Posted on 06/01/2005 10:34:25 AM PDT by quidnunc
Vengeance is mine, saith the Sith, whith thoundth like Violet Elizabeth Bott. No such luck. Instead, it’s George Lucas, with what he insists is the final film in the Star Wars sextet. My guess is the first film in the new Star Wars septet will be opening circa 2008. Anyway, Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they were diverted by the opening dogfight and Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a wild four-legged space beast to hunt down General Grievous. But they were howling with laughter through all the so-called ‘tragic’ elements. When Senator-Queen Padmé (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant, her secret husband Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so … beautiful.’
‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.
‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.
At this, my fellow theatergoers exploded with guffaws of derision. May the farce be with you! The final descent of Ian McDiarmid’s Chancellor Palpatine into Darth Hammitup brought on more laffs, as did the moment when Anakin attempts to talk Padmé into joining him over on the Dark Side: ‘Together you and I can rule the galaxy,’ he snarls. Well, tries to snarl.
‘Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed,’ says Princess Padmé. ‘I don’t know you any more.’ He used to look like Princess Di flashing those big eyes from under his hair. But suddenly he looks like Princess Di with too much kohl and in a peevish mood. What can this mean?
-snip-
I loved the movie. To hell with reviewers, left and right. I admit there were a few stupid lines, and I thought the transition from Annakin to Darth was too rapid, but it was still a great movie.
I'll never understand the Star Wars thing.
I loved the movie. It was big and loud, had tragedy and lots of fighting. Very epic, damn the reviewers.
I was just glad that it was Ewen McGregor who had the lines that had to be delivered best. At the end, when he was yelling at Anakin "You were like my brother!!!"
It broke my heart for ObiWan. Very sad.
The movie was very operatic. And the music.
Did I say I liked the movie?
I had the exact same experience. Well, we'll never have to see Hayden Christensen in a movie again.
All movies appear stupid to me, although some manage to be entertaining dispite their stupidity. The only movies I can watch more than once or twice are comedies, and darn few of them.
I liked the movie, too. But that doesn't mean it wasn't stupid....just fun. It really was a dumb story.
STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH
Vengeance is mine, saith the Sith, whith thoundth like Violet Elizabeth Bott. No such luck. Instead, it’s George Lucas, with what he insists is the final film in the Star Wars sextet. My guess is the first film in the new Star Wars septet will be opening circa 2008. Anyway, Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they were diverted by the opening dogfight and Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a wild four-legged space beast to hunt down General Grievous. But they were howling with laughter through all the so-called ‘tragic’ elements. When Senator-Queen Padmé (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant, her secret husband Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so ...beautiful.’
‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.
‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.
At this, my fellow theatergoers exploded with guffaws of derision. May the farce be with you! The final descent of Ian McDiarmid’s Chancellor Palpatine into Darth Hammitup brought on more laffs, as did the moment when Anakin attempts to talk Padmé into joining him over on the Dark Side: ‘Together you and I can rule the galaxy,’ he snarls. Well, tries to snarl.
‘Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed,’ says Princess Padmé. ‘I don’t know you any more.’ He used to look like Princess Di flashing those big eyes from under his hair. But suddenly he looks like Princess Di with too much kohl and in a peevish mood. What can this mean?
It means the young Jedi knight is en route to his rebirth as the evil über-Sith Darth Vader. Lucas has had three decades to plan this moment. One must respect a hit — Star Wars has been doing boffo biz for 28 years, which is two-fifths of the entire history of talking pictures. But the heart of its mythic pretensions is the transformation of Anakin, boy hero of the three ‘prequels’, into Vader, black-hatted villain of the first three movies. For Lucas, the revelation of this degeneration was supposed to bring the Star Wars story full circle and explain the primal forces driving the original film. And what does Lucas come up with? Well, Anakin’s worried that his beloved Padmé might die in childbirth.
Padmé promises him she won’t die in childbirth. ‘I promise you I won’t die in childbirth,’ she says. I wrote a couple of Star Wars back that Lucas characters always have to spell out what they’re thinking and feeling because he’s incapable of showing it. You can’t make the core of the story the absolute overpowering love of boy for girl when the two of them have all the sexual chemistry of their Burger King merchandising tie-in action figures. Lucas is truly one of the all-time worst directors of actors, and I include the teacher who put together the school production of Fiddler on the Roof I saw last week and got a more touching love scene out of a couple of 11-year-olds as the middle-aged Tevye and Golde than anything Christensen and Portman manage here. Presumably actors say yes to Lucas because they figure Star Wars will do for them what it did for Harrison Ford. Instead, Lucas turns everyone he touches into Mark Hamill.
