And yet, it's just so much better. It's even actually, positively good, I think. Though it's hard to think of it that way when you're watching Hayden Christensen's Anakin (a little worse than in Attack of the Clones) and Natalie Portman's Padmé (much better than in AOTC) laboriously intoning the most asinine love banter known to English-language cinema:
Anakin: "You are so... beautiful.So with that in mind, where do any of us get off calling this the best prequel? Having pondered it, I think the answer looks something like this: think of the overall story arc that the prequel trilogy has to cover. If you were going to describe it one sentence, I bet that sentence would look akin to this: "arrogant young Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker succumbs to the Dark Side of the Force and becomes Darth Vader, the most iconic movie villain this side of the Wicked Witch of the West". Now think of how that concept maps onto the prequels as Lucas wrote and filmed them. Notice how that arc takes place solely within Revenge of the Sith - Attack of the Clones exists to set up one whole plot thread ("Anakin loves Padmé") that could have been fitted into the opening ten minutes of a movie, and The Phantom Menace includes not one single plot point that isn't re-introduced in Attack of the Clones and then re-re-introduced in Revenge of the Sith. Hell, Sith's best character-driven scene exists in part to execute some Phantom Menace damage control. So basically, everything this trilogy promised is bunched up entirely within just the third movie. It is, bluntly, the only prequel where shit happens - and that, I think, is why it seems so vastly superior to two films whose worst sins it largely replicates.
Padmé: "It's only because I'm so in love."
A: "No, it's because I'm so in love with you.
P: "So love has blinded you?
A: "Well, that's not exactly what I meant."
"Gnaw gnaw gnaw" - Me, escaping by chewing my arm off
(It's not even a great prequel: it does a terrible job of patching the holes made by the first two movies, and the idea that Star Wars is 20 years in the future is impossible to square with some of the things we see, especially the already under-construction Death Star. And it calls undue attention to how arbitrarily and unpersuasively C-3PO has been placed into this trilogy at all. But at least it successfully showcases Anakin's fall, something Attack of the Clones badly failed in attempting to initiate).
Also, unlike either of the other prequels, Revenge of the Sith starts off really damn well, with what I think to be easily the best opening ten minutes of any of the first six Star Wars films. After the expository crawl fades into space - a remarkably bad crawl this time, too, with foggy expressions and no clear sense of what the hell is going on: "There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere" at least fails to include the phrase "taxation is in dispute", but it has a kind of Euro-nihilist lack of commitment, like Lucas thought it would be fun to let Tarr Béla write a Star Wars crawl for a moment. It also really sharpens how bizarrely the series has seen fit to color in that simple reference to "the Clone Wars" way back in Star Wars; giving us the horribly contrived and confusing lead-up to the war in Attack of the Clones, the brisk wrap-up here, and no sense of what the hell the actual Clone Wars were, except in the from of Genndy Tartakovsky's lovely 2003-'05 Cartoon Network series Star Wars: Clone Wars, by a fucking huge margin the best thing released in the Star Wars media empire between 1999 and 2005, unless I'm forgetting a really top-notch video game. Clone Wars does everything Revenge of the Sith badly needs to do: explain the stakes of the war, make them exciting and flesh out the many Jedi and a couple of villains who distinguished themselves in the conflict. It's inappropriate how much more satisfying Sith is with Clone Wars in the background - I have no patience for franchises that bury actively important canon material in tie-in media, and Star Wars has been unusually bad about that, down to the present day. That being said, Clone Wars is the real essential viewing here, and Revenge of the Sith is primarily useful as its sequel.
AFTER THE EXPOSITORY CRAWL FADES INTO SPACE, the camera angle does the thing it does in Star Warses; it tilts down to follow a spaceship. And up pops the most intense and crazed vision of space warfare ever filmed. As John Williams's score mercilessly thumps out a base note over and over again, we see the operatic grandeur of Industrial Light and Magic operating at the very peak of their capabilities in 2005, with dozens of ships and God knows how many individual moving objects crossing over each other in three-dimensional space (why is it so fucking hard for space movies to remember that space is three-dimensional? Revenge of the Sith nails it, anyway), while the simulated camera blitzes through and around the action for a gloriously protracted take. It's a hectic, violent ballet of movement between beautifully-designed ships (nowhere is the three films is it more apparent in visuals how the world of the original trilogy develops from the world of the prequels), with Williams throwing out exhilarating action music mixing and matching themes from all five previous films beautifully. It's rousing and intense, and the fact that it's more or less literally a cartoon doesn't hurt it, since we almost never seen human faces interact with CGI.
