we had a special early morning screening of star wars III: revenge of the sith this morning for our customers, so i was there to meet and greet, and hand out t-shirts and the like.
as for the movie, all i can say is: it isn’t as horrifically bad as the first two.
it’s certainly not great, and i don’t know if i can even go as far as it being good. but was is horrifically bad? well, no, i guess not.
we all know i hate hayden christensen, who can’t seem to act his way out of a wet paper bag. but honestly, when a cg yoda is more expressive and gives a more nuanced performance than your lead actor, that’s a problem. it’s got to be george lucas, who i hear is a terrible actor’s director. under his direction, even samuel l. jackson comes off as wooden and lifeless. SAMUEL L. JACKSON! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
the funny thing (besides hayden trying to walk that fine line between furrowed-brow-upset and furrowed-brow-almost-evil) has to be the scene where he’s darth vader for the first time and they raise his table up off the ground, where he does an actual frankenstein’s monster-type awakening, complete with arms out stiff and primal scream. i kid you not.
the horrible thing about this movie is that even if it sucks you can’t really leave, because you have to stay and see what happens. which is inherently ridiculous, because you know what happens. you’ve seen the NEXT THREE MOVIES ALREADY. anakin lives and becomes darth. obi-wan lives. luke and leia are born. and the death star is constructed (although it takes like 17 years to finish it off, even though it’s like 1/2 done at the end of this film? what? did caltrans get the contract for that sucker?)
it’s funny, last saturday cc was asking if i was going to see it, and we concurred that you just have to do it. just get over it, know that it’s going to suck, but just do it so we can all get on with the rest of our lives. we never have to pay attention to george lucas again, and we can go out and see good movies, free of these nostalgic shackles.
until they remake TRON, that is.
Posted at May 19, 2005 6:08 PMi’m convinced now of two tacts that lucas must be taking:
1. his audience need no more than a 5th grade reading level
2. the jedi are supposed to be as stoic as he must imagine shaolin monks to be
number one became obvious to me watching the first movies, because harrison ford had lines and reacted to romance scenes with all the skill and depth of a 7th grader asking someone to a school dance. but in roughly the same span of years he expressed more complicated characters (in my opinion) in movies like blade runner and witness. so i blame lucas, he must have been telling them to intentionally dumb it down to a teen audience emotional level.
number two, the intentional woodenness of jedi, is just my opinion. i can imagine the role of jedi hard to fill for a method actor though, you can’t really express any of the feelings that you’ve been trained to work with. inherently lifeless maybe as a character form? i think he should have let them have more emotion but work with it in some way. i guess he did let them do that more in this latest movie, but not in episode I or II very much. that way nearly leads to the dark side…
Posted by: davee at May 22, 2005 7:26 PMit is most definitely worth $10 to see the birth of vadar.
it would be worth $10,000,000 to be digitally edited into that scene so you could walk up to him and push the big green button on his chest and admire his puffy sleeves.
what’s this switch do? call your mother?
there is only one hyphenated word to describe this film, and that is: god-awful.
Posted by: xz at May 23, 2005 10:39 AM“primal scream?” my viewing must have skipped that part. instead we got a lackluster “noooo”. it was my least favorite part of all of my least favorite parts of the movie.
Posted by: mac at May 23, 2005 1:16 PMah, it’s possible that the primal scream could have been from me from my brain trying to escape the torment.
Posted by: e at May 23, 2005 2:10 PMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.