So even though his hand-me-down Faustian bargain-basement plot motivation has been a surefire firecracker down the ages, it’s a damp squib here. The scene where Darth Sidious (McDiarmid) talks Anakin into signing on with the Dark Side takes for ever yet still seems perfunctory. And Anakin’s attempt to butch up his voice sounds like a boy soprano trying to growl ‘Ol’ Man River’. ‘I have brought peace, freedom, justice, security to my new empire,’ he cackles, trying to sound like one pithed Sith. ‘If you’re not with me, you are my enemy.’ Uh-oh. Anakin seems to be transmogrifying into Darth W. Bush.
‘Only a Sith deals in absolutes,’ scoffs Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Oh, put a lightsabre in it, will you? The allegedly anti-Bush ‘subtext’ has won Lucas the unlikely approval of the Cannes Film Festival crowd, but honestly: how desperate do you have to be to applaud mockery of Bush for seeing everything in black and white from a guy who’s spent 28 years peddling a fairytale so basic the good guys and the bad guys are called the Good Side and the Dark Side. Other enduring pop-culture yarns get going because some fellow comes up with an idea, rattles it off, no big deal — and, if it takes off and hangs around for a few decades, what began as necessary functional plot mechanisms gradually deepen and darken: hence, all those gloomy Batman ‘reinventions’ in which the ‘dark knight’ sits hunched in his cape on a Gotham City rooftop brooding over the death of his parents, his inability to form lasting relationships, etc. Many of us think the conversion of great junk into self-conscious art is not altogether a blessing, but nonetheless it reflects a basic truth: that simply by sticking around long enough, a two-dimensional comic-book character becomes real. With Star Wars, the opposite’s happened: after 28 years, Lucas’s characters are more cardboard than ever. All his energy goes into ever more elaborate computerised backdrops, while up front Obi and Anakin fade to ever more witless felt-tip outlines. In 1977, the original movie said only that Darth Vader had been ‘seduced by the Dark Side of the Force’. There’s no seduction here: he’s played for a sap and suckered by Sidious. He’s Dork Vader, all-time fall guy for the machinations of another. Even for a paint-by-numbers space opera, that doesn’t pass muster.
Oh, well. After Padmé dies giving birth to Luke and Leia — and no, I’m not giving any plot twists away; you can see it coming towards you from three sequels back — Senator Organa says, ‘My wife and I will take the girl. We’ve always dreamed of adopting a baby girl.’ It’s virtually the last line in the movie, and it had my fellow customers weeping with laughter. How can Lucas have such a tin ear? It’s like he’s been walled up in the Vader helmet, the young Hollywood knight transformed into Darth Plonker.
The Spectator, June 1st 2005
There are two groups of Star Wars "Fans": Those who enjoy watching Star Wars Those who love to hate Star Wars
I liked the movie, too. I'll agree with some reviewers that it was better than the original Star Wars (a.k.a. Episode IV), but I'm torn as to whether it, or the other unhappy-ending episode, The Empire Strikes Back, was the best of the six.
It still suffered from Lucas not directing his two romantic leads into shape. (I guess even with dialog ghost-written by Stoppard he just wasn't up to it--good thing Christensen matured a little and Portman didn't get too much screen time.)
I'm not sure Annakin's turn to the Dark Side was too quick (after all, it was set up by his perfectly human, but un-Jedi-like revenge killing of the Tusken raiders who kidnapped, presumably raped, and killed by ill-treatment his mother).
Thanks; I was going to ask quidnunc to ping me when someone posted Steyn's essay. Thanks!
Dan
You and me both. I cannot make it through one of them. There is nothing interesting there. I don't care about any of the characters.
We're supposed to care about the dialog? All my kids want to see are people's limbs hacked off with lightsabers and the like.
Oh, I try to ruin it for them. In Episode II, I called whatever the clones flew in on "Huey's" and said they were carrying MG42's. Also said that they were going into a "hot LZ" with flak bursts around them.
I'm not sure if the rocket firing droids were supposed to be Wurfrahmen or Katyushas.
It's just a high-tech combo of "We Were Soldiers" and some History Channel footage of the Russo-German war. With bad dialog.
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Same here. Absolutely loved it. As for how "quick" Annakin converted to the dark side, I think in that split second where he impulsively attacked Mace Windu (for fear of Sidious' knowlege of how to save Padme being forever lost), that the floodgates just swung open and he was consumed. Had Windu been willing to take Sidious prisoner (not sure how THAT would happen!), then in my opinion he doesn't turn.
Thanks for posting the full article.
I agree. The older I get, the more I've become conscious that I'm just watching a prefabricated product.
it's got to be a hell of a film to take me to another place.
I haven't seen the new movie, but I will. And I'm sure I'll like it. That being said, I would read a Steyn article trashing my mother, and laugh. He's that good.
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