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May 22, 2005

Psssssst! Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader!

In which I try to talk about the new Star Wars movie without ruining it for people who didn't make it on opening day

I suppose there was at least an off-chance I wouldn't see Revenge of the Sith on opening day. Like if they lost all of the copies of the film that were supposed to be shipped to New York. Or if I managed to contract the Ebola virus. Given my current circumstances (those being "Man of Leisure who's been reading every article/ review of the new Star Wars movie as I basked in the radiance of my recent graduation from b-school"), my general geekiness/ enthusiasm for the Star Wars thing, and the fact that I'd seen both previous prequels on opening day despite being gainfully employed, my attendance at a Sith screening was pretty fait accompli.

Right. So we got tickets, day of, for the 7:15 showing on the IMAX screen (which is pretty much the best ticket to get). Whoa. We were shocked; shouldn't we have had to sleep in a tent for a week in our Stormtroopers costumes to get those sorts of tickets? Nope. Our final ticket was purchased through Fandango at 4:30 in the afternoon. No hassles, no worries. And though the theater was pretty full, it wasn't sold out. (I imagine this has something to do with Sith being released on four screens at every multiplex in America this weekend. But still.)

At the risk of ruining it (and I'll try really really hard not to), some reactions to Revenge of the Sith:

It's A Good Thing When They Tell Us That The Bad Guys Are Going To Win: The Empire Strikes Back remains the best movie of the six, in no small part because it was so dark. Han gets frozen, Luke loses half his arm, Darth seeks partial custody of Luke, and the rebels have to turn tail and get the eff out of Dodge. And the best part is that we knew it was going to happen ahead of time. As noted in the title, the Empire struck back. Same thing here -- you know ahead of time that the Sith are going to have their revenge, but you just don't know how much revenge. (SPOILER: It was a lot of revenge. A lot.) Even before I saw a single frame of Sith, I liked that they were telling us the bad guys were going to win. Excellent track record there.

Most Lightsabers Ever!: inasmuch as "George Lucas has enough money that he can make whatever goddam movie he wants and no one can tell him otherwise, even if it means we have to sit through Jar Jar Binks for two hours," I do feel like he's gotten some feedback from the previous two films and applied it as he went along. More specifically, I feel like there must have been a lot of focus group talk about how people really really really liked watching lightsaber fights. Episode 1 had an awesome lightsaber fight at the end, but only really that one big one. Episode 2 not only had a sweetdaddy lightsaber fight at the end (Yoda!), but also a gigantic multi-Jedi, multi-lightsaber fight on Geonosis, as well as the cool shot of all the Jedi kids with their Yoda/ child-sized lightsabers. Sith is all lightsabers, all the time -- lots of duels, lots of fights, and new lightsaber-wielding dudes. The people asked for lightsabers, and the people got lightsabers. LOTS of lightsabers.

Speaking of Lightsabers...: though there were lots of lightsabers in this one, they didn't debut any new designs or colors. No Darth Maul double-sided model; no new color like Mace Windu's purple one. Our crew was actually pretty bummed about this: why not a yellow (like Luke had embedded in his arm in the original Kenner action figure)? An orange? Also, when is someone going to tell me what the colors mean? Why do the Sith roll with the pink? A friend suggested that when you change sides of the Force, your lightsaber should automatically change colors (like in Tron!). NOTE: see here for the best answer I could find; this is also worth clicking.

And One More Thing About Lightsabers: not to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT!), but it's not as sweet to watch a lightsaber fight when the lightsabers are the same colors. Ack just saying. I will now stop talking about lightsabers.

A Very Complicated Cartoon: they're pretty restrained with the space battles in this one, which, at this point, is a good thing. Whereas once upon a time Star Wars movies had the market cornered on spaceships whizzing around and shooting ray guns at each other, at this point digital effects are cheap enough that there were moments when the opening space battle looked pretty much exactly like Battlestar Galactica on Sci-Fi. Even the designs of the ships. Pretty lame. (I think it might have been all the shadows on the ships in this one that made it look like Battlestar Galactica. I think.) Though I did enjoy seeing the inside-the-ship details of cannons firing and things blowing up as two gigantic ships flew past each other and fired at each other broadsides/ old-timey-naval-battle style. Also, perhaps due to the IMAX, I definitely had that cool vertigo effect as the ships dove and twisted. That never gets old for me.

