The last of the new trilogy and hopefully the last Star Wars movies Lucas directs, Revenge of the Sith is without doubt the best of the new bunch but isn’t on a par with New hope never mind Empire. Word of warning – spoilers ahead. Considering everyone watching the film knows the outcome and who lives/dies it’s still a good film to watch mostly due to it’s darkness. There’s a beheading, wife beating (ok…strangling) and probably the scene that got most gasps at the cinema was the killing of the child jedi’s (although I couldn’t help laugh at the use of ‘younglings’ throughout the rest of the film – it just sounded so false).
The special effects are stunning although there’s maybe too much in certain scenes – the opening space battle for example requires 3 or 4 watches to catch everything that’s happening. Even then the feeling of ‘falseness’ is throughout the film as scenes are ruined by the overuse of special effects – the final battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin is a prime example. I was enjoying the fight and the lava looked amazing. Then both Jedi jump onto small robots in the middle of the lava flow – rather than enhancing the battle it made it feel more like a computer game or a battle of between graphic artists and cgi modellers in an attempt to outdo each other.
I also had a few issues with the structure and storyline, namely:
The actors in the film did a pretty good job. Ewan McGregor was pretty good (much better than Episode I) although some of his dialogue was pretty sucky. Same can be said for Hayden Christensen. The best was undoubtedly Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine. The evil pored out from him at all times – great to watch. Christopher Lee was underused and yet again a good character in Dooku (like Darth Maul in I) was lost to easily.
It will be interesting to watch IV, V and VI again – I’ve not seen them in years but I feel the 6 episodes will not gel well at all. R2D2 for example is like a super droid in II & III compared with the last three films – I guess he got old. I’ll be treating the Star Wars films as two separate trilogies – one a great space story, the other a good tale and a good use of new technology.
I was impressed at the empire’s herculean advances in death star construction. It took them at least 17 years to get the 1st one working btween episode III and IV but a much shorter time to get the 2nd one up and running for episode IV.
Can’t say I was impressed by episodes I,II & III. Maybe I’m just getting old.