As I begin to write this, I have not yet read any detailed reviews, printed or online, of Revenge of the Sith (written and directed by George Lucas). I wanted to write down my own first reactions after I saw the silly thing, without being unduly influenced by someone else’s colorful spin on what the movie had going for it. (I don’t think I’m that easy to brainwash, but why take chances?)

(NOTE: I am assuming that you have seen Episodes IV, V, VI, I, and II of Star Wars, preferably in that order (that being the sequence in which they were filmed and released). If you haven’t, why on Earth are you even thinking about watching this movie yet? Run down to your local video store and start renting out the things you’ve missed! I’ll wait! Also, if you want to refresh your memory regarding my criticisms of the screenplay for The Phantom Menace then just follow the link!)

First a few very general observations: As I hinted in this title, I think the strength of the Star Wars franchise in general (bolstered by the lovely imagery and dramatic situations and John Williams score and so forth) is going to carry this movie to victory despite the less-than-sensational dialogue written by George Lucas. If he had stuck to directing it according to his grand vision and let someone else fiddle with the exact wording of what characters were supposed to say in each scene, we might have five-star material here in terms of summer action movie entertainment in a popular franchise. As is, I'm prepared to go to four - better than average for a summer action movie; better than I feared it would be.

Now I'm going to take the "Shotgun Approach" to movie reviewing. I did it with X-Men 2 and I did it with Spider-Man 2, and now I'm gonna do it again! After all, none of my readers actually started foaming at the mouth in rage when I did it before, so they must have found it to be at least tolerable in certain circumstances. (Come to think of it, if they did start foaming at the mouth in rage, they might not have maintained enough motor control to type out a comment explaining why my scattergun method was driving them out of their skulls, but I prefer to take a more optimistic interpretation.)

"Shotgun" means that instead of trying to lead you by the hand through the plot, I'm going to sum up my first reactions in various "departments" and toss them out at you, hoping that if some of them touch on points that don't particularly interest you, others will be more successful.

Accordingly, we have:

01. The Special Effects Department
02. "We All Know Exactly How the Major Players are Going to End Up” Department
03. Clueless Villain Department – “I could stick to my own decision like a sensible leader . . . or I could arbitrarily change my mind for the sake of the Holy Script!"
04. (Lack of) Political Science Department
05. (Lack of) Female Heroism Department
06. Old Familiar Faces Department
07. Midi-Chlorians and Prophecies – Was there a POINT to all that stuff? We’ll never know!
08. Fade to Black so we Don’t See the Gory Details Department
09. "Thou Shalt Not Kill in Hot Blood," Except When the Holy Script Says "Thou Shalt Kill in Hot Blood." Learn to tell the difference, Young Jedi!
10. The Closing Credits Department

The Special Effects Department

Gut reaction: "Vunderbar! George Lucas always delivers when it's time for the "gorgeous spectacle" scenes in a Star Wars film!"

(Excuse me, my Germanic ancestry was suddenly coming to the fore. Some other time, I'll let my Russian or Italian or Cherokee or other brand of ancestry take the reins for a moment. I'm a product of the notorious American "melting pot.")

My Germanic ancestry may have been particularly stirred by the feeling toward the end that we were witnessing a scene (the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker lightsaber duel) that seemed rather operatic in the Wagnerian tradition. The music playing in the background supported that impression. The fact that they were fighting in the vicinity of a river of flowing lava (I think that's what it was) added to the feeling that they were in some sort of larger-than-life struggle in an infernal environment. (The fight began in a sort of city that someone had built overhanging the river of lava, for no clear reason - possibly the designers were working on the plausible theory that this insanely dangerous environment was the last place on this planet's surface that anyone would ever come looking for a secret hideout?)

There are actually quite a few lightsaber battles in this one, which is fine since I've always been a sucker for those things, ever since I was a wee slip of a lad watching the original Star Wars for the first time. Although I wasn't timing things with a stopwatch, I suspect this movie may very well have more minutes of lightsaber-versus-lightsaber action scenes than any other Star Wars movie; possibly even as many minutes as any two of the other five, put together. And yes, Master Yoda once again gets to prove that there's still life in those old bones!

