Friday, May 20, 2005

Oh, Georgie boy. Everyone's saying you've redeemed yourself with Episode III. I saw it and I liked it. But you're still not off the hook as far as I'm concerned, you swarmy bastard.

I'll never forget when you broke my heart. You hurt me, George, and you demeaned me and my generation with your joke of a film, The Phantom Idiocy. What were you thinking? Why did you let yourself be convinced that you were a genius of some kind? You actually believed your own hype and for that, you deserve to be fired or fined or something.

And then you tried again. You learned from a few mistakes, you ramped up the Jedi numbers, you pushed and pulled every little thing to an extreme and you almost fooled me. I almost liked Attack of the Clones. There were some cool moments, some definitely cool battles. Ultimately flat, though. The simple things that made the first trilogy so awesome: character, scope, thought behind everything (in science fiction we call that World Building), was absent from these movies. The plot was so slapdash and unfocused, it was impossible to follow so you just whistled and waited for the next battle sequence.

And then you learned more. You cut the fat, stuck to battle sequences, focused your energy on a little bit character and the inevitable plot. And it worked, fucker. You got lucky! You got lucky that the story behind your main character was interesting enough to propel a first, plodding, half of the film. And then, miracriously, clever enough to craft some chilling scenes.

Revenge of the Sith is the most gorgeous, eye-dropping, film I've ever seen. (Shame about the title, though.) The detail on the spacefighters, the strength and length of the massive capital ships, and all the exotic scenery was perfect. Huge kudos to those overworked slaves over at ILM. Like others, I feel like the constant sunset and sunrises was over the top, but, thankfully, for the first time in this trilogy, the plot was good enough to forgive the over the top visual theatrics. And then you got lucky again! With Ewan McGregor, who pulled off a fascinating performance, with nuance and power, a big contrast to the bland facial expressions of your other actors.

The movie is not perfect, of course. (The smattering of applause at the end of the Wenesday night, midnight showing, proved that.) As I walked out, I felt underwhelmed. But a few days later, I think about positively about the film. The visuals stand out in my memory as bold and beautiful, the drama of Anakin's inner conflict resonated with me. The best part about enjoying a Star Wars film again is that I want to go back and rewatch the films with Anakin's full journey in mind.

I believe this new trilogy could have been approached in a completely different light. I think the neverending blue screen was unnecessary. I think the multiple villains was superfluous. And the inevitable plot twists in the final film could have been changed to actually create real drama. Oh, and different titles.

But, this is the new Star Wars we got. And I'm glad it ended on a high note. You saved yourself an bad ending, George, but you still deserve to be exiled, just like Obi-Wan. So, go. Go to some hut (or mansion) in the desert, put someone with some real imagination in charge of Star Wars, and save us all from future disasters.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=episode3

elad said...

AUGUST!!! hi, bro. been meaning to email you, but i'm a lazy bastard.

what did you think of the movie?

Anonymous said...

It was ... ok. Not great. Better than the last two, but still not good. The pacing was better, but the plotholes really piss me off. The whole motivation for turning Anakin into Vader was so lame. And the "execute order #66!" was just laughable. Fucking stupid jedi. What kind of jedi gets shot in the back?! Sam Jackson had a good death, though. I was really worried he would get bitch slapped.