film, eyeballs, brain

It took me all of three evenings to try to finish Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, one of the more unwatchable movies I’ve seen in a while. More like “Revenge of the Shit”, actually.

It’s a shame because this is the one episode of the series that had the most potential in terms of character development, because it’s not just get-the-Princess-to-the-Hidden-Fortress, but about a psychological and emotional turning point in the series, i.e., how Darth Vader came to be. (In fact it could have been easily subtitled “The Seduction of Anakin Skywalker”, and that just might have been a far more interesting film.)

Instead, the last temptation of Christensen is dealt with in a couple of dispensable scenes, dripping with fake, obvious portent, and with many sideways glances IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN: “This Jedi had the power to prevent death NUDGE NUDGE.” “You can learn that power, but not from a Jedi WINK WINK.” And so on.

We are at least rewarded with the little thrill of recognition at the end: “Look, there’s the Death Star!” “Look, it’s the dark helmet!” “Listen, it’s that heavy breathing!”, but, like love, it’s fleeting, and takes up only a sixteenth of the screen time accorded to an increasingly ludicrous lightsaber fight on some collapsing big iron thingie at some planet that looks completely uninhabitable because it’s, like, made of fire, and at this point I can’t even remember why Anakin went here in the first place, and how Obi-Wan managed to track him down, and later on they still manage not to behead each other with their lightsabers or get burned despite the thin clothes they are wearing or slip into the lava or fall off those tiny scraps of metal they’re actually surfing on or get beaned by any of the countless hurtling balls of fire, probably because they’re not just any kind of Jedi, they’re Jedi Masters, except one is Lawful Good and the other is slowly turning into Chaotic Evil, which probably explains why one turns into Alec Guinness and the other into barbecue at the beach.

The acting is uniformly terrible, and it’s indicative of the film’s level of acting that Yoda is the most humanly expressive of the characters. If this were a different film, the actors’ delivery might be called “mannered” — but the context of this film obviates such magnanimity. The humorless, artless dialogue lands with the proverbial thud, and those bleeps you hear in the background is the sound of ATM buttons being pushed, as a group of generally able actors — MacGregor, Portman, Smits — deposit their paychecks. Even the beloved Samuel L. Jackson is reduced here to further a plot twist we knew was going to happen anyway. Couldn’t George Lucas have at least let him get away with saying something like, “You’re Darth Motherfuckin’ Vader?” That would have made me happy.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Hayao Miyazaki, "Howl's Moving Castle" (2005).
2. Christopher Nolan, “Batman Begins” (2005).
3. Tim Burton, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005).