Episode III: All Is Forgiven
Dean
Saw it. It was beyond awesome.
I thought the handling of Anakin's fall, showing it to be (like I believe most evil is) based on weakness and selfishness and cowardice, was perfect. It managed to do something I've never seen a prequel do: make a later episode seem better. The tale of Luke's refusal to go to the dark side, and Vader's redemption at the end of "Return of the Jedi," now seems less cheesy, much more moving and much more believable.
I also have to say some of the slams on the film simply miss the point. These movies--all of them--are fables first and foremost. If you don't relate to them as fairy tales, you're already ruining the experience for yourself.
(And when I say "fairy tales," just remember that the old folk fairy tales were far more gritty and dark than the sanitized ones we see from the likes of Disney.)
Complaints about stilted dialogue? No, the stilted dialogue is exactly right for the fairy tales that these are--and by the way, going all the way back to the original film in 1977, can you name a time when Jedi and their friends didn't speak in stiff, wooden dialogue?
Back when Star Wars came out, some left-leaning critics panned it, seeing it as an allegory to the Cold War and slamming it for oversimplifying that conflict. That was nonsense then. It's nonsense now for right-wingers to think that this is any serious allegory to current politics--this or that line aside, it's about a civilization taken over by an evil manipulative person. What more do you need to know?
These are fairy tales. If you aren't watching them with that first and foremost in mind, you've lost the point. If you're complaining about corny or contrived parts, you've especially missed the point.
I thought the whole thing was beautiful.
Note to George Lucas: all is forgiven. Thanks man. You made me love the entire series all over again. And my 7 year old thought it was awesome. Driving home, he even told me he couldn't get the sound of light sabers out of his head.
Heh. Me neither.
(By the way, I stand by the recommendation to see it in digital. It was absolutely gorgeous. One tip though: don't sit too close to the screen, or it's like sitting too close to a TV; you'll occasionally spot little jaggies. Sitting a third to halfway back in the theater should be about perfect though.)
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Truth be told, I was very conflicted between thinking it was kind of crappy and thinking it recaptured that great fun of the old series - weird. I need to se it again.
My son thought he was BSing about the Senate bit, which seems plausible, but that scene struck me as false.
Other than that, though, I liked it a lot, especially in the very beginning where (once I got over the tactical idiocy of capital ships slugging it out at ranges of less than 1km) I got a very strong 'wooden ships and iron men' vibe.
I have to disagree about the wooden acting, though. the guy who played old obi-wan was believable, and never wooden. nor were Han Solo nor Fischer...
The whole origin of Vader just seemed off somehow. They have a whole planet covered in lava flows with pyroclasts and explosions everywhere. But when it comes time for Anakin's ruination they have him slide down a hill and smolder like a hotdog left on the grill too long. Bah. And the "Vaderizing" surgery that followed lacked the necessary weight for such a momentous turning point.
Ah well. The very end of the movie did make up for a lot of the annoyances. It was great seeing the early construction of the Death Star (complete with a young Grand Moff Tarkin!) and the double suns of Tatooine. The fanboy in me was happy. :)
Maybe a better analogy is Last Samurai. Nice mysticism; nice conflict between irresistable, indifferent force and noble intention; lame love interests; eventual resolution. Granted, the Samurais lose; but Tom Cruise lives, which is somehow a victory of nobility over baseness (which it is for him, but in real life he would have died.)
Why did they bother with Jedi and light sabers? Because special effects are cool. This story is exceptionally unexceptional.
I'm with you, Dean. Star Wars III was all that and a bucket of Popeye's chicken with biscuits and red beans &rice.
The dialogue overall was better but, come on, the whole, "I love you, no I love you, no I love you more, no I love you more," was crap.
And as for the Jedi not doing anything about Anakin and Padme's marriage - the movie would seem to indicate that overall they were unaware of it. Palpy knew but even Obi-Wan asked Padme if the baby belonged to Anakin. That seems to indicat that if Obi-Wan was even the slightest bit unsure then the Jedi Council was completely oblivious.
