Re: \'Revenge of the Sith\' reviews (Spoilers)
Okay, I saw it last night, and here's my response:
SLOW DOWN!
The pacing was way off for me. All the scenes near the beginning were really short and choppy, and near the beginning it doesn't really feel coherent at all. In A New Hope we're on Tatooine for a good long time, then the Death Star, then the last battle. In Empire it's the same thing: Hoth, Dagobah/the Falcon, Cloud City. Here, the plot moves from place to place and from event to event so rapidly that you don't really feel settled at all until near the end of the movie. And there are some dramatic moments -- the destruction of the Temple, for one -- which really needed to be slowed down. The best scene in the movie, in my opinion, was Palpatine talking to Anakin at the theater (or whatever that place was). It's much more reasonably paced, and it's one of the most intense moments.
Basically I think Lucas tried to do too much with too little.
Other problems:
The mystery of why Padme would fall for a whiny brat in Ep II is solved: she's secretly an idiot! Where was the very sharp, insightful quen/senator of Eps. I and II? She has one or two intelligent lines, which show us she sees through Palpatine, but then when Obi-Wan tells her that Anakin is in on Palpatine's plot she can't accept it at first, despite all the considerable evidence to the contrary. Love makes you do the wacky, sure, but to this degree?
Palpatine's various duels with the Jedi bother me a bit. First he takes out three expendable Jedi masters very quickly, then Mace Windu nearly gets him, and then he beats Yoda. Now it's pretty clear that Palpatine was faking his weakness against Windu to get Anakin to turn, but in that case why did he go all ugly then? I think he should have been drained in his fight against Yoda. The way this was laid out, it made it seem that Windu was stronger than Yoda, not something I'm entirely prepared to accept. (At least the problem of why Yoda no longer has a lightsaber in Ep. V was resolved. And the fights were fairly impressive visually.)
Why was Threepio's memory erased?
What happened to Artoo's rocket boosters?
All the wookiees sounded like Chewie. Give 'em a little individuality -- unless Chewie was cloned, too?
The Jedi are wise and powerful yet don't notice that Anakin and Padme are sleeping together until she's nine months pregnant?
Was it just me, or is John Wiliams mostly recycling his music these days? I felt "Duel of the Fates" the other musical allusions were a little distracting. We're talking the fall of the Jedi; it should get its own theme song, surely!
The whole Anakin/Obi-Wan fight was over the top and overdone -- and then Obi wins "because he has the high ground"? Uh-huh. Doesn't make sense to me. And evidently the trip from Coruscant to the lava world is about three minutes, because Palpatine arrives so quickly. (Actually travel times bugged me a lot throughout. "He's here! Now he's halfway across the galaxy! Who needs hyperdrive when Star Trek loaned us the transporter?")
But it wasn't all crap:
In the first scene with Anakin and Padme, I loved the cinnimon rolls, and when Anakin smiled he looked startlingly like Luke. I loved the appearance of the Rebel ship from Ep IV, that felt very visually reassuring and anchoring; in fact I loved most of the visual cameos. The staging of the initial fights was loaded with foreshadowing -- to the Death Star trench in Ep. IV, to the climactic duel in Ep VI (obviously), and, when they've been trapped and Obi-Wan says "We're smarter than this -- why didn't we see this coming?" it sets the stage for the betrayal of the Jedi by their own troops later.
I loved how the clone commander returns Obi-Wan's lightsaber as a friendly favor and three seconds later is trying to kill him.
Probably the most intriguing moment came in the opening crawl: "There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere." I would have liked to see more heroics on the part of the Separatists, they seemed pretty uniformly evil or cowardly, but it does set the stage for the moral ambiguity later on. And that was relatively well-handled. Palpatine has a point: power does corrupt. (Of course he's the most corrupted of all, but that just proves his point.) It's my belief that Yoda deliberately hides in a swamp for the next twenty years to relearn humility as much as anything else.
As I mentioned above, the seduction scene in the theater/auditorium was very well done indeed. Best scene of the movie.
I've got more problems and more pleasures about this movie, but this has gone on long enough for now. My basic review? Too fast, and disappointing. Just enough "how" but nowhere near enough "why." If you want to see a really good dark Star Wars film... go watch "The Empire Strikes Back."
One thing is now certain in my mind: "Serenity" will unquestionably be better.
