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Topic: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
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Sam Graham
AKA: "The Evil Sam Graham". Wackiness ensues.
Posts: 1431
From: Waukee, IA
Registered: Dec 2004
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posted 05-22-2005 03:39 PM
CINEMA: Century 20 Jordan Creek, West Des Moines, IA
AUDITORIUM: 11
PRESENTATION: Dolby Digital/THX ("The Science of Sensation"?!?)
PRESENTATION PROBLEMS: Slightly shaky picture
RATING: Two stars (out of four)
WARNING: Spoilers dead ahead! Aye
I saw the original on December 25, 1977, at the Coliseum Theatre in Ketchikan, Alaska. It was my Christmas present to my dad...taking him to see Star Wars. Not a bad present from an eleven year old, I thought. I have to this day never seen "The Empire Strikes Back", or "Return of the Jedi". I have seen the prequels.
The original was a spectacular campy adventure that harkened back to the serial matinee adventures of the fifties. That's what Lucas was shooting for, and he delivered in spades. That's also what's responsible for the "wooden" acting still dominant in the prequels. It's a tribute to cheap 50's sci-fi.
"Star Wars" is taken far too seriously by many, and the most guilty of this is Lucas himself. The prequels drag the whole concept down under their own weight. This one is no different. This is a bad soap opera hidden under lairs and lairs of action sequences which, at least this time, don't have any scenes that look like they were directly ripped off from "Galaxy Quest" (see the stampy thingies in "Attack of the Clones").
Here's my biggest problem with this one..."She's lost her will to live". WHAT?!? Padme loses her will to live over her husband joining the dark side? A woman's will to live is not defined by a man...It's defined by her children. Even with all the other crap going on, being presented with her newborn twins should have SAVED Padme.
Is this the best of the prequels? Absolutely. Does that mean I want to see it again? Absolutely NOT.
Two stars to the new THX "Science" trailer too. Bring back "Cimarron".
[ 05-22-2005, 07:01 PM: Message edited by: Sam Graham ]
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Brian Michael Weidemann
Expert cat molester
Posts: 944
From: Costa Mesa, CA United States
Registered: Feb 2004
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posted 05-22-2005 06:48 PM
My understanding is that the "grand scale" that Lucas had plotted out since the beginning went no further than the political upheaval and downfall of the Republic. Specific plotlines with Anakin or Obi-Wan were only vaguely outlined things like "fought in Clone Wars".
Characters like Padmé and Qui-Gon and General Grievous were invented when the screenplays themselves were executed, most likely. And I doubt Lucas would claim that they existed since the early eighties, let alone 1977.
If Episodes 7, 8, and 9 stories are ever going to be told, it's going to be like the Clone Wars animated series. Besides, if anyone wants to know what happens to Luke, Leia, and Han, there are tons of books (many, many tons) that go into the continuing stories. I never read them, and I know they're not "officially" part of Star Wars chronology (but some refuse to accept these prequels as official either), but they're something. All I know is that Han and Leia name one of their children Anakin at some point.
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-23-2005 02:42 AM
I saw it Friday 3x at a theatre with DTS6 (no dropouts! Fantastic 4 trailer wouldn't play in DTS there either, though) wandering in & out of the house, looking out the porthole, etc. while doing some other stuff.
I thought it had some things in it that were very intelligent: like killing off early the character that had the only actor doing a good job in the movie. Like in the previous movies, I think 80% of the casting $$ should have gone to Christopher Lee. With a little bit of promise at the beginning, it looks like he knows what to do with slightly dumb dialogue & makes it fun: "The greater the pride...(minuscule smirk) the greater the fall." Yay for someone who knows what he's doing & how to make something work. If EVERYBODY had played it like a James Bond movie, it could have been fun, instead of having the leaden, embarassing performances & readings of a college production of Hamlet.
quote: John Walsh
A friend of mine made the point that (it seems) George only gives his actors the minimum amount of information to do a scene. This causes their acting to be sort of wooden.
Angela Lansbury pretty much summed up these problems when she talked about paying the bills by working on Disney movies like 'Bedknobs & Broomsticks'. It's all effects, done in front of a screen, & if the director doesn't yet have a concrete idea & can't convey how things are supposed to be working, you just have to 'try to fit in as best you can in a jolly way'.
quote: Mike Blakesley
Lucas has said the acting that we might consider "wooden" is actually a style from the 1940 and 50s.