And watching two capital ships slugging it out over distances of many kilometers, while accurate, is very boring visually.
Luke very well may have fallen had his blow not simply lopped off Darth Vader's hand, and instead done something even worse. Anakin was given that chance when he nearly killed Padme, but he seemed to be too far gone at that point.
I mean, if you really want to get into it, Anakin's fall began with his own fears and insecurities and need for approval, and he took the big first step into darkness when his mother died and he killed all those sandpeople. By the beginning of Episode III he was already on the edge. His giving in to Palpatine was all but a given by the time they got to that scene.
If you think "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo!" is "exactly right" and not junior high drivel, then I just don't know what to say.
And, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it would take a heart of stone to watch the Frankenvader scene without laughing.
"Frankenvader?" Oh, you mean when he comes off the table and shouts "noooo?" Yeah, well, once again, did you even watch the first trilogy? "Luke, I am your father!" "Noooooooo!"
Whatever dude.
General Grievous, by the way, is somewhat overcomes his ludicrous name when you realize that to get those four lightsabers, he had to kill four Jedi.
When I finally "got" that I really felt I understood where Lucas was going all along. As I say, it makes the ending of "Return of the Jedi" less cheesy than it seemed when it first came out, and it makes some of the parts I didn't like about Episodes I and II better than I realized.
Shallow twit with enormous power: that was Anakin.
YMMV and probably does, by the look of the doomsayers above.
It all seemed kinda dumb (and light sabers, gimmee a break!)
After I saw a lot more movies, I realized that Star Wars provided something different, sort of magical. So naturally episodes I-III are going to be really dumb cowboy movies. It's a question of whether they also have something extra.
Good point 1: Special Effects. Kick ass as always. Especially the opening battle and Anakin's duel with Obi-Wan.
Good point 2: Design and vision. He has this right down to the smallest wiggle of Yoda's ears. (and the digital screen makes a huge difference.)
Good point 3: Supporting Cast. Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Jimmy Smits (Sen. Bail Organa), and Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) deserve special kudos.
Complaint 1: Anakin's fall. I know the kid is conflicted, but give me a break. He gets a plum seat on the Jedi Council, but gets pissed off at the entire order because they won't call him "Master?" He goes from sharing an "I love you, man" moment with Obi-Wan, to murderous homicidal rage at their next meeting? (For that matter, why does Obi-Wan suddenly believe he has to kill Anakin at the end?) He finds out Palpatine is a Sith and is trying to destroy the republic, and has him at the point of a lightsaber, but lets him go? He goes from telling Mace Windu about Palpatine to chopping off Master Windu's hand at the mere thought of killing Palpatine? (He didn't have a problem DECAPITATING a "disarmed" Count Dooku like he was trimming a hedge, but he can't bring himself to kill a guy who is firing Sith lightning every which way? And he insists on giving Palpatine a trial in front of the Senate? To quote Master Johnny Sack of the Sopranos, "What is this, the f*ckin' UN?") He falls to tears at the thought of Padme's death, but will hack up a room of Jedi younglings just like that? Bottom line, Hayden Christensen is a fine actor. He was great in Shattered Glass. But his Anakin is simply too much of a whiny, weepy, indecisive, manic depressive little bitch to be believeable as a Sith Lord, much less become the future badass Darth Vader. Some Xanax get this kid. (Why, oh, why, couldn't we have gotten something like the Anakin/Vader described over at Memoirs of a Monster?
Complaint 2: Anakin and Padme: AKA Schlock and Schlockier. There is no emotion, no chemistry. "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo!" WTF? We don't even get to see any believeable emotion out of Padme until the very end. And Anakin simply never shows any, only this sort of pained "eat your brussel sprouts" kind of pouting. (And about the digital screening: It just shows how Lucas misused lighting and shadow during Anakin &Padme's love scenes to obscure almost everything and nearly put them in profile. I was ready to chalk it up to film transfer problems, but he was doing it on purpose the whole time through.)