I put it that way because there is an exact specific shot where the film goes off a cliff, and it's right when we do so humans in a CGI space for the first time, as Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin Skywalker flip out of their fighter ships and into the docking bay of a much bigger ship, and their flipping is accomplished by sinfully bad effects work - I'm not sure if the whole CG budget was spent on the opening, but it's alarming how crummy most of the effects in Revenge of the Sith look. And it's not just dated CGI: it's noticeably worse than the three-years-older Attack of the Clones. Just compare the two films' rendering of Yoda.
From that momentum-killing shot onward, the film is one of the most perfectly mixed bags in the annals of popcorn movies. Some of it is is truly, unmissably great - moments as extraordinarily enthralling in their garish pulp magic as all but the best parts of Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back. Some of it is hilariously awful, and some of it is awful enough to not even crawl up to the level of hilarity. Sometimes it's both of those at the same time. I think of the scene where Jedi master Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson, given something remotely worth of his time and talents for the first time in three movies) confronts Supereme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), now revealed to the characters to be Lord Sidious, the prime mover of all the evils of the trilogy; the initial confrontation between the two is nervy and tense, and then Anakin shows up and, for the sake of driving the plot, makes dumbass choices that are exactly contradictory of what he was doing the very last time we saw him, and the screenwriting announces its contrivances in a way that just rips the scene in two. Plus, the godawful make-up used to turn Palpatine into a corrupt being of evil - the Oscar-nominated make-up, the only time this franchise scored in that category and also the only Oscar this movie was nominated for - makes his face look like a big grey butt. And it is stupid and silly. But then Palpatine flips his hood over his buttface, and suddenly, just like that, he's the immensely creepy, croaking wraith from Return of the Jedi, and its phenomenal.
Really, I guess what I mean to say is that Revenge of the Sith is inordinately sloppy. That's burned right into Lucas's script, which is a crazy, almost incoherent array of stuff happening, sometimes at the same time as other stuff which is cross-cut together, and sometimes you think "but that stuff could only occupy, like, an afternoon, while this stuff appears to cover days if not weeks, so how are they happening in tandem?" It is a film that defies summary: every other Star Wars film has a plot that, in a pinch, you could reel off in a sentence: "Luke and Han team up to save Leia from a giant space station, which they then destroy"; "Obi-Wan uncovers a plot to create a clone army while Anakin falls in love with Padmé". Even The Phantom Menace, a grisly misfire of a scenario, is basically "Qui-Gon helps Padmé escape from the Trade Federation, and then helps her lead a fight against it". There's no single-sentence plot synopsis for Revenge of the Sith; there's not even a multi-sentence synopsis that doesn't involve charts and diagrams.
On one hand, this is of course bad. But it does at least mean that Revenge of the Sith gets to be active and busy, two adjectives that do not apply to either The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones in any way. Wait for a few minutes and something cool will happen, if just for a few shots; and those shots are, I might point out, usually stitched together very well. Ben Burtt returns as editor from Attack of the Clones, this time alongside one Roger Barton, and his game has been upped considerably. With something like nineteen different subplots all running around to be interleaved, the film has some really lovely internal correspondences, with action flowing across locations and characters in a beautifully fluid manner that's really much too nice for a film as generally boneheaded as this; it's legitimately some of the best cross-cutting of the 2000s, and it provides Williams with some outstanding places to work his scoring magic. Revenge of the Sith has a score that is predominately made up of pre-existing material - the one new major theme "Battle of the Heroes", is unexpectedly weak, basically copying the structure of "Duel of the Fates" without its robustness - but the remixing is really quite incredible, especially the closer it gets to the end.
What power the film attains in its final sequence, which is honestly kind of dumb as hell - it's gloopy fan service tediously setting up all the bits and bobs for the 1977 film, storytelling logic be damned - comes from that music (and that editing, but mostly that music), ending in the best possible way: a statement of Luke's theme, the main Star Wars fanfare, that eases into a lullaby, and then into the Force theme to take us into the credits. Lucas may have intended for Revenge of the Sith to be the midpoint of the six films, but Williams knows better: his score definitively marks this out as a series finale, drawing down from all five earlier movies while making those familiar cues their own thing, and occasionally going someplace wholly different, as he does in the superlative "Padmé's Ruminations", a dark and pensive vocal piece underscoring a wordless scene as Padmé and Anakin stare across a reddened city at each other. It's the one place that "modern Williams" shows up to augment and complicate the prequels' resuscitation of "vintage Romantic Williams", and it is one of the sonic highlights of an already great score.
