Just got back from seeing the movie. It was much, much, better than the last two, but it still left something to be desired, especially in the Anakin/Padme scenes. It's still like those two have never acted before.

I saw it at a midnight showing Wednesday night (well, technically, Thursday morning). Didn't expend any energy, no waiting in lines, etc. Wasn't gonna put that kind of effort into it because my expectations were pretty low. We just showed up about a half hour before showtime, bought our tickets, and walked in....

The movie met my expectations in some ways. Slightly exceeded them in others.

Good:

- Visually stunning. Perhaps the most visually impressive movie I've ever seen. Better than all previous Star Wars films. Very spectacular.

- Incredible sound production. Very visceral soundtrack, everything was tangible and real-sounding.

- Opening space battle is the best one ever put on screen. The first 15 minutes of the film are some the best action sequences of all the Star Wars films.

- Some of the action sequences later in the film are fantastic as well, nearly matching the opening sequence. Completely brilliant.

The above is enough to justify the ticket price, so I'm happy. And I recommend everyone go out and see it, just for what I've listed above. But...

Bad:

Lucas still can't write or direct his way out of a paper bag.

And the people he cast in the leading roles, bless their little hearts, can't act to save their lives, either.

First, a recap: Last movie, our protagonists were supposed to fall in love. We never saw it happen. We saw them TALK about it happening, but we never actually SAW THEM BE IN LOVE. Nothing in their actions, dialogue, expressions, or voices conveyed to me that these two were anything other than paid to stand next to each other and say words. There was some stuff on the cutting room floor that was supposed to show us more of that. Lucas took some flak for not leaving those bits in the film.

Well, in this movie, he tried to answer that criticism. Stuff that otherwise would have been on the cutting room floor stayed in this time. Because it was all more-reasons-for-them-to-be-in-love stuff.

But he missed the point.

The point wasn't to show us all the REASONS they were in love. It was to SHOW THEM ACTUALLY BE IN LOVE. Something he seems to be incapable of doing.

And the same thing happened with Anakin going to the dark side. We have endless scenes of Anakin and the emperor TALKING ABOUT going to the dark side, and we have lots and lots of plot devices pushing Anakin that way, but we never actually SEE HIM turn. We never connect with that part of his character. It never ends up on the screen.

The movie plays like a freaking checklist. Lucas is checking off every motivation that Anakin's got for going to the dark side, and when the checklist is complete, Lucas waves his hand and says, "Poof. You're a Sith."

So what you end up with in this film is a lot of yawn-inducing scenes where Lucas is completing his checklist, interspersed by some fantastic action pieces. Go see it for the action, go get popcorn when people start talking. You'll do OK.

Aside from the fact that you guys seem to be implying that the people in this movie can't act in any movie, not just this one (well, Hayden Christensen isn't one I'll defend), I agree. As for the dialogue, as usual I turn to Ebert to summarize better than I could:

Quote:
The dialogue throughout the movie is once again its weakest point: The characters talk in what sounds like Basic English, without color, wit or verbal delight, as if they were channeling Berlitz. The exceptions are Palpatine and of course Yoda, whose speech (voiced by Frank Oz) reminds me of Wolcott Gibbs' famous line about the early style of Time magazine: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."

In many cases the actors are being filmed in front of blue screens, with effects to be added later, and sometimes their readings are so flat, they don't seem to believe they're really in the middle of amazing events. How can you stand in front of exploding star fleets and sound as if you're talking on a cell phone at Starbucks?

"He's worried about you," Anakin is told at one point. "You've been under a lot of stress." Sometimes the emphasis in sentences is misplaced. During the elevator adventure in the opening rescue, we hear "Did I miss something?" when it should be "Did I miss something?"

But overall, I thought his favorable review was pretty accurate.

I agree with almost all of your litany of "bad". The really unfortunate thing is that it is supposed to be a movie about the fall of Anakin, and, as such, should be about the person. And the fact that he was unable to really show us instead of telling us is embarassing. I think the one scene that most points out is inability to do that was the beginning of the final confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin, where they each restate the theme of the movie like three times. Lucas is so confused about how to show us what's going on that he feels it necessary to tell us three times in a row.

On the other hand, I disagree about the special effects to a certain extent. The opening battle scene was cool, and I know that battles are supposed to be chaotic, but they way it and many of the other battles in the movie were shown, it was very closely choreographed, but then there was so much going on that you couldn't make heads or tails of it. What I'm trying to say is that if everything was running around willy-nilly, and I didn't follow everything, that would have made sense, but in these battle scenes, there was little to no chaos, but the sheer amount of information on the screen was overwhelming, and not in a good way, I think. It was certainly technically impressive, but not really conducive to telling a story.

