A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…
This will surprise a lot of people, but I really like Revenge of the Sith. It’s a weirdly enjoyable film compared to the other two prequels. As well as that, there’s a huge meme culture surrounding this one specifically that makes every line of dialogue 10x more funny. Even the most serious scene in the film of someone being burned alive becomes a quotable mess of hilarity. There are also some really decent scenes in this that make you forget some of the bad moments. But at the end of the day it is still a flawed Star Wars movie and goes on far too long. Lets start positive at least.
Revenge of the Sith feels like George Lucas was starting to remember how to write real dialogue as there’s not as much cringe this time around. It allows you to just sit back and enjoy the film for once without wanting to turn off the TV. It also does a good job at allowing the audience to focus on the events of the movie and how important they are to the universe. This is the final push that makes Anakin to the dark side, and we see the events that send this into motion pretty early on.
Seeing all these events take place makes you wonder how the Jedi managed to fall within the space of a few minutes. One second they are one of the most ancient and powerful organisations and then reduced to hermits living in the dessert. While showing off how evil Anakin has become along the past few years we also get to see Palpatine have a lot of fun. Boy Palpatine is just Evil for the sake of it and you can see it in his actions and voice. When he fights Yoda at the end Yoda is powerless and everything he has built for the past 500 years is falling apart. Meanwhile Palpatine is just giggling and throwing shit at him because he just did it all with one boy and years of corruption.
Obi Wan actually feels fairly developed and interesting at this point and I think this is the movie where everyone gets the idea that Obi-Wan saves the prequels. He drops off some neat one liners and gets the job done, showing some real emotion here and there. Anakin of course is going through a lot right now and while some of the dialogue is a little shoddy at the end it still feels like a powerful performance from Hayden.
They’ve also learnt how to add a bit of colour to the screen so everything doesn’t look like dirt in my eye. George is sure to show off a few different locations that we haven’t seen before while opening up new possibilities to be explored in other forms of media. One of my favourite things is that we get to see the Clone Troopers kicking some ass here and there even if for brief moments of time. The Clones are shown off to be really exciting characters through The Clone Wars TV series.
Unfortunately this is where most of the high notes end. When I was watching this it dawned upon me how much of what I was seeing wasn’t real. I’m not even talking about the Sci-Fi element, I mean how much was computer generated or done with a shoddy blue screen. From what I’m aware of, there isn’t really a real location in this movie, it is all filmed with actors in hand crafted green screens yelling at each other. A lot of the delight in the original trilogy comes from how real everything felt, Tatooine especially felt like it could be a real place as we got to explore areas of the planet along side Luke.
You can feel the lack of anything real effecting the way the actors take on a scene. They’re not sure what it is they’re looking at, and there’s some objects that can really distract you from whats going on. Especially during the Count Dooku fight where he places a bit of catwalk on top of Obi-Wan and I feel like you can see the individual pixels when it happens. While I understand George Lucas wants to show off a lot on screen, he does it in a way that doesn’t make anything exciting or real.
The movie also feels like it goes on for far too long. While the two end fights have a lot of depth and meaning behind them, they become snooze fests pretty quickly. I think the fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan goes on for longer than half an hour which makes one of the most important scenes in the franchise a chore to watch on screen. While there’s a lot of effects going on in the fight they aren’t as interesting to watch as the originals which had precise attacks and emotions influencing the battles. Anakin and Obi fight like ballerinas on steroids completing choreographed moves rehearsed months in advanced.
I think the thing that gets me the most is the wasted potential. General Grievous is introduced and forgotten about almost immediately and becomes nothing more than a B-plot villain with no real motive. There’s also not enough we get to see of the downfall of the individual Jedi that died in order 66. While there’s a quick minute montage of people getting gunned down we’re just expected to believe that everyone else eventually shared the same fate. From reading comics we know that Vader hunted down Jedi like it was breakfast and that’s what I wanted to see. Instead we get a little moment at the end of Vader screaming NoooooOOoOOoooOoo, which feels a little out of place for my touch.
Anyway thats really where the prequels end, and at least it’s lowest point was at the beginning and middle rather than the end. After seeing this, I was happy to just enjoy Star Wars passively while playing the exciting amount of video games that would be coming out over the years, especially Battlefront 2 which became one of my favourite games of all time. I thought that I would never see a new Star Wars again and I was happy with that. Little did I know that Disney, one of the biggest corporations would be taking over. While this scared me at first I quickly realised that the prequels sucked and that they were doing okay with Marvel so why not get more Star Wars.
Now here we are today with 2 weeks until the official release of Star Wars Episode 8. But before then we have to go through the Disney movies which will be done in a review format rather than the previous films. I’ll be Starting with Episode 7 and moving onto Rogue One before I go see The Last Jedi and pump out a review of my thoughts. So lets find out if Disney could do a Star Wars better than George..