The Lair

Ok, so I’m finally going to act like all the cool kids and go watch Revenge of the Sith at the City Screen today. Along with planned high jinks at the El Piano afterwards. Should be fun. I’ll update this entry with a review of what I remember of the movie when I get back.

And yes, I mention what I remember because we may well adjourn to the Don’s place for more South Park episodes and more cider varieties from the local speciality shop. Unfortunately, due to a novice error with backups, hasty file deletions and the like, I discovered I’ve lost roughly a day’s worth of Jython code so I’ll need to get back to the department to catch up for lost work. Showtime in another hour and half or so, roughly. Start yer engines!

I am back from the cinema and lunch at a thoroughly enjoyable restaurant. Mellow, full and not looking forward to working. But oh, well. Onto the business, then. Other people have done reviews already, so I’m just not going to bother with the usual claptrap or plot descriptions, ok ? This is not a proper review. If you want those, go away.

There are minor spoilers ahead. If you don’t want to find out what happens in the movie (some details only), then stop reading. I warned ya.

All in all, the movie was worth watching. I would have gone to see it even had I heard everyone say it was one huge steaming pile of elephant dung, so I don’t know how much credence one should attach to my opinion. It was; to rehash the consensus opinion, much better than Episodes 1 and 2. Probably still not quite as good as the initial 3 episodes. But, there were lots of niggles and downright embarassing moments which reminded me that, after all, Lucas came into this movie on the back of two rather sad attempts at prequels.

First off, the initial rescue scene took waaaay too long. Somewhere inbetween, I was going… umm, er. what’s the point of this shit again ? Oh, never mind. The straw connecting the extra large paper cup of (fricking expensive) cinema hall Coke to my mouth was sucked on like a teat till the boring bits went on by. The caffeine in it just kept me awake, barely. Of course, the space battle scene was somewhat nifty and immediately reminded the Don of XWing vs Tie Fighter. Jar Jar Binks had no speaking part in this movie. Mesa not sure if I would have minded that, though.

The truly embarassing parts in the movie were any attempt by Anakin and Padme to conduct a dialogue without immediately sounding like a tacky Mills and Boon novellete. Or one of those porno movie dialogues. You know, the token attempt at conversation before the porno actors get down to what the audience really want to see ? Except that there was no explicit sex in this movie, so the conversation had to stand on it’s own. And it did that just about as well as an average person after draining a keg of Stella Artois. At this point, only having a stomach filled with (fricking expensive) cinema hall Coke saved the people in front from getting barfed on. And this is only because that (fricking expensive!) cinema hall Coke was way too (fricking expensive!) to barf away. But I digress. How did I get to barf from a movie ? Oh, right. Yeah. So, the only segment of dialogue which sounded at all natural was, shockingly, the part where Anakin goes off to kill the separatists. Minus marks for dialogue, but at least the waterfalls and mushy teen romance scenes from Episode 2 had been removed. The dialogue overall is terrible. Sorry. Making slurping noises into that (fricking expensive) cinema hall Coke won’t make you miss anything. And Rory says it better than I ever could. Funnier, to boot.

I know it’s been said, but the dialogue is just that bad. If the entire human race ran out of things to complain about, then at least we’d still have all the words from this movie to keep our negativity-machines running for the next thousand years or so.

It’s that bad.

My advice: pretend that the first ninety minutes of dialogue is in Basque, and that only three people on Earth could understand it. Anytime someone opens his/her/its mouth to say something, just think “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!”

Then, at the ninety-first minute, start listening again.

You’ll thank me for this counsel later.

And once Lord Vader was transformed from an ordinary looking guy (with the oddly reddish tint in his eyes) to someone who would cause a lot of disturbance in an airport metal detector, his reaction to hearing Padme had been killed by his own hand was supposed to be one of the dramatic highlights of the movie. Unfortunately, breaking the restraints which bound him and striking a dramatic pose before making a foghorn like “Nooooooo” only provoked laughter and embarassment. You know, the sort of discomfort where you’re carrying this small kid and she pisses on you ? Ok, so maybe you don’t know. Count yourself lucky you don’t have nieces then.

And it wasn’t just me. The Jeffster agreed that Natalie Portman looked less hawt in the first few scenes than she has ever looked in any of the other episodes. And in retrospect, it has been six years since Episode 1, so perhaps it’s understandable. Unless you had the hots for the oddly blue tinted Jedi female, expecting to ogle females in this movie isn’t really going to work. Rent that porno movie instead. I expect the phrase Order 66 to become one of the next Slashdot cliches, though.

But all in all, it was a good movie. It tied up all the missing pieces (whoops, I thought Obi Wan K. should have gotten killed off in this episode, I was apparently wrong) and set the stage for what we’ve already seen before. Lucas set the bar pretty low so the movie would have had to be pretty bad before anyone would complain. I’m not complaining.

In summary:
Cool:
Wookies! You can never have too many Wookie battle scenes.
The General Grevious (what a lameass name that is, and what’s with the hacking cough for a droid ?) 4 lightsaber battle scene.
The huge lava battle scene that went on and on. I suspect this was actually done with some waterfall as a backdrop and then tinted like lava, but it was interesting.
Yoda kicks stormtrooper butt.
Nice touch with Anakin/Vader just firing up his lightsaber when the youngling asked him if it was safe to come out.

Double You Tee Eff:
He is a mighty Sith Lord. He is Machiavellian in his scheming. But he apparently killed his dentist and never heard of using the force for dentistry because the Emperor Palpatine’s teeth looked fricking awful. And he wasn’t afraid of grinning with them either. The Sith in general seem to have very bad teeth, unlike the Jedi. The dark side of the force obviously isn’t big on dental care plans.
Were the Jedi so unattuned to the force that they didn’t know when the stormtroopers were going to execute Order 66 on them?
Amidala in general. ugh. If she wasn’t so hawt, I’d be downright scathing.
Yoda is called a little green man. Picked up on that, I did. And did Yoda sometimes lapse into normal human speech instead of fiddling with word order? I thought he did.
Mace Windu got a weird death. You mean to say that Yoda couldn’t defeat the big bad Darth Sidious but Mace Windu had him dead to rights with a lightsaber at his throat? Eh what? Ok, so maybe Darth Sidious was playing possum waiting for Anakin to rescue him, but still …
Overall, umm..it was just a touch busy with the effects. Lots of things going on, lots of stuff happening.
Oh, well. I’m running out of things to say, so I’ll stop now.

And the restaurant was so good that I’ll probably write a more or less formal review in another post.