Complaint 3: Padme's buns in the oven/Jedi incompetence: How the hell does absolutely no one notice Padme's pregnancy/suspect Anakin is the father? Does it take a Jedi to figure out that her robes are getting waaay too baggy when she, as a prominent senator, is on the news every night? And little Ani was crushing on her since he was 9, and for a dude who is supposed to forsake all worldly attachments, nobody knew he was spending a little bit too much time with her? (They shared a freakin' apartment and a bed, for Qui-Gonn's sake!) And Yoda has sense enough to know Anakin's mother died, but he can't even sense that Anakain knocked Padme up with not one, but two highly force-adept feti? Meanwhile, Palpatine knows not only that Padme is pregnant (If the Jedi don't know, then how does he?), but that Anakin dreams she is going to die in childbirth, and uses the promise of saving her to lure Anakin to the dark side. And Anakin was not the least bit suspicious? Or, if the Jedi did know about Anakin &Padme, they chose to do nothing, which is even worse for the plot. Between Anakin's love and the shine Palpatine has taken to him, they must have known something was up. They're freaking psychic and all that. And if they are so psychic, how is it that Yoda is the only one who can sense the entire Jedi Order being slaughtered like cattle? Sub-complaint: The Jedi were a bunch of clueless pansies. Most unworthy of the way Obi-Wan and Yoda talk about them in the original trilogy. I expected so much more.
Complaint 4: Anakin to Vader: A flawlessly tragic and well-done scene, but it fell completely apart with that cliched scream. (It worked in ESB because we could see Luke's face and his expression of horror. Since we can't see Vader's face, it fell completely flat. I actually giggled. And I wasn't the only one in the theater giggling.) The more I think about it, the more I think Lucas could have done with that scene. A vein of pure dramatic gold, and Lucas lets it slip away.
Complaint 5: Jar Jar Binks, the epitome of everything wrong with the first two movies, SURVIVED WITHOUT EVEN A LIGHTSABER SCRATCH. 'Nuff said.
It is a cruel irony that even though George Lucas came up with all the Star Wars mythos, the films seem to work better the less he is involved, and the more he is on a short leash. (ESB, ROTJ especially.) He's great with character design and special effects, but an Aqualish on LSD could write better dialogue and plot. (IMHO, the only thing that save ROTS from being a disaster was that Tom Stoppard came in to redo most of the dialogue.) I'm mentally fixing all the plot holes as the movie is going along, and at the end I get a completely different result.
Now that the second trilogy is complete, I'd have to say that none of the movies were better than the original trilogy, not even this one. I haven't been this underwhelmed since Matrix Revolutions. I want to force-choke George Lucas for messing this new trilogy up so badly, and missing so many opportunities.
Grade: C+
P.S. Ironically, Padme, the linchpin of Anakin's fall, does not actually die giving birth, or from Anakin's force choke. She dies from a broken heart. And of course, Lucas does absolutely nothing with this.
-Rule 32: dialog in fairy tales is normally wooden and stilted, per Writers Guild guidelines.
I'm not going to go line by line right now, but there wasn't nearly as much of that crud in the first movie; most of the screen time was devoted to Solo, Leia, and Luke.
Recall that "Empire" was written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, and Kasdan had co-writer credit on "Jedi."
So Lucas didn't really have the same opportunity to sabotage the dialog as he did in the last three.
I am in the "I don't buy it" camp with Anakin's switch. Yes, in theory, he has been subject to various temptations, and he did wipe out that sandpeople camp, but he didn't seem to suffer from any sort of consequences, emotional or otherwise.
Basically Lucas screwed up by not painting a good picture of Anakin's moral journey. All we got were externals explanations. One of the basic precepts of good storytelling is show, don't tell. We were never shown Anakin's journey; all we saw were the stimuli.
And what's this about his paranoia over his wife and childbirth? Hello? We're in an interstellar setting where they can build AI droids, mass-produce clones, replace lost limbs, and Anakin's worried about the delivery? Feh.
Hasn't anyone in that galaxy ever heard of an ultrasound? Or for that matter, a pediatrician?