One could list just the things in Revenge of the Sith that are excellent and have quite a healthy collection of highlights: I'd hate to forget to at least mention the "Order 66" montage, in which Jedi are killed throughout the galaxy accompanied by yet another really astounding original Williams motif, or the shadow-dominated frames as Anakin enters the Jedi temple to commit murder leading into that sequence. And there is the astonishingly well-written meeting of Palpatine and Anakin at the space opera, a lengthy dialogue-driven scene that works entirely because of McDiarmid's icy, coiled-up performance, and the evocative details of the story he tells (rumor holds that this was Tom Stoppard's main contribution during an uncredited script polish; the fact that it's the longest protracted sequence of the film without at least one utterly ludicrous line supports that rumor). It's the least-characteristic moment in the prequels, maybe in all of Star Wars: drama coming entirely from people talking. And it might be the very best moment in the franchise where lightsabers aren't visible.
Focus on the good stuff, as I did for a decade (I was prepared to call this film better than Return of the Jedi before I rewatched it), and you'll have an infinitely skewed idea of what Revenge of the Sith has to offer. Every good scene is offset by a bad scene, and the performances of everybody besides McDiarmid and McGregor - who really amps up the Alec Guinness mimicry this time, aided by the hair and make-up department - are generally lacking (McGregor, for his part, is helpless with one of the worst lines in any tentpole in living memory: I have seen a security hologram of him... killing younglings", followed by the actor clamping his hand on his mouth in an obvious attempt not to laugh). The setpieces, other than the opening battle, are never better than adequate, undone by terrible effects and confusing angles much of the time, or even just by Lucas's flippant indifference to drama: the early scene on the bridge of a starship, where Anakin and Obi-Wan confront Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) is particularly appalling, undermined by insipid reaction shots of McDiarmid, and the worst lightsaber choreography in the series. It's a clumsy reiteration of Dooku's nigh-total uselessness to the films, dismissing him from the film abruptly and blandly.
The film manages to squander a seemingly limitless pool of imagination: the action on the Wookiee homeworld, which should have been a clear-cut highlight, is wasted on an unclear narrative structure for the battle; the spider-like droid General Grievous (voiced by Matthew Wood), wielding four lightsabers like a sci-fi blender gone mad, is a colossal waste of a concept, and impenetrably confusing to boot, with everything that makes him interesting as a villain left behind in Clone Wars.
But no matter how clumsy the film gets in building its story or executing its visual ideas, the thing that really hurts Revenge of the Sith is the writing of its characters. The cramped motivations are bad enough, and a clear sign that the previous two movies didn't do their job of building up the characters: Anakin's fall to the dark side doesn't feel like an inevitable outgrowth of his fears and tragedies, but a hurried series of inexplicable motivations (he's jealous of the Jedi! He's afraid for his wife! He hangs on every word of the guy who basically says "I am made of pure evil, wanna do evil with me? It's evilly fun!" and ignores his mentor that the script keeps insisting is his good friend, despite all of the evidence!"). The impression is that the only reason he turns into Darth Vader in this film is because Lucas realised that he'd run out of episode numbers before getting back to the original Star Wars. The film lacks a protagonist, and it lacks convincing character arcs: it's just a bunch of people racing through plot points as Williams's score pipes up to reassure us that this is all epic and grand.
The resultant film feels very enthralling and rewarding and appropriately Big; but dammit, if it's not a half-baked monstrosity. It has ideas spilling every which way, some of them working; it has dramatic images undercut by the laughable nonsense being said within those images (this film would be inestimably improved without dialogue). It is an emphatic summing-up of all the things Star Wars was as of 2005, dramatic and operatic but often totally ineffective. Even the messiness is so fearlessly personal that the film is always weirdly captivating, but making it through the outlandish crap to get to the great stuff is still a real chore. This is, maybe, the id of Star Wars; it's certainly what happens when George Lucas gets to do everything that crosses his mind with no kind of discipline or filter at all.
6/10
Hey, so how about that dialogue, anyway? I couldn't pick my favorite hilariously awful line, so why not help me out? Here are my top 15 worst lines, but feel free to write one in - it's an endless corncupia!
Reviews in this series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
All those bad lines of dialogue and no mention of "Nooooooooo!!!!!!"?
ReplyDeleteTim, what are your thoughts on Vader's birth? That part always makes me cry, not because Anakin realizes he murdered the only reason he turned to the Dark Side to begin with, but because it's literally James Earl Jones doing a Hayden Christensen impression.
ReplyDeleteOne of my all time favourite Kermode moments was in response to some inane apologist who they'd allowed to phone in :
ReplyDelete"Shakespearean?! It's not even Yellow Pages! It's barely English!"
Also worth noting how he contrasted the incompetence of this origin story with the supreme storytelling confidence exhibited in a certain other summin'-summin' in 2005.
I don't know if it's really right for me to vote, not having seen the film in like 8 years, but I had to throw in under other for the unfathomably hideous "Love won't save you Padmé. Only my new powers can do that". Though some of these provide some stiff competition.
