Movie Review: Revenge of the Sith

Disappointed, I am.

[Note: Returning again from another trip, and thus the period of inactivity. So if the next few posts seem a little disjointed and draft-y, it's because those were the things I was messing around with during my absence.]

I am proud to say that I attended the first, midnight showing of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith back on the 19th. This completes a 22-year streak for me--since Jedi, I've seen all the films on their opening day. It was an event, full of pageantry and divertingly pleasant geekery; but the film was...wanting.

I think it was fine; but as one reviewer said, the audience is strangely ready to be happy with a film that simply doesn't suck. It does tie up the loose ends (which we didn't really need tied up quite so neatly--in a way, it almost seems as if no time passes between Episode III and IV, the ends are so sharp); it does this, by turns, heavy-handedly and deftly. The scenes with Chewbacca have no function except to introduce Chewbacca (and to give Yoda a reason to be somewhere other than Coruscant); on the other hand, there is a nice little scene at the very end showing Vader standing with someone who must be a young Tarkin, played to the delightful hilt in the original Star Wars by Peter Cushing. And they do wipe Threepio's memory, which has been bothering me every five minutes through these prequels.

My wife and I went to the Guggenheim Museum in NYC a while back; in one room there was an exhibit of some artist's work, a person who specialized in painting photorealistic images (magazine-photo collages) on enormous canvases. Really big. At the time I said to myself, "I appreciate the technical skill, but I'm not really moved by the composition in any way." I had this reaction to Sith. I only felt a visceral twinge at two points: one where some undeserved violence is being unleashed on the unsuspecting, and one in which Yoda (a computer-generated character!) is desperately trying to hang onto something. (Yoda, by the way, puts in the best performance of all the "actors," with the possible exception of Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine. Read what you want into this; my take is that we should recognize Frank Oz as the American treasure he is.)

That is this film--a big, beautiful canvas, largely devoid of feeling. It's worth seeing, especially for the single, delicate plot point which makes the whole story--almost--worthwhile. But don't expect to be blown away, despite what some "professional" reviewers tell you.

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UPDATE: I saw the movie for the second time last night, and I have to say it's beginning to grow on me. The clunkiest lines still grate like the screeching brakes on a UPS truck ("Let's go to Naboo and remember a time when all we needed was our love" and so forth); but the truth is that the story is not unnuanced. Clearly, the most compelling angle--Anakin's internal struggle between loyalty (and I think this is loyalty to Obi-Wan more than to the Jedi code) and self-interest (he wants to save Padme, but I think not so much for her sake as for the fact that he can't bear to be without her)--could have been done better, since when the time comes it's like someone simply flipped Anakin's switch from "Good" to "Evil." But the run-up to that is interesting, and laden with (mostly unexplored, sadly) possibilities.

Palpatine convinces Anakin that the Jedi want to wrest power from the Senate...and, well, that's true. In this way it's possible for the Jedi to be painted in a very unflattering light, but this is only possible because the Jedi jealously guard their independence. Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi are hiding knowledge about the Force from him...and, well, they are. And when Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi represent a threat to the democratic nature of the Republic, he's absolutely right: the Jedi feel that things should run a certain way, regardless of the democratic machinations of the Senate, and furthermore they will intervene to see this vision remain in place.

I came out of the theater thinking that it would have been much easier for Lucas to take a page from Roman history and simply 1) have Palpatine use his "Order 66" to take personal command of the clone troopers (which by now are on pretty much every planet) and 2) use this as a weapon to cow a rump Senate into declaring him Emperor. Those Roman senators could always be counted on to debase themselves as soon as some general brought his legions within sight of the Tiber. In this way, the Jedi wouldn't seem to be related to, for instance, the Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks of 1917--fanatically devoted to a philosophy and willing to do whatever it takes to see it put in place.