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Sat, 13 Aug 2005
Movie Review: Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
Kristy and I finally made time to drive down to the Cinerama and catch Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith tonight. The fact that the movie has been out almost 3 months already should give you some indication of my enthusiasm to see the film. I turned 8-years-old in 1977, the year the original Star Wars came out. I grew up with the original trilogy and they were, without a doubt, the most memorable movies of my youth. But since then, I've grown a foot or two, and my tastes have matured quite significantly. I can't say there still isn't a lot of "little boy" in me, and, in fact, I really wanted to love this film (and the other two prequels) like I loved the original three Star Wars movies. But a bad film, despite all its eye candy, is still a bad film (and I must admit, without the impressive eye candy, I would rate Episode III a meager 2/10). The dialogue is just plain lousy; but especially between Anakin and Padme (it doesn't help that Hayden Christensen is even more of a cardboard cutout than Mark Hamill ever was). And because of this I never had buy-in with Anakin turning to the dark side because "he loved his wife so much he was willing to slaughter a few dozen 8-year olds to protect her from a couple of bad dreams he had." Maybe if Lucas had spent a little more time developing the depth of the Anakin/Padme relationship I could have taken that logical leap, but I guess Lucas seemingly had more important items to address (like the eye candy). The Anakin-Skywalker/Darth-Vader character is the only one of significance that appears in all six Star Wars Episodes (I'm not counting the throw-away R2 and C3PO droids... or ghost Ben Kenobi in Episodes V and VI). So I believe that it goes without saying that the transformation from Anakin to Vader should have been the most deeply explored (and finely tuned) aspect of the these prequels, and most specifically, Episode III. But it wasn't, or at least, if it was, it was certainly poorly executed; possibly due to poor writing (Lucas), poor acting (Christensen), or both. Such as it is, without the buy-in for the Anakin to Vader transformation not only does the film fall apart, but (I'm very sad to say) the entire series falls apart... even, I'm afraid, the original trilogy that I grew up on and loved. Without a legitmate antagonist (Darth Vader), there can be no legitimate protaganist (Luke Skywalker). And so, these prequels (in my humble opinion) have only served to detract from the greatness of the original trilogy. A grand shame to be sure.
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