ReplyDeleteAlso, and this is the most petty fucking thing but I noticed it when I had to copy-and-paste her name: Padmé's name has an accent over the ending vowel, despite being universally pronounced PAHD-may, which means that not only did I have to go to extra effort for the é, but that it's not even right.
*sigh* This movie was a lot better when I was 12.
We podcasted on this one a while back (http://twofriendswatch.libsyn.com/revenge-of-the-sith), and this may be the film for which I most closely align myself with Tim's position, and for broadly the same reasons - finally, stuff happens. Tons of stuff, much of it stupid, but it meaningfully happens nevertheless. I feel that the film just, barely, edges its way into the status of a "good" film by the skin of its teeth.
ReplyDeleteI have to say though, I'd be hard pressed to name any film where the lead performance is this deleterious to the end product - whether it's Christiansen, the direction he was given or the asinine dialogue he was required to recite, but when we get to the soliloquies at the climax where Anakin is ranting about "my... new... Empire!" it's hard not to see howemotionally harrowing his transformation could have been and wasn't. "Guy turns to evil in order to save his lover and is later made to believe that he killed her" is downright Jacobean. How do you fuck that up?
"unless I'm forgetting a really top-notch video game"
ReplyDeleteWell, there's the two Knights of the Old Republic RPGs. I particularly like the second one, which is about a Nietzschean elderly woman criticizing George Lucas.
While this movie could be considered "better" than the earlier two films, the fact that Lucas waited til now to begin moving the plot forward (as shoddy as it is) made me retroactively hate the other two films even more for being such colossal wastes of time.
ReplyDeleteRotS- a shining beacon highlighting how the whole prequel project was an enormous bowl of suck from the get go.
And, as Tim pointed out, the visual effects are really dodgy this time around. What's worse, they're ugly from a design standpoint. Whatever else one can say about The Phantom Menace, it has the best, most consistent FX in the prequel trilogy.
I still put this one just below The Phantom Menace, and I think that's mostly because it tried so hard to paper over its many deficiencies with heaping piles of nostalgia. Plus, the major son of the prequels' lightsaber duels, the fact that they look so choreographed, absolutely kills the last one. What absolutely needed to feel like two people trying to take each other's head off still just feels like a slightly aggressive dance.
ReplyDeletePlease tell me I'm not the only one who noticed the howling plot hole from the beginning of the film.
ReplyDeleteAnakin and Obi-Won are sent to get Count Dooku. Obi-Won gets knocked out, Anakin kills him rather than arrests him.
WHY DID NO ONE EVER ASK WHAT HAPPENED TO COUNT DOOKU?
Damnit, Visal sniped my suggestion. KOTOR forever!
ReplyDeleteDamn it, BOTH of you sniped me. Knights of the Old Republic II is, hands down, the best bit of Extended Universe material that exists.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which - when I first saw this I wasn't even aware that Tartakovsky's Clone Wars series existed, and boy does the film go to no effort whatsoever to explain who General Grievous is or what the hell he's doing there.
"...grandeur of Industrial Light and Magic operating at the very peak of their capabilities in 2005..."
ReplyDeleteNow stop right there. 2005 is the same year ILM provided the sublime VFX for Spielberg's War of the Worlds. That is ILM operating at the peak of their powers in that year. (And many others, to boot)
I had to go with "only a Sith deals in absolutes," because while all of these lines are clunky and inelegantly written, they're at least crudely functional in the intention they're meant to convey. This line, however, is not only bad, it's broken!
ReplyDeleteAlso, why is General Grievous more of a cartoon character in the film than he is in the cartoon?
ReplyDeleteWould it be terribly gauche for me to admit I actually quite like Dooku's "twice the pride, double the fall" line? Part of it is probably Chritopher Lee's delivery and the suave self-assurance he projects.
ReplyDeleteWhat a mess this film is. It succeeds at enough that I can't write it off completely, but it completely fails at what is nominally the point of the trilogy--providing a convincing Vader origin story.
ReplyDeleteLucas spent the first two movies dicking around, so Sith has to do all the heavy lifting. The problem is that I never once believed that Anakin Skywalker was the same character as Darth Vader. Not even when he was in the full regalia and voiced by James Earl Jones.
In the original trilogy, Vader was cold, controlled, casually brutal. This movie reveals that he became that way because he was a whiny child who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas. Not the same character at all.
But then, I can't deny the shiver that runs down my spine when Ian McDiarmid first uses that satanic lizard voice. Residual love for Jedi? Maybe. He's scarier in Jedi, that's for sure. I love that you brought up the horrible scar makeup, though. I always assumed in Jedi that he was just a withered old man held together by the power of the Dark Side. Actually, I'll probably continue to hold that opinion because it's unlikely I'll watch these damn prequels again.
