Revenge of the Sith! Wow! What a shocker!

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

I didn’t see the ending coming at ALL! Did you guys SEE what happened to Anakin? They put him in that whole black armor thing, and suddenly he sounded like Simba’s dad!

And–whoa! Twins! Padme had twins! Not crazy about the names she chose, but they’re not bad, I guess.

My question is…what now?! I mean, that’s how they END it? With so much left dangling? What happens to Yoda? And Obi Wan? And the kids? The bad guys just WIN in the end? What the hëll kind of ending is THAT? What a downer.

Has anyone heard if there’s gonna be a chapter 4? I’m dying to see what happens next!

Spoilers follow:

Okay, seriously…

THINGS I LIKED–Pacing was brisk. There were actual stray laugh lines that weren’t painful. The special effects, except for a few patchy moments during the lava flow battle, were superb and seamless. A number of dangling questions were dealt with (including the glaring “Why didn’t 3PO remember being built on Tattooine?) The lightsaber battles were outstanding, and some of the crosscutting sequences were deftly linked thematically (the birth of Darth Vader matching up with the birth of his children, for instance).

THINGS I LOVED–The scene where Palpatine, while watching that weird balloon glob opera, calmly and coolly seduces Anakin with the backstory of the Sith and the notion that Anakin might be able to save Padme if he just opens himself to the Dark Side. Not only did the chemistry between the two actors crackle, but I think it may well be the best dialogue scene in the entirety of the first three films. Plus I think we’re supposed to infer that Palpatine’s mentor was responsible for the creation of Anakin, which at least provides SOME kind of explanation. Love the John Williams score, interweaving new themes with the Empire March, Luke and Leia’s theme, etc. Also loved that Jar Jar didn’t speak. The visit to the planet of the Wookies, which Lucas ostensibly wanted to do since “Return of the Jedi,” but settled for half-sized Wookies called (spell it sideways and drop half the letters) Ewoks. Ewan McGregor convincingly aging into Alec Guiness. Anakin wearing an ensemble identical to what Luke was sporting in “ROTJ.” And, hey, now we’ve got a new fan gesture, taken from the Obi-Wan/Anakin battle: Jedi High Five, which consists of bringing your plams to within an inch of each other but not making contact no matter how hard you try. Also the cameo of a clearly young Grand Moff Tarkin.

THINGS THAT I DON’T BELIEVE: That Mace Windu is dead. I’m sorry, he’s the baddest bad-ášš there is. I don’t care that he was thrown halfway across the city. I think when he lands, he dusts himself off and says, “That all you got?” I also don’t believe the names of some of these characters. Darth Sidious. What’s his first name, “In?” General Grievous, as in Grievous Bodily Harm? C’mon. Certainly Lucas has had snarky names before, but at least he had the decency to put them into foreign languages (anyone for a serving of Mon Calamari?)

THINGS I HOWLED OVER: “It’s alive! It’s alive!” How in God’s name could Lucas have thought it a good idea to do an entire Frankenstein riff by having Darth Vader break his bonds on the operating table and lurch forward. I mean, it was hysterical. The lame spreading of arms and shouting, “Nooooo!’ was the capper on an inadvertently laughter-inducing sequence. With Vader believing that Padme had betrayed him, it might have been more effective for him to, upon learning of her demise, coldly saying, “Good.” Plus I was waiting for the legless, partly armless Anakin to shout after Obi-Wan, “Get back here! I’ll bite your kneecaps off, you pansy!”

THINGS I WAS ANNOYED OVER: No explanation of Leia’s remembering her mother or Luke looking around Dagobah and saying it seemed familiar. Granted, we can chalk it up to Force-induced dreams, but still… Also, it would have been cool to see how 3PO lost a leg and had to wear the silver replacement one he had in the subsequent films. Also…boy, the whole Jedi seeing-the-future thing is pretty freakin’ hit and miss. Seeing Jedi after Jedi caught by surprise by a massive conspiracy is a little like the psychic convention that was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. I know, I know, Yoda kept saying the force was cloudy, but sheesh.

THINGS I’D LIKE TO SEE NEXT: An entire film called the Adventures of Han Solo. Recast with a younger actor, obviously, but charting his early years and how he hooked up with Chewie.

