Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
That disturbance you felt? It was me, finally closing the gap between II (which I saw
in 2015) and IV (which I saw
in 1977).
A co-worker of mine was incredulous that I'd never seen this movie (please forgive him, he's relatively new and doesn't know about my ...
condition), so we did a movie swap. I gave him a movie to watch, and he had me agree to finally watch
this movie, which I actually managed to do relatively unspoilt...except for all the memes, of course. Unlike
Clones, this movie actually manages to have and stick to a main plot around the fall of the Republic and rise of the Empire. There's a lot less silliness in this one than either of the first two, probably because this is where everything takes a rather
Sidius serious turn, and also because there are so many pieces that have to be set up onto the board and properly arranged before we can finally get into IV.
Now I know I said this is better than II, and I stand by that assertion, but "better than
Clones" isn't really
that high of a bar to clear. This movie has serious pacing issues. From the moment the crawl disappears, everything unfolds in order, sure, but each scene plays out like those point-and-click adventure games from the late 80's/early 90's (
Torin's Passage,
Kings Quest,
Leisure Suit Larry, etc). Scene follows scene in the same order as the storyboards, but many of the scenes play out very ham-handedly. Not woodenly, just...it's as though they were being told to move from pose to pose and hold each one long enough for the audience to fully enjoy it before moving on to the next one.
The plot is decent, and I was able to follow it well enough despite my previous comments. The Sith (the authoritarian group dismissively scheming and wielding their RED lightsabers) work their behind-the-scenes campaign to sow distrust against the Jedi (the democratic group espousing restraint & cooperation and wielding BLUE lightsabers--except for Mace, of course), culminating in a coup that destroys and/or renders all the Jedi irrelevant while Padmé opines, "So this is how Liberty dies--with thunderous applause." It almost feels like there's some kind of message to be had in there, I dunno. Ian McDiarmid does a
fantastic job with his speech here, btw. The only way it could be more on the nose would be if he had delivered it in black & white. In fact, somewhere between half- and two-thirds of the way through (somewhere around the time Anakin makes his big decision), this film actually starts getting surprisingly good. The cinematography dials in, the acting starts to flow
much more meaningfully, the actors begin to actually ACT, and of course John-
EFFING-Williams comes through with a leitmotif or three to presage what's coming.
It was a good enough movie, I suppose, but I think the movie I am going to remember going forward will be a better movie than the one I watched, by which I mean that my memory of the movie is more going to be of what I thought they were going for rather than what I actually saw on the screen.
--Patrick