I actually like the Sith lords are our specialty line.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry.
But, clearly, it's the Jedi are evil line. Holy fuck what?
Goddamn, but "Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo ... so long ago when there was nothing but our love" is DESPICABLE writing. And so is "Anakin ... you're breaking my heart!"
ReplyDeleteBut I remember "From my point of view, it is the Jedi who are evil" so much better, because at least Natalie Portman was halfway pulling off her lines. RIP Hayden.
My vote is for the inane non-sequitur of "It is a volcanic planet. You will be safe there."
ReplyDeleteAs for the movie itself, you're far kinder than I am. A quarter of the movie (Obi-Wan chasing after Greivous) could be excised with no great loss, the Clone Wars as a narrative point remains as confusing and meaningless as ever, Anakin's fall to the Dark Side strains credulity, and it's hard to build up a head of emotional steam when the aforementioned awful dialogue tends to derail any sense of immersion. This gets a 3/10 from me.
I would vote for "Only the Sith deal in absolutes", but it's far and away the funniest thing in the prequels, so I won't.
ReplyDelete"From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" is an appalling line, appallingly delivered, so I'll go for that instead.
Oh yeah, the bad dialogue vote. I picked "Not if anything to say about it I have." There are lots of bad lines in this movie, but only one of them is the "Arnold Schwarzenegger in Batman and Robin" kind of bad.
ReplyDeleteIf the previous two movies can be described as Start Warts put together by a man who's forgotten what Star Wars is supposed to be, is say this movie is the one where he remembered "I was supposed to have some Star Wars in these Star Wars movies" and crammed three movies worth of Star Wars into one without stopping to see if it worked for that moment. This is the best of the three because stuff finally happens, but in all honesty this should have been the slow one - the psychologically intense one.
ReplyDeleteThat opening battle does a great job of appearing of just why this whole series doesn't work - the bad guy has been kidnapped by the other bad guy who we know to be working for the main bad guy, so there's no stakes at all. Then let's off that bad guy pointlessly (I realize there was a thematic point but it's wasted), and give us another bad guy, General Greivous, who's hyped up and then immediately knocked down a peg because "oh, he's a coward, he'll always run away." All that work going into fleshing out and then disposing of now three villains over the course of the series and member actually going to the trouble of fleshing out the one violation we needed to see developed.
And then there's Palpatine's ascension to Emperor amiss roams of cheering morons. Imagine the real world analogue to this, the President of the United States saying "oh yeah, some people tried to kill me so I'm making myself dictator for life" while Congress screams their faces off in delight and celebration. It makes less sense than everything else so far combined, even if it does set up the series' single best line.
Add in the disappointing Wookiee battle and the way the Jedi all go out shot in the back like chumps, and this is the most disappointing of the three because it had so, so much potential to be great instead of just good.
"The problem is that I never once believed that Anakin Skywalker was the same character as Darth Vader. Not even when he was in the full regalia and voiced by James Earl Jones."
ReplyDeleteYep. The whole point--I thought--was to explain how Anakin became Darth Vader. But by the end of RotS, he's still nothing like Darth Vader. I can't picture him barking orders like, "Commander, tear this ship apart until you've found those plans, and bring me the passengers, I want them alive!" I think Vader is a natural leader, and Anakin isn't.
I have the impression that the prequels were less about Darth Vader and more about Palpatine's rise to power. Maybe if Palpatine had been the main character, it would have been more interesting. Like Richard III or House of Cards. Though even that story probably wouldn't need three movies to tell.
Most of the still baffling nature of the Clone Wars I can attribute to a failure of concept, but the development that really bothers me is Yoda's retreat from his fight with the Emperor. Every time I watch the movie I swear I must have missed something. Swinging swords, throwing shit, suddenly Yoda's scampers off into a tunnel and runs away. Does some timer run out? Does he sense something elsewhere is going on? Are CGI blobs failing to convey that the fight is totally one-sided? I've always just assumed he realizes he can't win, but a.) the action sure as shit doesn't tell me that b.) from a character perspective that's totally backwards: megawise Yoda runs into a fight he couldn't win? and c.) what the goddamn hell were the stakes of this fight???
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel is a good thousand times more entertaining than the Darth Maul ballet from Episode I.
I feel that I have to defend the "only a sith deals in absolutes" line as, at least, intentional. Lucas is many things, but I truly don't believe he's an idiot of the level it would take to realize that line is a contradiction. It may be clumsy, but a big function of the prequels is obviously to show us that the much-vaunted Jedi themselves can be frustrating myopic about their own issues, and Obi-Wan's line is in there just to drive the point home. There's a lot wrong with the prequels, not doubt -- and you can definitely argue that line is ridiculously on-the-nose... but you can't argue that it was some kind of mistake on Lucas' part. Unless you really do think that he's basically an illiterate who can't even figure out the basic meaning of the sentences he's writing.
