revenge of the fan

revenge of the fan

WARNING: SPOILERS

I went to see the Revenge of the Sith the other day. I suppose I should go with the good points of the movie first.

It was visually stunning. The obligatory opening space battle sequence was damn near vertigo-inducing. There were lots of pretty colours, particularly in the various light saber battles. There were lots of those too: Anakin versus Count Dooku (ObiWan was taken out of the battle early), Yoda versus Palpatine/Sidious, General Grievous versus ObiWan, Palpatine versus Mace Windu, Anakin versus ObiWan, Yoda versus a couple of clone stormtroopers... basically one light saber duel after another throughout. General Grievous weilding four simultaneously against ObiWan was kinda cool; the two he spun in front of him were making little hash marks in the floor as he advanced. The battle between ObiWan and Anakin was fun to watch too, with much flailing about that would have gotten a real swordsman killed in microseconds.

Now, the bad points. There were holes in the script big enough to drive a Mac Truck through.

In the opening battle sequence, the fight continues from space fighters to a light saber battle onboard Grievous's command ship, where Grievous and Dooku hold Senator Palpatine "captive". After Dooku's death, the ship gets hit and starts to plummet to the planet below. The orientation of the ship means that the elevator shafts are now parallel to the surface of the planet. Anakin leads Palpatine and the inert ObiWan down a elevator shaft - with Anakin and Palpatine walking in the now-horizontal shaft quite normally, even though Anakin, Palpatine, and the ship are all in free fall.

The ship gets righted by use of emergency boosters, whereupon the elevator shaft rotates to its normal vertical position, causing the trio to fall: after a stop that ought to have torn Anakin's shoulder from the socket, they are captured.

When brought to General Grievous in the bridge, a light-saber battle ensues. Grievous breaks the glass and is sucked out into space, saving himself with a quick application of some sort of anchor. During this sequence, Anakin and ObiWan are clinging for dear life to a railing as hurricane-force wind blows past them through the open window. Seconds later, the integrity of the window is restored with no explanation; we don't get to see any blast-shield or force field or anything like that. One second they are in danger, the next they are fine. Anakin pilots the crippled ship to the surface of the planet; the reentry tears the ship in half, but the window destroyed by Grievous and magically replaced without explanation holds up to the temperatures and stresses of reentry.

Anakin and Padme continue their secret love affair in Padme's glass-walled penthouse apartment, in view of millions of other windows. The Jedi remain clueless. They are apparently clueless as to their own cluelessness: ObiWan chastises Anakin with such lines as "Only the Sith think in absolutes", disregarding the entire point of all six movies (the struggle between good and evil, which are sorta absolute). Anakin too reflects this cluelessness, killing Dooku with the words "you are too dangerous to live", but slicing off Mace Windu's hand when Windu says the exact same line to Palpatine. All the Jedi (with the exception of Yoda) are equally clueless about the murderous intent of the clone Stormtroopers, and all die (or in ObiWan's case, nearly so) without so much as a whimper. At least this has been consistent throughout the six movies: the Jedi are clueless. ObiWan in particular is daft; by the time of episode 4, he has forgotten completely about R2D2 and C3PO, and by episode 5 needs to be reminded that Luke has a twin sister, even though he was present at their birth.

The final battle between ObiWan and Anakin further demonstrates George Lucas's complete ignorance of the laws of physics and the practice of engineering. No engineer worth his salt designs anything without failsafes: if one computer goes down, an entire multizillion dollar lava mining complex should not simply collapse into the lava. Anakin and ObiWan fight their way off the disintegrating complex, ending up on hovering thingys that move mere inches from the surface of the center of a flowing lava river, without breaking a sweat. At the end of the fight, Anakin lays several feet away from the edge of the lava flow, where it is much cooler, and yet bursts into flames. ObiWan has been fighting with Anakin this whole time, cool as a cucumber.

At the end of the movie, Lucas once again demonstrates that he has no idea how to end a movie. It is almost as though he realized that he still had a hundred different things to throw in to tie the prequel trilogy into Star Wars IV, so he threw them all in there in the last thirty seconds.

So, was it an enjoyable movie? Hmmm... yeah, I guess so. It was all right, as long as one is willing to really suspend disbelief.

It would have probably been better had I viewed it on DVD though; some idiot in the theatre thought it was funny to shine a laser pointer at the screen every few minutes. If I had seen who was doing it, well... after the fourth or fifth time, I was ready to kick some asshole in the teeth.

Robot Guy rating: three Death Stars (out of five).

UPDATE: Maya has an even better review, with more spoilers.