For once, we had the major space battle, with zillions of moving objects of all shapes and sizes zooming around, in the opening sequence of the film, instead of toward the middle or the end. Still looked good, though.



02. "We All Know Exactly How the Major Players are Going to End Up” Department

In some ways, this movie was just what I expected. Like everyone else and his brother, I walked in knowing that Obi-Wan, Palpatine, Darth Vader, and Yoda will still be alive a couple of decades later at the start of the original trilogy, although Darth Vader will have been badly scarred by some horrible experience and stuck in a life-support armored suit. That meant, for instance, that I knew none of the guys I just named would manage to kill any of the others in lightsaber duels in this one, although virtually every other person affiliated with the Jedi organization would presumably be toast before all was said and done - or would implicitly become that way sometime in the next few years, already dead and buried long before Luke Skywalker ever started studying the ways of the Force. I wasn't wrong.

It was a bit reminiscent of some experiences from my teenage years: Reading the play "Oedipus Rex" for the first time in one high school class. Reading "Romeo and Juliet" all the way through in another class (with the teacher also showing us the 1968 film adaptation directed by Franco Zeffirelli). Reading other stories where I also know it all ends in tears because the stories have become so famous that I know approximately what I'm going to get before we ever reach the climax of the plot. A really great writer (Shakespeare, for instance) can pull that off because he really makes you care about the characters and desperately hope that it won't turn out the way you've heard it turns out. He also impresses you with his smooth use of language. George Lucas isn't that much of a wordsmith, but by and large he managed to give me a "satisfying" two hours of entertainment despite the inconvenient fact that the surprises were more in the nitpicking details of how things happened rather than in what happened to any of the major characters from the previous two episodes.

03. Clueless Villain Department – “I could stick to my own decision like a sensible leader . . . or I could arbitrarily change my mind for the sake of the Holy Script!

Newly introduced villain General Grievous, leader of the Droid Separatist Army, orders his troops to kill Obi-Wan at one point – then, a few seconds later, after Obi-Wan has jumped around a bit, but before anyone has fired a single shot, the General suddenly changes his mind for no apparent reason and says he’ll deal with the Jedi himself! (While his army of heavily-armed flunkies just watches?. Somewhere along the line he has completely missed the point of being a general in command of a big tough army. It’s not to pretend you can win all your battles in single combat, Champion versus Champion. Although Star Wars has always had a habit of tacitly pretending that a Big Bad Guy fighting a Big Good Guy, one-on-one, is in fact the proper way to settle a dispute involving billions of people on each side from industrialized societies with heavy firepower. It makes no particular sense, but it's much more dramatic, and I've certainly gotten used to it!)

The General has a metal body, but also has coughing fits during his dialogue, which is downright peculiar. I mean, I didn’t think droids even breathed to begin with, what with their total absence of lungs and all that . . . so what is causing his electronics to make that awful noise? Did he skip his last oil change?

04. (Lack of) Political Science Department

At one point, Padmé asks if it’s ever occurred to Anakin that perhaps they are on the wrong side; perhaps the Republic is no longer the champion of freedom and democracy that it once was. Anakin says in annoyance, “You sound like a Separatist!”

Does she? Surely there were other people in the Republic who exercised their right to complain about the current way things were being run, but didn't say they intended to become card-carrying Separatists just because they saw a need for reform instead of pretending that the Status Quo was Utterly Perfect?

Come to think of it, just what did the rank-and-file Separatists believe? What do they think they're fighting for? Did they simply say, “Nyah nyah nyah! We’re quitting the Republic and you can’t stop us! And we'll kill you to prove it!” or did they have a more elaborate and well-reasoned agenda for their actions; maybe even plans for organizing their own, brand new central government on a visionary basis? We, of course, have the huge advantage of knowing that the top leaders of the Separatists are actually the obedient puppets of Chancellor Palpatine, who (as we have known all along) is secretly Darth Sidious of the Sith in his spare time, and has only set them up as straw men so that he may "save the galaxy" by then using his executive powers and his newly-built military forces to crush them flat. But even the leaders didn't know exactly what he had planned for them in the long run, and any grass-roots-level separatists presumably didn't know or care that their rebellion was serving Palpatine's agenda, but honestly believed in Separatism for their own reasons (which, of course, are never explained to us, so it's very hard to gauge how "moral" their political platform was).