ReplyDeleteI personally went for:
ReplyDelete"I have brought peace...freedom...justice...and security to my new Empire!" - Anakin
Though "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" is truly appalling in every way. Jesus, this movie.
However, I'd dare say the highlight of the prequel trilogy is HERE in this movie. The Anakin vs Obi Wan duel is, like the Darth Maul fight, a choreographed dance fight. But what a pretty dance fight! The red and orange violent background clashes well with the blue lightsabers. The John Williams music is grand and heaving and operatic in all the right ways. And most importantly, for very prolonged stretches of time, no one says a goddamn thing. And every single time no one says anything, the movie gets a ridiculous uptick in quality.
Then "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" happens, and I have to swallow all my words. Jesus, this movie.
For many, many years, I remembered the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight as being an all-time franchise highlight. Great music, emotional stakes, tensely choreographed with all those small platforms.
ReplyDeleteThen I re-watched it, and oh my God the CGI is bad. "Pierce Brosnan surfing down a tidal wave in Die Another Day"-level bad.
The thing that most aggravates me about "Revenge of the Sith", and it has not dulled one whit in the near-decade since its original release-is that the birth of Darth Vader, nominally the story this entire trilogy was essentially made to tell, is fundamentally botched at every level here. As you point out, Anakin's decision to help Palpatine at the critical moment, feels odiously unearned, and worse, once it's happened, the movie decides that's that and Anakin is 100% evil now; it's not an actual transformation, it's a damned switch being flipped, and so we go from Anakin reluctantly helping Palpatine defeat Mace (not even killing the dude himself!) to him unquestioningly murdering dozens of children. It's ridiculous. Then there's the actual Making of Darth Vader scene, which at first looks like it might stick the landing; the Frankenstein's Monster-esque set-up is cool, and the way Vader's Force Powers lash out as he fully awakens likewise works...and then he talks, and bless James Earl Jones' soul but he cannot make this tin-eared dialogue work, and the now-notorious "NOOOO!" completely kills the scene's dramatic stakes dead in their tracks at the critical moment.
ReplyDeleteAll of that said, I'm inclined to agree it's the best of the Prequels, though that really does feel more often than not simply a virtue of it being the least completely awful; if nothing else, I do appreciate that we get a good, full sense of the Clone Wars' actual scale, and some of the Dramatic Beats, like the Order 66 montage or the Obi-Wan and Anakin Fight (not the best Lightsaber Duel of the series by a long-shot, to be clear; not even the best Lightsaber Duel in the prequels by a long-shot, but there are moments in there that work exceptionally well, such as the two ultimately sensing each others' patterns so well that they make several waves of their sabers without actually striking), that actually do work nicely. Indeed, credit must really go to McGregor; the "killing younglings" moment really does die on screen, to be sure, but holy hell he no-sells Obi-Wan's grief at losing Anakin to the Dark Side; "I have failed you, Anakin" is the one moment in all these movies where I genuinely believed in the bond the script keeps insisting these two shared.
I hope you've brilliantly planned the timing of these so that you release your review of the Star Wars Holiday special next instead of, well, the other thing everyone's expecting.
ReplyDeleteAlso? "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" is my pick for Worst Line. Every other option, you can at least read as a failed attempt at wit or else unwieldy exposition, the kind of Bad Writing you can understand how others would fail to notice how bad it is. "From my point of view", though? It is impossible for me to understand how any actual human being wrote that, and how several more human beings let it into the final cut of the movie. It is just so obviously, transparently, obscenely Wrong at every goddammed level that there is no excusing or explaining it at all.
ReplyDeleteI had to choose "From my point of view, it is the Jedi who are evil!" but a close second for me is Palpatine's "POWAH! ABSOLUTE POWAAAAAAHHHH!". It's so bad it cracks me every time, especially Ian McDiarmid's performance there. Seriously that guy really enjoyed playing Sidious, and I have to respect him for that.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I love your comment about Gendy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars. Although it still suffers from having Obi-Wan and Anakin as protagonists (they're bad characters no matter what)and of waving lightsabers as if they were Christmas toys (seriously, even lackeys have lightsabers here), it still gets the spirit of the Original Trilogy very well. The Force is back to being the mystical universal life essence it was supposed to be, and it comprehends (and even explains) that lightsabers are more than just weapons. It even explains Anakin's downfall better by showing the brutality of the war he was fighting. Anyone would be driven crazy by that.
"Anakin, you're breaking my heart!" struck me as one of the very worst lines and line-readings I'd ever heard when I saw this movie in theaters, and has stayed with me ever since, so it had to get my vote.
