Saturday, May 28, 2005

Well, It Didn't Suck Completely

We saw Revenge of the Sith a couple of nights ago, and we half hated ourselves for wanting to go. Call it sentimentality on our parts; we were both still in college when the first Star Wars came out, and we wanted to hear the rest of the story. 25 years -- geesh!

Episodes I and II were almost embarrassingly bad, but I'm happy to report that Episode III didn't suck quite as much. Not that it was very good; it wasn't. If you're so picky as to demand halfway decent acting or an actual story line, this is not your movie. The love scenes were hilariously bad, and Greg (who is deeply proud of his Danish heritage) was rather embarrassed that any Dane could put on as execrable a performance as Hayden Christensen. Samuel L. Jackson was completely wasted in the movie; you kept hoping that he'd whip out his light saber and yell, "Yes, they deserved to die! You're daaaaamn right!" and then put the rest of those losers out of our misery (except for Ewan McGregor and R2D2).

If you like to play "Spot the Quote," this definitely is your movie, even if it makes you want to scream lines of dialogue and throw things at the screen, a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Some are so obvious it hurts, such as "I've got a bad feeling about this." Some might be unintentional, such as the fight scene between the Chancellor and Yoda on the floor of the Senate. The Chancellor hurls the Senate's seats at Yoda, and it the scene reminded me of Mickey Mouse controlling the waves as the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia. Oh, and I defy you not to think of Princess Di during the funeral scene.

However, the special effects were just plain cool, and I've always been a sucker for a good sword fight. When the DVD comes to the grocery store and land in the 99-cent rental bin, definitely pick it up on some Friday night along with the chips and salsa.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you think it's worth seeing if you haven't seen I and II? I thought the first one was so bad I couldn't even sit through it. I think I watched about an hour of it once when it was on one of the pay channels. I gave up on them after that and refused to see the second one. (BTW, I won't see the first and second just to make the third make more sense.)

blogdog said...

I have a friend who did (she works at Fox and went to an employees-only screening). She liked it well enough, though she felt it didn't bear enough resemblance to the original movie for it to matter to her.

That said, I wouldn't. Episodes I and II were a complete waste of 4 hours, and I don't know anyone who would be masochistic enough to watch those movies again just to make sense of the third.