FILM REVIEW – STAR WARS 3 -
REVENGE OF THE SITH
Though not 100% awful, at times it outdid The Phantom menace in the
claptrap stakes. Good points first 1/. Jar-Jar only appears briefly and keeps his gob shut. Why they didn't kill him for potentially the best cheers of any film is beyond me 2/. General Grievous was a great character, a wheezing, bronchial skulking figure that suddenly turns into Shiva in a sword fight reminiscent of Harryhausen movies. 3/. Anakin/Vader chillingly raising his light sabre for the off screen slaughter of the Jedi children 4/. Windu goes out the Wind-ow and off with the wind 5/. Yoda's set to with Palpatine/Siddeus, with the chamber-saucers crashing all over the place. 6/. The brilliant image of a young Grand Moff Tarkin at the finale 7/. R2D2 oiling the floor to waste attack robots -8/. R2 giggling when C3PO is sent for a mind-wipe
Now the bad stuff - 1/. Very poor CGI in some scenes, a/. Dooku's leap to the floor of the hostage room, b/. Various speeded up shots of various bodies crashing across room’s c/. Some light-sabre fights, in which the beams didn't so much move from a to B, but simply be redrawn arriving at the new position, so the transition from place to place had gone - this didn't look like fast moves, it
looked like a jerky film process from the silent era. 2/. Dooku gave a great fight to the finale of part 2, but gets killed relatively easily this time - rather anti-climatic 3/. Obi-wan gets into Grievance's hostage rooms alone all to easily. 4/. Yet again with so many Jedi, only Anakin and obi-Wan go on the most dangerous missions 5/. Some scenes were so over-cluttered with spectacle and detail it was impossible to focus. 6/. The main male leads gave extremely tedious performances - McGregor especially, 7/. The magnificent Normandy landing look of the Wookie scenes was barely glimpsed before the action moved off to other worlds - it may show more on DVD of course, 8/. The whole, it might be a trap notion… It was bloody obviously a trap!!!!!! Vader's clumsy awakening, like a parody of the Bride Of Frankenstein 9/. The volcano world was utterly stupidly over the top - Who in their right mind would build metal landing stages there, the whole edifice would melt away and the place looked so molten even being in fifty miles of it would vaporise you, - rocket fuel within feet of lava pits mmmmm The fight on metal crates in the lava stream looked ridiculous, Anakin's burning wasn't just potentially life threatening, he seemed to burn to ashes and come back like a vampire - Half expected to see Golum swim by waving to show off his shiny new ring 10/. The battle cat/Lizard looked too much like He-Man's steed in Masters Of The Universe; surely you'd get seasick riding about on that, 11/. Though r2 got a lot to do, c3po didn't and they hardly meet either, nor do we see much of Chewbacca - 12/. The reasons for Anakin taking to the dark side with such relish didn't make sense 13/. Thought Palpatine getting paranoid about the Jedi being out to get him was perfectly justified - they were!!! On the whole, a big sprawling mess - still let's look forward to Star Wars 3b - Luke, the Adolescent Years
Arthur Chappell