(Incidentally, what we saw of the workings and bunglings of the old Republic in The Phantom Menace left me doubting it ever had been half as great as its apologists fervently insisted it was, but still . . .)

There was the obligatory lip service to the idea that Democracy is Good, but no one seemed terribly interested in analyzing what had gone wrong to make Palpatine's increasingly dictatorial approach actually popular with the Senate. They had elected him Chancellor, and sometime before this movie begins they had voted to beg him to stay in office after the normal term had already run out, and they had kept voting him increasing amoutns of unilateral executive authority and funding for a bigger and bigger professional military and so forth. If Democracy is so great, why did its chosen representatives keep drifting further away from it and not getting voted out of office by their constituents on their various home planets?

05. (Lack of) Female Heroism Department

Yeah, yeah, I know, you still remember fondly seeing Princess Leia throttle Jabba the Hutt with that slave chain he thought would look so good on her (which gave her a beautiful opportunity to ironically kill the male chauvinist pig as he deserved, while simultaneously titillating the male chauvinist pigs in the audience as they got to watch her move around in her metal bikini. Talk about having it both ways at once, George Lucas!)

And you even liked Padmé's demonstration of "aggressive negotiation" in the final battle sequence of Attack of the Clones. So you were hoping to see some more heroic action from her or some other butt-kicking female in this final installment of the epic.

Dream on! Padmé's important role in this movie can be summed up in just a few imperatives:

1. "Be madly in love with your secret husband, Anakin, and continue to have faith in him to the right thing, even when no one else does. Complain to him about the nasty trend of Chancellor Palpatine's growing power, etc., and then watch him ignore you."
2. "Be pregnant, and let him obsess over it as he keeps having prophetic visions of you on the verge of death as you go into labor, so that he can get all twisted out of shape, psychologically, over what he might be able to do to prevent it."
3. "Other than successfully carrying twin babies to term, don't you dare accomplish anything in this one, girl!"

I admit that I would hate to see a pregnant woman overexerting herself in gunfights, martial arts displays, etc., as part of a Star Wars film. Did George Lucas introduce any other female character this time to substitute for Padmé with an impressive action hero (or action villain) role during any of the battles? Not that I noticed, no. Granted, with some of those Wookies who got to rush forward during a battle scene, I was none too sure of gender, but as far as humanoid females go, there wasn't much to see.

06. Old Familiar Faces Department

There are a few bits set on the home world of the Wookies. I had read about that months ago, and promptly forgotten. As Yoda is leaving their homeworld after a battle, he calls one of the Wookies Chewbacca. If he hadn’t said that, I never would have known that was Chewbacca. (What can I say? All those Wookies look alike to me!)

It still gets a trifle disturbing to see all the people who know each other way back when and then never reflect that in the original trilogy. Obi-Wan and Anakin (Darth Vader) at least cop to knowing each other in Episode IV, but we never see either of them express the faintest recognition of R2D2 or C3PO from the good old days, do we?

On the plus side, while we did see a few Gungans in at least one scene, I don’t recall Jar Jar Binks getting a single line of dialogue at any point in the movie. He may have been one of the (nonspeaking) Gungans I mentioned, but I couldn't tell for sure. As with the Wookies, they all look alike to me!

07. Midi-Chlorians and Prophecies – Was there a POINT to all that stuff? We’ll never know!

There was a mention of the midi-chlorians in dialogue and I was promptly thinking, “Oh, no, no, no, no, NO! George, you were doing so well until now on that topic – you never even referred to the little critters in Attack of the Clones! I hoped you had learned your lesson!”