Obi Wan Is Actually Really Good At Being A Jedi: I guess we always knew that he was pretty good at being a Jedi, but he kicks a lot of ass in this one, and seems to do a much better job of fighting than lots of the other Jedi (some of whom seem to have pretty low levels of Jedi powers).

Speaking of the Jedi: without going into it too too much, I definitely feel like I get the Jedi a lot more now. That is, I see where they're coming from, why they have their rules, and what they're trying to do. Also, whereas in previous incarnations they seemed pretty infallible/ unkillable, it was cool to see how they could screw things up too. And they totally screwed things up. So they're not perfect either.

Speaking of Getting Things More Now: whatever one will say about George Lucas and these stories (the dialogue is atrocious, he has no idea how to write a love scene, etc.), you really have to hand it to him in re: plot. As in, as boring as the first two movies could be with all their politics and nonsense, he really pulled the whole thing together with Sith: the first two movies make a ton more sense now, and the earlier three actually do have a legit backstory. It's actually very satisfying, epic scope and all that. Tin ear for dialogue, blah blah blah, but he knocks the plot thing out of the park.

Proto Toys Everywhere!: so, I know this is just a serious geek sort of thing, but, errr, I, errr, thought it was really cool how all the ships/ toys in this movie looked like variations on the ships/ toys from the original Star Wars movie. As in, they showed us a lot of ships/ toys that were supposed to be the earlier models of the ships/ toys from the original three movies. Yeah. I totally ate that up.

SPOILER: Anakin Is A Cheap Date: without offering too big a sequence on this topic (since it's essentially the central issue in the film: "How did Anakin become Darth?") or ruining too much, I think I can safely say that while I understand the reasons why Anakin became Darth, I don't think said reasons were effectively communicated by the dramatic narrative of this film. That is, I could write them down as a a little list, and they are all satisfying reasons that resonate with what we know about Anakin's history and personality as well as the more general things we know about the Jedi, but I don't think the film really hit it on the nose. And that's pretty big, since it is the Big Question in the whole six-movie series. They could have used another scene on the topic at the very least (assuming that the actors and dialogue weren't going to improve in the existing scenes). I'll stop now.

Some Coma/ Amnesia/ Secret Twin Sort Of Thing: so when they say "Darth Vader" for the first time, a teenaged girl in the row behind us gasped and started whispering to her friends. At first, I thought she was trying to be funny in a "DUH!" sort of way, but the volume of whispers exchanged between she and her friends indicated some splainin was happening. This girl didn't know that Anakin was Darth! I mean, that isn't a geeky sort of thing; casual observers of pop culture should have a pretty decent chance of knowing why we're following this Anakin guy around. Or, at the very least, you expect that the sort of person who shows up for opening night of the final Star Wars movie would know who Anakin was. And that's when I realized that there is a subset of kids who probably go to opening night at the multiplex every single weekend regardless of the film (the same girl was probably at the House of Wax the week before). And that's why I don't go to the movies so frequently.

The Verdict: you know, I guess I was expecting the Single Greatest Movie Experience Ever That Would Rekindle My Childhood Wonder At The Marvels Of Star Wars; I didn't get that. Parts of it were weak, parts were slow, and the CGI doesn't look special anymore. All that said, I really enjoyed the film. Things make sense for me now, and I understood everyone's emotions. This one was just a lot more heavy/ serious than any of the others, and it actually resonated with me -- I guess I was invested enough in this universe that the emotions worked. The bad guys won. By a lot.

If I had to nail down a single reason why this one worked for me (certainly more than the other two prequels), it was that each of these movies has left me really fired up to find out What Happens Next. That is, I wanted to continue with the story and see how things worked out. None more so than this one -- the ending was long and serious, and there were a lot of corpses on the ground by the time the credits rolled. As noted, the bad guys had won, and I was pretty disappointed about it (as said bad guys were pretty evil/ awful dudes). But instead of waiting three years for another prequel, I now get to watch the rest of the story unfold immediately on my Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi tapes. And that's pretty sweet. They should have been selling the DVD Boxed Set in the lobby. Seriously. I would have bought it right there.

So there you go: Star Wars movies make me want to watch more Star Wars movies, and this one made me like the ones I have even more/ purchase new copies of things I already have. Makes sense to me -- good work, Lucasfilm.

(Or maybe that's just the Force talking....)

Posted by thatkid at May 22, 2005 6:21 PM under Stuff To Buy

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