PAD

204 comments on “Revenge of the Sith! Wow! What a shocker!”

  1. RE: Death Star: I’m actually expecting some industrious EU author to explain this, since the origin of the Death Star as explained in the EU has been fairly well torpedoed by the prequels. If it were me writing in the EU, I’d probably go the direction that the one we see at the end of Ep III actually ends up being a failure, but Tarkin gathers his think tank and runs with the idea at the Maw installation.

    RE:The “Two Sith at a Time Rule”: This is actually a logical fallacy that a surprising number of people seem to fall into because they don’t see the distinction between a Sith and a Dark Jedi. Anybody force sensitive can fall to the Dark Side and become a Dark Jedi. The Sith way is one very specific Dark Side tradition which adopted the two-at-a-time rule as a means of self-preservation after they were nearly wiped out.

    -Rex Hondo-

  2. This is undoubtedly a post that no one’s likely to see, but since I’m finally digging out from under a mountain of various tasks I figure I need to make at least a FEW comments on the film.

    In general: liked it. I certainly don’t agree with the NYT review that it’s the best of the four Lucas-directed films, but it’s easily the best of the prequel trilogy and possibly up there with Jedi. (Bits of it are, to be sure.)

    Likes: Ewan McGregor is several different kinds of marvelous here. PAD mentioned his aging convincingly into Guinness, which I agree with, but he also seemed to be one of the more convincingly emotional actors here. His “you were the Chosen One!” speech really hit home, I thought, and other scenes worked as well.

    McDiarmid was great until Palpatine visually became a Ðìçk Tracy villain — a bit over the top after that, but still MOSTLY okay.

    The big “cheer for Yoda” moment, unlike Ep 2, worked well here. In Ep 2, his saber battle was pretty goofy — this time, I liked his walking into Palpatine’s office and casually taking down the two guards with a gesture. Hëll yeah.

    Unlike its two immediate predecessors, this film actually felt convincingly epic to me. There are still moments here and there where dialogue had me cringing, but they were isolated moments as opposed to most of the film.

    Dislikes: Apart from the FrankenVader bit that everyone’s hopped on … a hearty “ehh” to Padme. Utterly passive and useless; she’s not only well below the quality set by her daughter, but she’s really wimpy compared to her own character in the first two films. “Lost the will to live.” Right. [I like tyg’s suggestion that Anakin was dominating her; it would’ve been really nice had that point been made, or even deliberate.]

    Apart from that … it’s been a lotta weeks and probably nobody’s reading this, so I’ll stop here. The gist: I think the film works as a whole IF you buy Anakin’s fall, and I did. (I mostly bought it because of the reactions of other characters, not Anakin himself … but I bought it nonetheless.)

    TWL

  4. “Was Bail Organa alive at the destruction of Alderan? In Leia’s original message to Ben she said “General Kenobi, years ago you fought with my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.” So that at least implies that he was alive, unless Leai was speaking figuratively, but he may not have been on Alderan when it was destroyed by the Death Star.”

    That message was recorded one shoot out and several days of imprisonment and torture before the destruction of Alderaan, in which it is to be supposed Bail was vapourised along with everyone
    else.

    >Has anyone else mentioned that Obi-Wan acts as
    >if he’s never seen R2 before when Luke first
    >finds him in ep IV? We can probably chalk this
    >up to his whole deception (saing Vader killed
    >Luke’s father…saying Anakin wanted Luke to
    >have the lightsaber…etc), and it could be
    >argued that he only says “I’ve never owned a
    >droid.” But it’s the one piece of ROTS to ANH
    >continuity that seems too stick out there for me

    Except that when Luke is unconscious Kenobi seems to recognise R2. So yes, most of what Kenobi says to Luke is bûllšhìŧ, he’s a manipulative old bášŧárd and the whole Jedi Order has issues with a high-handed (NPI) ‘master knows best’ attitude which causes every single problem in the whole series, which they then rely on pawns to fix. Just as Kenobi says, only the Sith deal in absolutes, the Jedi are spectaculartly relativist… from a certain point of view.

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