Lucas is trying to call the genre of wooden performances a legitimate acting style. 40s & 50s performances that are good aren't lead window weights like Charlton Heston's. Hell, Bogart underplayed & didn't come off like these bohunks. LOTS of actors underplayed, not poorly-played like this.
The CGI annoyed the hell out of me. Light never coming from the right direction, never changing on objects as they moved around, etc. There was a shot with R2D2 following Anakin just before he massacres a bunch of space critters (just before he says 'wait here, R2', or something like that), & the features on the front of the CGI R2D2 jitter up & down as he rolls. There was another wide shot of a hangar or something with a tiny R2D2 rolling around through it that looked like someone was just moving a painted cel of R2D2 over the glass of the port.
A lot of it was so flat & nonsensical as far as light, shape, etc., that it made me think of how well it would have been done with models earlier. The idea seemed to be: if it doesn't add up, just stick more crap in there.
It looks like they realized that the more tiny crap they've got going on in the scene the less likely folks can notice incongruities like light not changing or making sense. The only thing to do is give up early & just look at it like it's a big, moving comic book.
Fast cutting helps to mask observation of artifacts, as anyone who's looked at showroom TV set demos has found out.
A lot of it seemed to be just desire to put in good, dramatic shots, most of which are stolen. Hey, didn't we see that in Dune? Hey, isn't that Oz again? Blade Runner! It dosen't look like homage to me, but a lot of steals to stick between the mechanicals.
Physics just were awful. The CGI people just fling stuff around without inertia or weight: little CGI people doing tumbling are terrible, but their reference is probably the way things move in computer games again. It gives you so much respect for the WB cartoon artists who animated Road Runner cartoons for making stuff outsize yet plausible.
Speaking of WB cartoons, am I the only one that thought some of those evil robots looked MIGHTY familiar?
Mostly I was giggling & trying not to be heard so as not to offend the ticket-holders. Towards the end, when the emperor tells Darth Vader that his little monkey pumpkin babydoll is dead, it sounded like he screamed: "STELLLLLAAAAAA!!!!"
The guy playing the emperor had about 3 ways of doing things. Such a low-effort bad guy caricature. Crumbs, what Christopher Lee, David Warner, or a bunch of other good actors could have done with the role. As it was, the next step is just to have Ford Sterling laughing evilly.
The stock evil laugh was intelligently placed over the flinging to the floor of the stuffed Yoda (whose internal organs & skeleton apparently weigh no more than straw). The evil laugh from the screen effectively masked the laughs coming from different spots in the audience.
The scene where Darth Vader gets his name seemed perfunctory & dumb to me, too. While thinking, "Well, what that mean?", what flashed into my mind was the scene in 'Animal House' where John Belushi is giving the pledges their new names "From now on, you're name is, uh, Pinto." "Why?" "(Massive belch) WHY NOT?!"
The step up from light saber battles is fake lightning bolts coming from fingers & both folks making faces like the stupid ending in Roger Corman's 'The Raven'? It was screamingly funny!
I looked out the porthole at one point, & there was Ewan McGregor, one of the best actors of our time, riding around on a giant green chicken. His acting skills failed him, as he looked embarassed. Later, it turned out he was riding around on a big lizard that had a giant green chicken head. An usher rightly pointed out that it looked more like something from He-Man. Come on, Skeletor, punch this thing up!
All in all, if you hadn't seen all this guff before, like with the 1st Star Wars, it moved, had wooden performances, & was a high-budget version of a fun, cheap programmer. As a popcorn movie, certainly better than Gladiator! 3 3/4 stars out of 5 if you don't care or haven't seen it all before, & done better.
SPOILER ALERT: Great laugh early when Anakin cuts off Christoper Lee's arms above the wrists, kills him, then says, "I shouldn't have killed him. He was an unarmed prisoner."
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Attendance maybe 125 in a 480-seat house. The presentation of the feature was excellent; a couple rough edges in the trailers though. Image-wise this looked WAY better than Episode 2. They opened up the masking after the flat rolling stock so everyone got to see the screen get bigger for the previews (of which there were 1 or 2 too many). Woo hoo! ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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