His conversion was ludicrous. At one moment he's narcing on Sidious, a half-hour later he's killing Jedi leaders to defend Sidious. After that (quite literally) he begins to wipe out the Jedi en masse.
Can you say "cognitive dissonance?" Can you say "George Lucas can't write a screenplay worth diddly?" I knew you could.
Don't get me started about what he did to the "younglings" (and what's up with that word, anyway? Lucas' thesaurus break!?). That, by itself, damn near ruins the movie and eliminates any sympathy I might have had for that whiny little post-adolescent until then.
Real world scenario: a young fighter, a marine perhaps, is worried about his wife. He would do anything to save his wife.
While stationed in Iraq, he spends a lot of time with a very sneaky Mullah, who manages to convince him that devil-worship will save his wife. The young Marine (a devout Christian as well as a decorated hero) then discovers the Mulla is really Zarqawi, and is personally responsible for the deaths of many of his comrades, not to mention slaughtering thousands of innocent Iraquis.
The Marine tells his Colonel about the Mullah, but at the last minute rushes to where they're arresting him, and shoots his commanding officer to keep him from killing the Mulla. Right after that Zarqawi murders his commanding officer.
A few minutes later our hero dumps his lifelong devotion to Christ, swears allegiance to a vicious Satanist murderer, abandons the Marines, and proceeds to kill every man and woman he's served with by his own hand.
When a group of Iraqui children (who have been protected by the Marines until then) look to him for support, he cold-bloodedly slaughters them.
Yeah...
Luke grunting as he looked into space: "Faaaa-therrrr..."
Then there's one of my all-time favorites, spoken by an Imperial officer with a sneer: "You rebel scum!" Pah!
Oh yeah, and then there's, like, every line that Jabba the Hut or Yoda ever spoke.
As for Anakin's fall: I guess it must just be me. I remember all too well being a surly, angry, resentful, rebellious teenager (and early 20-something). I bought into the whole thing hook line and sinker as a refusal to grow up and face your own demons--which to me is the ultimate in cowardice.
Indeed, it was made pretty clear to me by the whole third movie that Anakin never really loved Padme--he loved the idea of her. She, on the other hand, really did love him.
Maybe it's all because I grew up with what they call "father issues." Growing up, I didn't really have a father so much as a series of men who sort of tried to fill that role in various half-measures.
With the hope that this isn't getting too personal (I don't think I'm talking out of turn or saying anything secret here) I note that Mr. Mason above grew up in a similarly broken home. I suspect that as a result we both related to Anakin and his dark side almost instinctively. After watching Episode III I felt like I totally "got" Darth Vader. I thought, "Damn, yeah, if I were who I was at 21, and I had that kid's powers, that could well have been me if I'd made the wrong choices."
That moment after Obi-Wan had defeated him in battle, and he screamed, "I hate you!!!" Man, chills ran down my spine. Filled with rage at Obi-Wan for not validating everything he wanted to believe.
I have to say again: it does help if you keep in mind that Anakin was young, very young, and very conflicted and alone most of his life. The Jedi Council was probably right that he was waaay too young for the responsibilities he was being given. But not just that--also it was obvious from day one that Anakin was kind of a mess.
Maybe others who didn't grow up like that or know anybody like that can't relate. I don't know. Me, I thought it was beautiful. Especially in seeing how Luke, faced with many of the same problems and limitations, overcame them and became a better man.
To be painfully self-revealing here, I often hope my sons will be better boys and men than I was at their age. In truth, I often guage my effectiveness as a father with that as my yardstick--not in a way to push them or bully them or try to make them someone they are not, but because to be blunt I was a train wreck back then. My boys are not me, and they have to make their own way and discover who they are. Indeed I often marvel at how wonderful they are as people, even in their imperfections. I am only an imperfect (to say the least) guide.
The self-conflicted mass of insecurities that was young Anakin was like clay in the hands of Palpatine. It was so obvious to me.
Maybe not to others. I don't know.
The movie was kinda fun, tho. ;)