Also, many of the SFX shots in the less grandiose portions of the movie were really bad. Virtually every time you see C3PO walking, it's like he's floating, never quite putting his feet on something concrete. Every time you see the head clone take his helmet off, it's really stiff, like an in-engine video game cinematic with an actor's head pasted onto the body. Many scenes were obvious green screens; the one that pops to mind is Owen and Beru looking into the distance at the very end of the movie, though there were many others. At one point, I saw some stairstep aliasing on a live actor, one can only assume from poor use of a digital camera. (Though the digital camera mistakes rife in the last movie were largely not there in this one.)

Oh, and a lot of the dialogue was looped, and they obviously didn't work very hard to match the actors' mouths with the new dialogue.

Yoda felt less like a flea on crack in this movie, but his lightsaber battles still felt wrong. I finally figured out a way to put it: Yoda and the Emperor are both too powerful in the ways of the force to use something as gauche as a lightsaber. How much more interesting were the fight scenes featuring either of them when they put down their lightsabers? Or the way Yoda dealt with the guards?

The beginning of the movie, the infiltration after the space battle, I thought was the best part of the movie. It felt a lot like the old movies. Namely, it had some humor in it, and not fart jokes. Towards the end of that segment, they started going over the top a little, but it was nice to see someone having some fun in that universe again.

Another thing that made it feel like Star Wars again was the fact that so much of it took place in large spaceships. It didn't occur to me until I was watching this one that that was one of the elements missing from episodes I and II.

Now, my wife read the novelization and was disappointed that a lot of the political beginning of the Rebellion was cut out. And apparently the turn to the dark side was more well fleshed out in the book.

All that being said, though, I'm far from disappointed in the movie, and I was quite disappointed in the last two.

Much of this is shown in the Clone Wars animated series. Overall I like the movie. It would have been better if they did cover anakins fall more in depth, but well it just wasnt there. I was really impressed with the imagery and didn't notice all the things you pointed out (probably will on the next few viewings.

I saw it Thursday night. I'm by no means a Star Wars fanboy, but even without knowing every single detail of all the movies, it was obvious to me that Episode III was all about connecting the dots in the series, and less about making a great movie. Of course, Lucas had painted himself in a corner with the way the series came together, so there were certainly a lot of loose ends to tie up... But I think they should have concentrated more on making this, the last film, as enjoyable as possible, and I don't think that was the focus.

First off, let me get the good out of the way. I thought the interplay between Obi-Wan and Anakin was great. The two actors seemed to have great chemistry, and at least for those scenes, Anikin's emotions seemed real and believable. I did enjoy the special effects; they did a good job of making the ships, planets, etc. close to how I remember them from the original Star Wars movie.

Yoda was definitely a highlight. I personally think it's fine that he and the Emperor fought with lightsabers, that's consistent with the rest of the series, and I think the fights would have been boring if it was just force wind versus force wind, or whatever it's called. Yes, the moments when they used force powers were cool, but if they weren't in the context of a lightsaber battle, it'd probably look kinda lame.

Now, the bad... The worst part of the movie for me, bar none, was Natalie Portman's performance. If there's a winner for this year's "Sofia Coppola Empty, Wooden Performance Award," it's her. Which is odd, because I thought she was the only good thing about Episode I. Then again, maybe even that notion is just a perspective problem because the rest of Episode I was so bad... Anyway, I think she was horrible in this movie, had *zero* chemistry with the actor who played Anakin, and even when he wasn't around, she brought nothing to the movie.

The other part of the movie that really irritated me was that, no matter how much I tried to suspend my disbelief, it could not accept that Anakin had reason to go to the dark side. I understand the sequence of events that led to it, but, even after making the snap decision to kill Windu, and even with his desire to keep Padme alive by whatever means, they didn't create enough of a sense of darkness or hunger for power to make that transition believable, to me at least. When he went into the Jedi temple and started hacking up kids, I just felt like they hadn't done enough to set that moment up. (Note: I didn't see Episode II, so if he was "going dark" in that movie, this complaint is less relevant.)

Anyway, the worst part is, even though it seems to be entirely a connect-the-dots movie, they didn't even do that well. The death during childbirth of Padme was garbage. She died because "she lost the will to live?" And had the same fate as Anakin's mother? Please. Besides, Leia remembers her mother in the original Star Wars film, and it's hard to remember your mother when she dies right after naming you.

All in all, it was a pretty entertaining film, definitely better than Episode I, and by all accounts, the best of the prequels. But it's kinda sad that none of the three could come within shouting distance of the first three films in terms of believable characters, story development, dialogue, and overall entertainment.

So, what does Lucas do next?

I really liked it much better then ep's 1 and 2. And I was REALLY glad jarjar didnt have a single line this movie he annoyed me.

In Episode II, hew slaughtered a huge number of sand people because of the death of his mother, who they kidnapped and killed or something.

