Art La Flamme put a lot of effort into reviewing all six Star Wars movies. We got to twittering about the Jedi and whatnot, and I told him I would repost my review of Revenge of the Sith, to counter his very creative review.
This was originally written May 20, 2005, about three minutes after returning home from seeing the movie:
So. Where to begin. I’m kind of giddy right now and waaay overtired and I’m just going to ramble on, hit save and go to bed without editing or proofreading anything.
First, this: I am not going to sit here and pick out the flaws and bitch about continuity. And yea, the dialogue was mostly horrid, but I knew that going in. I expected no less. The acting? I don’t think Hayden Christensen is going to win any Academy Awards in his lifetime.
I went into this movie expecting several things. Mostly, though, I wanted a line to be drawn from A to B, A being Anakin Skywalker and B being Darth Vader. And I got it.
I loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was everything I expected and more important, everything I wanted. It was exciting and dramatic and emotional and dark.
Do you want to know how much of a geek I am? I can’t believe I am going to admit this here. When the opening scroll started and the music began I actually teared up. I swear to you, there were tears in my eyes and I almost, nearly started crying. And I’m not the only one. There was a palpable sense of relief in the theater when the scroll came up. Like everyone sighed at once. Finally, our questions answered. The closure. The scroll and the music is the beginning of the end, and it’s very bittersweet because you know that once the movie starts, you’re on your way to it being over. Not just the movie being over, but the whole Star Wars saga that you spent 28 years of your life thinking about and talking about is over.
I thought they did an excellent job of explaining the transformation of Anakin to Vader. It made perfect sense to me. Palpatine played on Anakin’s sense of love; his love for Padme and his love for power and Palpatine knew that the love of power would grow and eventually dwarf the love for Padme once Anakin got a taste of it. He knew that Anakin was afraid of Padme dying so he fed him all that bullshit about bringing people back to life to get him interested in what the dark side could do, and when he had his interest, he went for the kill by making him angry with the Jedi Council. Because what feeds the dark side? Anger. That’s why Palpatine told Anakin it was he who killed Padme- he would be consumed with losing the thing he loved the most (a recurring statement of sorts in the movie) and that anger and rage would make him even more powerful and fearsome.
When Anakin finally, really becomes Vader – not in that cheesy naming scene, but in the scene where he’s being fitted with the Vader parts and helmet – when he takes that first breath and you hear James Earl Jones’s voice for the first time, and he takes that stiff step (pure homage to Frankenstein there) – goosebumps. I mean, the whole theater just sucked in their breath and waited for it and when he did the Vader breathing and then the voice, you could just feel it, like tension being let out. A bunch of people even applauded and I know why they did. Because there it was – the culimination of the wait. Go back to what I said in a previous post:
I know what’s going to happen in this movie, I know how things are going to turn, how they are going to go bad, and while I can’t wait for that clank sound in my head, when it will be like two train cars hooking together, when everything makes sense and one film flows into the other, it will be both satisfying and sad.
Exactly. Just like I imagined it. Everything came together. I don’t know how else to describe it and for anyone who is not a huge Star Wars fan, the moment won’t mean nearly as much. But for those of you who, like me, invested 28 years in waiting to have the connection made on film, it’s an amazing, spine tingling moment. But yea, it was sad, too.
The whole movie was beautifully played out – the lightsaber battles (Yoda ROCKS) and the emotional tug of war, and that one scene where the rebellion happens – it was so reminiscent of the Godfather (if you’ve seen both movies you’ll know exactly what I mean) and I thought that whole scenario was very powerful and sad, in many ways. And seeing how Anakin gets so defeated in the lava scene, and Obi-Wan just standing there, watching him suffer like that, that was a really sad and powerful scene, too.
Yes, there were a lot of hokey parts. When she names the babies as they come out, that seemed just weird, and Vader’s cry of NOOOOOO, and “hold me like you held me on Naboo.” Ugh. But those moments were fleeting.
And on that now infamous NOOOOOO scene, I think people are kind of overplaying the gack effect of it, because you have to think – it’s not that he’s just pissed that Padme is dead or even that he killed her, I think the cry is one of anger at himself, at knowing the transformation is really complete and he is now a monster. Which we all realized when he killed the kids in the Jedi temple. My son gasped when that happened. A lot of people did. Sure, he’s Vader, but kids? Younglings, rather. That’s what they called them. Cheesy, I know. Anyhow, I guess it that “noooo” yell was some kind of catharsis, because we all know that after that (in subsequent movies) he seems to rather enjoy being Vader.
I love this movie. I can’t decide if it’s going before or after Episode IV in my rankings of SW films. I’m going to see it again Sunday night and I’ll decide after that. But it definitely goes before Jedi.
I love this movie.
Some day, when this one comes out on DVD, I am going to watch all of them in one sitting, in the proper order. I think a lot of people will. Viewing the story as a a whole piece instead of parts of a whole will be novel. George Lucas may be a lot of things, but he is best at being a storyteller.
Thank you, George Lucas. I hate you, I still do. But thank you.
I love this movie.
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My god, I’m a geek.
And just to touch on something I said to Art about the Jedi, I found a post I wrote ten days after I first saw the movie that sort of sums it up:
So after sitting through my third viewing of Revenge of the Sith, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Jedi suck.
Really, they piss me the hell off.
