Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

[mmcirvin]

I finally saw this movie. What's left to say about it? Not much. But I suppose I can at least say what I agree with.

It's certainly the best of the prequel trilogy. Versus the original trilogy, it's hard to gauge, since its last act derives much of its sad power (which it does have) by reflecting the original trilogy. It's not better than Star Wars (as one overenthusiastic critic put it). It does make the previous two movies seem mostly superfluous. It could never have lived up to fanboy expectations, of course.

Hayden Christensen is the weak point here, which is a pity considering that he's supposed to be the central tragic figure. Mark Hamill was never a great actor, but at least he could enunciate; Christensen mumbles his lines through most of the movie (and the terrible dialogue he gets doesn't help). In the last act, when he mostly has to glower and kill people, it's not as much of a problem. He's got the glowering down.

There are other problems. As everyone complained, Natalie Portman's character has been reduced to a weeping, consumptive cipher. I don't know what they did to Samuel L. Jackson; he still seems kind of wooden. Darth Vader's bursting from the surgery table like Frankenstein's monster is pretty silly (though it does contribute to the movie's clever subtextual implication, never explicitly spelled out, that little Anakin was not conceived by any damn midichlorians, at least not without a strong nudge). It's probably a good thing the movie reduces the discussion of where to send baby Luke to a single throwaway line, because any fucking sense it does not make.

But it has to be said: Ian McDiarmid is so good in Revenge of the Sith that he pretty much carries the first two thirds of the movie by himself. In its last movie, the prequel series finally delivers its compelling main villain. Up to this point, apart from his big reveal and demise in Return of the Jedi, he was the evil puppetmaster in the shadows; now he gets to slime and persuade and chew the scenery all over the screen, and he does a great job of it and is riveting whenever he's there. I do wish that his withered-face makeup were more mobile and less like a Halloween mask; it inhibits his performance somewhat after his transformation.

And at least in this one, Christopher Lee gets his death scene at the beginning of chapter three.

The movie delivers as much spectacle as Attack of the Clones, to which it adds an actual dramatic plot instead of a bunch of machinations we don't much care about, so that's something. The shots that awakened the most nostalgic feelings in me, for some reason, weren't the appearances of Darth Vader in costume, R2-D2, C3PO or even Chewbacca; they were the brief scenes near the end on the Blockade Runner. But you probably have to have been nine in 1977 for that to work.

Comments

[zmook.livejournal.com]

the brief scenes near the end on the Blockade Runner.

I know exactly what you mean, but can't put my finger on quite why. Perhaps it's because those scenes are in some fashion just better than the rest of the movie. Or maybe just that they're a closer match to the tone of the original, which really was not mostly about rich people in penthouse apartments.

I was six in 1977, but somehow managed to avoid actually seeing the original until I was a teenager. So I don't think it's any special glow of childhood.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think it was just suddenly being immersed in this whole environment that was actually in Star Wars. I remember thinking, "My God, this is a Star Wars movie all of a sudden."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And the "rich people in penthouse apartments" gets close to the heart of the matter, too. A lot of it is actually set design (real and virtual). In the whole prequel trilogy Lucas seems taken with sumptuous Art Nouveau- and Deco-ish settings, harking back to the 1920s and '30s fantasies that inspired Lucas to begin with, but there really wasn't much of that in the original trilogy. It was probably just because Lucas couldn't do them justice back then, so he instead made the tech look like a grimier version of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its Seventies imitators. (For that matter, the Blockade Runner isn't even grimy inside; it's something straight out of Gerry Anderson's Moonbase Alpha, establishing a contrast with the dirt on Tatooine and in Han Solo's ship. But you can tell that it's an artifact of the same culture.)

But it established a visual style for the trilogy that was adhered to pretty consistently. And the prequels don't look the same, until Lucas deliberately alters the visual emphasis at the end of Sith to indicate that he's closing the circle. But the problem is that the audiences really wanted to see more of that Star Wars look, and were put off when they didn't get much of it. Sith hints at it in passing visual references throughout the movie, until the style emerges full-blown at the very end.

My God, it's full of rectangles

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I think the movie critics who complain about the CGI in the prequel trilogy are coming close to seeing what's going on, but they don't quite get it. They talk about the lived-in, worn quality of the original movie's sets and models, but that only extended to the good guys, and not even all of them; the Blockade Runner is this spotless environment and the Death Star is too. The dirty, worn quality indicates that we're out in the sticks or with hard-bitten types, and it goes away when we're not. Star Wars video games like Dark Forces and X-Wing did a good job of evoking the look with CGI even in real time on a PC.

No, the key thing is geometric. Tech in the original Star Wars trilogy has lots of rectangles. Sharp-cornered rectangles and rounded rectangles and everything in between. Superfluous vacuum-formed and drawn-on outline rectangles that often don't mean anything. There are rectangles and right angles all over the place. Spheres too, but the spheres have rectangles drawn all over them in latitude/longitude coordinates.

In the prequel trilogy, the rectangles aren't there most of the time, because the CGI can do interesting non-rectangular things. Everything's blobby and tendril-covered and Art Nouveau and sometimes neoclassical. The Naboo ships look like shiny distorted SR-71s. But it's not the look that screams "Star Wars".

The Blockade Runner isn't grimy or worn, but it's full of rectangles.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Dunno how much Lucas himself had to do with the original movies' visual design, honestly. I suspect that this was one of the many things that other people did better than him.