It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, though. I think the word “midi-chlorians” was mentioned just once, gratuitously, for old times’ sake, and then mercifully disappeared from everyone’s dialogue again, and a good thing, too! If we grant that the Force works for the Jedi, then whether or not the midi-chlorians are essential in making it work was a detail that had no perceptible influence on the plot.

Granted, there were other mentions of the old idea that according to some silly old prophecy taken seriously by at least some of the Jedi Council, Anakin had clearly been meant to be the Chosen who would “bring balance to the Force.” Beyond that single phrase about bringing balance, the exact wording of the prophecy was never provided. The presumed meaning of “bringing balance to the Force” was never defined. The source of the original prophecy was never named. The established hit/miss ratio of any previous prophecies among the Jedi, from the same source or a similar one, was never mentioned. (Although Yoda and Obi-Wan eventually seemed to concede that this particular prophecy was scoring a big fat zero or else had been terribly misinterpreted; take your pick!)

So we don’t know where the prophecy came from, why anyone ever took it seriously in the first place, why “bringing balance to the force” was supposed to be such a great idea, or how they “knew” the Prophecy referred to Anakin for that matter. You know, when a prophecy is supposedly at the center of a policy decision, I expect to hear a bit more about the nitty-gritty details of it than that!


08. Fade to Black so we Don’t See the Gory Details Department

Once again, Anakin Skywalker kills a whole bunch of children – offstage, thank goodness. If he has to kill them at all, I admit that’s the way to do it. We didn’t get to see him kill all the younger members of that Sand People community in Attack of the Clones, and we don’t get to see him kill the rising generation of candidates for the Jedi (kids collectively referred to as the Younglings) either. But we know it happened from the way one scene ended.

09. "Thou Shalt Not Kill in Hot Blood," Except When the Holy Script Says "Thou Shalt Kill in Hot Blood." Learn to tell the difference, Young Jedi!

Since this happens in the first sequence of the film, I don’t think I’m ruining anything by saying that Count Dooku is disposed of in the early scenes of the film. Anakin and Obi-Wan come at him together, lightsabers flashing. You remember how badly that turned out in the final scenes of Attack of the Clones, of course. Once again, Obi-Wan gets knocked down and gets intimately acquainted with the local floor while Anakin tries to carry the ball alone. And this time he does. He chops off Dooku’s hands with one deft move, and then Chancellor Palpatine, allegedly a helplessly restrained prisoner, starts urging him to finish Dooku off. Anakin chews on it for a minute and then does exactly that.

Afterwards, Anakin feels guilty about it, saying something to the effect that Dooku at that point was already "an unarmed prisoner" and standard operating procedure demanded taking him back to stand trial in a civilized fashion, or words to that general effect..

I blinked. A trained and experienced Jedi Knight, good or evil, missing a few extremities or otherwise, is not an “unarmed” anything. To illustrate what I mean: At the moment Anakin polished off Dooku, Obi-Wan Kenobi was flat on his back, unconscious, trapped underneath a heavy piece of metal that Dooku had dropped on him. And as I recall, Dooku didn’t drop it on him by slicing through support cables with a lightsaber; he dropped it on him through the sheer power of mind over matter; i.e. using the Force. The injuries Anakin had just dealt Dooku did not change his ability to do the exact same thing again anytime he felt like it. In the real world, if you disarm and handcuff a prisoner and then toss hin in a maximum-security cell and throw away the key, you render him fairly harmless. But if powerful, murderous, telekinetic criminals existed in the real world, we might need to reexamine our standard operating procedures for how to deal with them.

The idea that Jedi are not supposed to kill their disarmed prisoners - allegedly not even Dark Lords of the Sith prisoners - comes up again later under circumstances I won't reveal. It still didn't make much sense.

Funny thing – I don’t remember Qui-Gon saying to Obi-Wan, as they confronted Darth Maul at the end of The Phantom Menace, “Remember, my Padawan, if at all possible we must disarm him, capture him alive, and take him back home to Coruscant to stand trial. If we kill him in the heat of the moment we are liable to lose ground to the Dark Side of the Force no matter what how dangerous he obviously is.” Even though they initially seemed to have the bad guy outnumbered two to one, I saw no particular sign that they would feel particularly guilty about it if they just killed him then and there. And after Qui-Gon got killed and Obi-Wan had to do the job single-handed, looking pretty darn annoyed at the fate of his mentor as I recall, I sure don’t remember him trying to just give Maul a flesh wound and then slap handcuffs on him . . . nor did the members of the Jedi Council reprimand him for his "evil," "vengeful" slaying of an adversary.