Speaking of JarJar, I noticed that the trade federation guys no longer had broad Chinese accents.

There were still some annoying voices and otherwise too recognisable accents. Though mildly humourous, I didn't really like the human emotions/silliness given to the battle droids. It's ok when R2 lets out a few squeels, but having droid after droid go "uh oh!" and "Oops" and "Oh no" just got very tiresome.

It was a technical marvel of digital compositing and post production, but not much of a movie. An enjoyable sit-down where you can just let your brain relax, it lacked a believable plot as has already been pointed out (Anakin's role could have been phoned in and there was very little motivation evident behind his actions). The biggest missing piece of the pie was story. There simply wasn't one. This movie, even more than the first two lacked in that department. It was just a series of brief one-on-one conversations strung together with explosions and other special effects shots. The villians seems far too weak (Doku lasted about 30 seconds, General Grievous a little more than that - what useless enemies). And even the Emporer didn't seem like a very strong match for Yoda - it just seemed like Yoda gave up because of that one fall. "Time to go into Exile."

I can't imagine the proposed TV series being any worse on the story front than this movie. Who knows, the TV series may very well breath some much needed life into the prequels. And if ratings keep up, we already have a verbal promise from Lucas that he wouldn't be at the helm after the first season - only good can come of that.

I still rank this movie below all three of the originals. And Empire still number one over all.

Bruno

It did occur to me that while the theaters are likely to be packed the first couple of weeks, at least they'll be packed with people who actually want to see the movie instead of people who came in to talk to their friends or have conversations on their cell phones. In other words, the Star Wars fans are more likely to shut the hell up.

Did anyone else think that the duel between Windu and Sidious was in slow motion?

I think that my girlfriend described Anakin's "rushed" fall best when she said "...I'm glad Lucas did it poorly bacause I adore Anakin's character. It all happened so quick that Anakin and Vader seem like separate characters. So in my eyes Anakin is still good."

I wasn't as attatched to the character as she was but her piont was valid. One minute he's on his keester proclaiming "what have I done?!?" and the very next words out of his mouth are "I pledge mysefl to you my master." Sort of bi-polar if you ask me.

Overall good movie, I liked it much better than Cats, I'm going to see it again and again. But the dialogue ruined it for me.

Actually, any chacter can do whatever Lucas wants them to do. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes down to crunch time. You can even see established "facts" fly out the window (established story elements, character background, etc..) And I'll just say it again, it's just apparent that the least amount of time spent on these movies was in development of the story arch, detailed plot and without question, the script (more notably the dialogue). Add to that extremely poor direction (not cinematography and certainly not art direction) and you're left with an audience wishing the actors had also been computer generated (on top of the other 99.9% of the movie that existed only in a computer).

I'm a Star Wars fan - check my basement sometime. I enjoyed all three prequel movies. But they all had tremendous faults and in each year they've premiered there have always been a number of movies that have been much much better (The Matrix in 1999 for instance). I don't know if anything if going to beat out Ep3 for FX overload, but there's no question there will be a number of titles this year that will use perhaps more subtle or less effects, but provide a "better" overall movie experience.

I'm NOT a George Lucas fan.

Bruno

I just saw this posted on another BBS and just about wet my pants. What can I say- I'm a sucker for bad puns and puppets.

Not really on topic for Episode III, but I just had to share STORE WARS with you folks.
Enjoy-
http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

[Mark and SWMBO collapse with laughter]

(Thanks!)

I can't wait to take that into work (a grocery store) next week! That was great!

Hahahahaha... Thai Fighters... That's classic.

Heh- Chewbroccoli... I just love it.

Glad you guys did too-

I have that stupid cowboy lizard sound effect stuck in my head. Dammit!

-Zeke

Seriously, when the droid army get personality, and why does it matter? The robot sarcastically saying 'You're welcome.' to Grevious? That and the Tarzan yell as the Wookies swing onto the amphibian droid. Why why why? Things like that serve only to deflate what little dramatic tension there was.

Padme was written too weakly. Her line about 'liberty ...(dying) to thunderous applause' would have been much better if she hadn't been so wishy washy, just going along with Anakin when he sides with the emporer.

Still, it was good eye candy and certainly didn't suck. Lucas has lost the touch & timing that brought us the 'Bad dates.' line in Indy.

-Zeke

I was watching a documentary the other day that pointed out something that I don't think I realized before, which is that when Lucas resigned from the Director's Guild of America due to the fact that they didn't like him having credits only at the end of the movie (something that's wildly commonplace now), he was barred from hiring DGA directors to direct his movies. That meant that he couldn't hire his first choice for Empire, Spielberg.

It makes me wonder, though, if Spielberg didn't work uncredited on Sith. He was noted as having worked on some storyboards, but I wonder if his input wasn't more than that.