ReplyDeleteOne of my biggest sticking points with this one has been the unceremonious offing of Count Dooku at the top of the show. He was never a good villain, a shameless copy of Saruman in Peter Jackson's LOTR movies, down to the casting of Christopher Lee--but he had presence, at least. He was preceded by a Satanic acrobat with four lines of dialogue, and followed by a four-armed cyborg Snidely Whiplash with a smoker's cough. This trilogy not only lacked a protagonist, it lacked a proper antagonist up until halfway through this entry when McDiarmid gets to be actively villainous.
I'm surprised you didn't comment on how bluntly the movie positions itself as an Iraq War parable, with Anakin as Dick Cheney. A pretty bad parable it is, but it's upfront about that in a way that Ewoks=Viet Cong never was.
I've only seen each prequel once - in cinemas - and do not remember almost anything about them. Even reading these reviews doesn't jog my memory. I count myself extraordinary lucky.
ReplyDeleteThough my masochistic side kinda wants to go back and revisit them... If only to make sure my expectations are even lower than they are now for the new one.
@Benjamin: Well, now that that cat's out of the bag, no, Anakin was Dubya. Palpatine was totally Cheney.
ReplyDeleteHaven't seen this one since it came out either. Speaking of an instant switch flip, I forget, had the newly Sith-led commanders already switched from the Republic's usual earth-toned wardrobe to the Empire's Space Nazi getup by the time Anakin became Vader?
You should consider a "wasted/missed opportunities" tag, Tim.
One more thing; as unlikely having the Death Star's construction take 20 years was, how much time elapsed between Empire and ROTJ? In other words, enough time for Death Star 2 to get three-quarters complete and operational?
Annnnd PS: I picked "No, no, no! You will DIE!!!" Even by the lower standards of the prequels, I would more expect to hear that coming from Ganon in that Philips CD game.
Well that's my logic, really. If three and a half years was enough to get Death Star #2 that far along, than even with "the second time you do something it goes faster" rules, I don't see how twenty years can conceivably have been required.
ReplyDeleteAnd we first see Nazi-style Imperials in the very same scene during the ending montage that the Death Star puts in its cameo, but not earlier.
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is just a straight razor of terrible, confused, contradictory writing.
ReplyDeleteMan I am starting to get really scared that I'm an alien robot or something because the "from my point of view" line doesn't bother me that much. Like, at least I get why someone had to say a line that conveyed that idea, which is the best one can hope for from Star Wars. Those Yoda lines though... "Not if anything to say about it I have"??? That's deleterious in a pretty "you'll watch my fucking movie and you'll like it so fuck you" sense.
ReplyDelete@Yourself: The key issue, I think, is not that the concept is inherently dumb but that that no reasonable person would ever phrase it that way. "You're wrong! It's the Jedi who are evil!", while not exactly going to be winning any Academy Awards, is a much more likely line; "from my point of view..." just undercuts who whole moment and the whole argument in a completely pointless and character-eroding way.
ReplyDeleteYoda picking up English idiom while still missing English SVO is unforgivable, though, yes.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to defend "from my point of view..." as intentional writing. It's delivered pretty awkwardly, but the point is obviously to mirror Obi-Wan's justification of "a certain point of view" for lying to Luke in Jedi. It doesn't really work in context here, but I think it does make Jedi retroactively more interesting, since Obi-Wan is obviously reflecting back on exactly this moment years later as he tries to justify his own lack of empathy for Anakin to Luke.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't mean it's a good line, or that it works in context. But, just like "Only A Sith deals in absolutes" I think it's disingenuous to claim it's simply thoughtless writing, it's obviously quite deliberate.
I suppose the fact that Revenge just keeps moving forward, filled with stuff, helps a bit, but I just found it to be so dreary and highlighted the problems with the trilogy as a whole. It was overstuffed, with too many ideas and plot devices that Lucas couldn't even use. "The Clone Wars" lasted approximately as long the U.S. invasion of Panama. If there was a "war" I certainly missed it. And then rushing to ensure Palpatine transforms into the Emperor and Anakin into Vader, so let's tidy it up in a 5 minute period with Anakin killing kids because then everyone can't question his evilness. DONE.
ReplyDeleteLucas spent the first two movies with expository setup of a convoluted plot and then realized too late that he had to tie everything up in a final 150 minutes, pacing and story development be damned.
The fact that the "from my point of view" is deliberate just demonstrates how thoroughly broken Lucas' storytelling happen to be. Why go for subtlety when you can just spell it out for the viewer and it will be so clear.
ReplyDelete"Why go for subtlety when you can just spell it out for the viewer and it will be so clear."
