star wars
As a movie, it was solid.
I think I have a few major issues with it though.
For starters, the dialogue was terrible. I mean … like … mindbogglingly mediocre. I don’t think there was a single memorable line in it, other than things that were memorably poor.
For another, The acting was weak, across the board. Probably palpatine and obi-wan were the only believable non-CG characters. Anakin was all angsty and conflicted, as you’d expect. But he wasn’t all angsty and conflicted for particularly good reasons, and he wasn’t unaware of his reasons either. He just like … lacked the self-discipline to correct himself, despite being a Jedi and having years of training.
The action was solid. Lots of sabering, a bit of blastering, some piloting. Crazy force powers galore. Many, many severed limbs. As usual, the saber fights were excessively flashy and inefficient, but that’s just how it’s gotta be for star wars, I guess. Leave efficiency and relative realism to Ong Bak, but this was satisfying.
I think … my biggest single beef with it is that I felt NO empathy for anyone in the movie. There was no real sense of attachment to anyone for me. I didn’t feel sad for Anakin, who was so arrogant as to be alienating. Obi-wan was downright asinine to Anakin, constantly talking down to him instead of interacting with him as something of an equal, or at least as another human being. Padme was rigid, paradoxically both clingy and distant, and as a whole I felt not very well played. Of course, it would have helped if she had actually DONE something. And it also would have helped if there were a sense of time scale to it: the movie seems to be depicted as if it’s maybe 2 or 3 days, but in the process Padme goes from barely-pregnant to giving birth, but I digress. My point is that I didn’t really “feel” what they were feeling. I couldn’t identify with anyone in the story. There was no Han Solo and his gritty humor. In fact, other than a few droidy visual gags, there was a stark absence of humor as a whole. There was no Luke and his struggle to overcome his own fear and to learn how to do things he’d never imagined being able to do. There were only disgustingly arrogant, cold people. Well, cold people and really really creepy people.
Maybe it’s a necessity for a story like that. But when you’re given three out of four central characters having a status that amounts to godhood, and the only struggles they have to deal with are fighting each other (or a CG-muppet) and fighting other people with essentially godhood… when there’s no real human element, no real emotional involvement … I dunno. It was just … a failure. A failure to make me understand Darth Vader, or to see him as anything other than just an asshole who got burned on the flames of his own ego.