(Harking back to the original trilogy, let me put it this way: So Luke Skywalker blows up the entire Death Star, with I don’t know how many thousands upon thousands of relatively innocent rank-and-file Imperial workers aboard, at the end of Episode IV, and that’s a just cause for celebration. Yet if he had killed notorious mass-murderer Darth Vader in single combat at the end of Episode VI in a fair fight between two soldiers on opposite sides of a war, that theoretically would have meant he was in danger of losing his soul and turning to the Dark Side?)




It was better than I was afraid it would be, though not as great as I might have hoped for. I figure four stars is about right. Better than average, but not making as powerful an impact upon me as the first Star Wars film did. (Granted, I was just a wee slip of a lad when I first saw that one.)




10. The Closing Credits Department

I'd skip this one if I were you. The meat of the review is already over and done with!

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith was written and directed by George Lucas. He would have done well to hire another writer to produce or rewrite much of the dialogue for him, while following his general plot outline, but evidently he preferred to do this one all by himself.

Beyond that, here's the list of "credited" actors and their roles, according to
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/fullcredits

Ewan McGregor .... Obi-Wan Kenobi
Natalie Portman .... Padmé
Hayden Christensen .... Anakin Skywalker
Ian McDiarmid .... Supreme Chancellor Palpatine
Samuel L. Jackson .... Mace Windu
Jimmy Smits .... Senator Bail Organa
Frank Oz .... Yoda (voice)
Anthony Daniels .... C-3PO
Christopher Lee .... Count Dooku
Keisha Castle-Hughes .... Queen of Naboo
Silas Carson .... Ki-Adi-Mundi & Nute Gunray
Jay Laga'aia .... Captain Typho
Bruce Spence .... Tion Medon
Wayne Pygram .... Governor Tarkin
Temuera Morrison .... Commander Cody
David Bowers .... Mas Amedda
Oliver Ford Davies .... Sio Bibble
Ahmed Best .... Jar Jar Binks
Rohan Nichol .... Captain Antilles
Jeremy Bulloch .... Captain Colton
Amanda Lucas .... Terr Taneel
Kenny Baker .... R2-D2
Matt Sloan .... Plo Koon
Peter Mayhew .... Chewbacca
Rebecca Jackson Mendoza .... Queen of Alderaan
Joel Edgerton .... Owen Lars
Bonnie Piesse .... Beru
Jett Lucas .... Zett Jukassa
Tux Akindoyeni .... Agen Kolar
Matt Rowan .... Senator Orn Free Taa
Kenji Oates .... Saesee Tiin
Amy Allen .... Aayla Secura
Bodie Taylor .... Clone Trooper (as Bodie 'Tihoi' Taylor)
Graeme Blundell .... Ruwee Naberrie
Trisha Noble .... Jobal Naberrie
Claudia Karvan .... Sola Naberrie
Keira Wingate .... Ryoo Naberrie
Hayley Mooy .... Pooja Naberrie
Sandi Finlay .... Sly Moore
Katie Lucas .... Chi Eekway
Genevieve O'Reilly .... Mon Mothma
Warren Owens .... Fang Zar
Kee Chan .... Malé-Dee
Rena Owen .... Nee Alavar
Christopher Kirby .... Giddean Danu
Matthew Wood .... General Grievous (voice)
Kristy Wright .... Moteé
Coinneach Alexander .... Whie
Mousy McCallum .... Bene
Michael Kingma .... Wookie (Tarfful)
Axel Dench .... Wookiee
Steven Foy .... Wookiee
Julian Khazzouh .... Wookiee
James Rowland .... Wookiee
David Stiff .... Wookiee
Robert Cope .... Wookiee

Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older