ReplyDeleteI mean, I'm not gonna argue Lucas as a do-no-wrong genius of storytelling, but let's be fair, this worked out pretty well for Brecht and a lot of other influential playwrights, and I don't think Star Wars has ever been a franchise renowned for its subtlety.
i do like that opening shot. "it's so dense, every single image has so many things going on" but in a way that it kind of works with the reveal. and in that one action scene we get a sense of a real partnership between anakin and obi-wan working together? maybe?
ReplyDeletethe moment with palpatine and anakin's conversation is cool too in the sense of where it takes place, some kind of space-ballet. is sidious a cultured guy? does he enjoy watching ballet, dance or theater in his free time?
but yeah, my overall feeling of the prequels is, a little less time waiting for george to approve creature designs and a little more retooling the script...
Revenge of the Sith is probably the best of the prequels qua cinema, but it's a joyless slog that is no fun for me to watch. The huge amount of airless CGI sets and the total dearth of memorable (for the right reasons) quotes make it feel the least like a Star Wars movie, and the entire film revolves around Anakin's rushed, forced character. The Phantom Menace may have lower lows, but it remembers that Star Wars films are ultimately pulpy space operas, and its whimsy still pushes it over the top for me.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Portman's visible struggle to sell the line about the lake on Naboo is much uncomfortable than watching Christensen lean into the one about his point of view.
I think the "point of view" line echoing with Obi-Wan in Return of the Jedi is no accident, and I can't say that my biggest problem with it is the line qua the line.
ReplyDeleteIt's that this is the absolute pinnacle moment of emotion in the whole of the prequel trilogy, the face-off that is the defining lynchpin of six movies, and Lucas gives Hayden "Woody" Christensen a line that simply cannot be spoken with any real passion. "From my" is a pair of words that no speaker of English can get through without having to choose whether they're going to slur it ("Fromeye") or brutally over-articulate it ("From. My."), and then the whole rest of the line is doomed no matter what.
E.g. "No! The Jedi are evil!" would be a hokey line, but it covers all the bases that the line in the final movie does, and has the benefit of being something that can be screamed.
Anyway, I voted for the "Lake on Naboo" line, with "Not if anything to say about it I have" as a close runner-up.
When are you going to review The Force Awakens?
ReplyDeleteT.Hartwell:I mean, I'm not gonna argue Lucas as a do-no-wrong genius of storytelling, but let's be fair, this worked out pretty well for Brecht and a lot of other influential playwrights, and I don't think Star Wars has ever been a franchise renowned for its subtlety.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but that was the point of Brechtian theater: to remind the audience that plays (and movies, as their spiritual successors) were artificial things, created with an agenda and designed to manipulate the audience's thoughts and emotions.
When someone spend millions in special effects and literal universe-building, I'd figure they're aiming for immersion, not alienation.
I'd almost consider paying real money to read a Brechtian defense of the clunky woodenness through all the Star Wars movies, though.
I'll never forgive Lucas for cutting all of the scenes that showed Padme was active in the political battles and schemes, choosing instead to reduce her to a damsel that hovers about the edges, waiting for her man.
ReplyDeleteThough to the movie's credit, she does get the only good line: "So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause."
This is kind of shameful but I'll say it anyway.
ReplyDeleteEnglish not being my native language and never having learned its grammar properly, I find all this gripping about bad dialogue a little funny. For me it's an "anything goes" situation. I never had much of a problem with any dialogue by Lucas.
Also, due to several circumstances, most people in my country (including myself for many years) have always seen, and still do, all movies and TV series dubbed. As you can imagine, they don't have Nobel prize winners translating them, and more often than not characters speak nothing like real people here do. I think everybody accepts it since childhood as part of the artifice of movies.
And yet, I'm mostly talking about form, and I should still be bothered by the content, I guess. Maybe I'm not too demanding.
But I wanted to point out, all those European and Asian art-movies that you love, spoken in languages that maybe you don't know too well, could have their share of awkward dialogue and you would probably never know it.
I think dialogue is only a vital ingredient of movies when you're doing comedy that depends on it to be funny.
There's one brief moment in Revenge of the Sith that is truly remarkable and absolutely stellar, and that is when the charred, ruined husk of Anakin looks, almost fearfully, upward at the Vader mask as it descends toward him. His eyes go wide. While a dirge-like rendition of the Imperial March plays in underscore, the mask lays over his face. The domed helmet slides into place, and the air hisses as the entire assembly seals. All the sound drops out for about a second. And then he breathes. That iconic sound, one of the most identifiable audio effects ever used in cinema, happens for what, in the context of that universe, is the very first time.
ReplyDeleteThis scene scene gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. It's chilling, and absolutely masterfully done. For me it is one of the most amazing movie moments of all time.