety, activate (or being "raised") around the three escaping characters. The first thing they say? A declaration of "ray shields." The audience already knew that, the characters already knew that; there was no reason to say that whatsoever. Thanks!
The dialogue doesn't get any lower than in the love scenes, though. Oh. My. God. I wanted to strangle the actors, it was so bad. "I love you because you're beautiful." *sigh* If this Lucas' idea of romantic dialogue, it's a wonder that he ever lost his virginity.
Considering how much he was being billed as a total bad-ass, I really didn't care too much for General Grievous. Sure, he appeals to my affinity for alliteration, but his emphysema was over-the-top obnoxious. His lightsaber fighting also left something to be desired; I was expecting a bit more than just twirling two of his hands around, especially since Obi-wan made mince-meat of the extra appendages fairly quickly.
I liked it, but it certainly isn't without it's fair share of flaws. The special effects are fantastic, but when CGI is used on sub-par characters, no one wins. The dialogue would have benefitted from someone else writing it, especially the romantic discussions, but everything in-between all the horrid dialogue was quite enjoyable.