Star Wipes Episode III

The verdict! (Sans spoilers) (For those who don't speak french/fontspeak, "sans" == without) (For those who don't use C, "==" means equals)

Awesome. Yup yup, it was good. Really good. The reason I'm not over-ecstatic is because firstly, it was very very sad. Secondly, there were a few things that brought it down, which I'll get to later.

But on the whole, it was a brilliant film. No, I don't think it's better than Episodes 4/5/6 simply because "THEY ARE STAR WARS" and will always be better to me. But if you want to look at sheer production values its probably up there with the classics, and is certainly much closer than Episodes 1 and 2.

Like all the Episode 3's of the Big Three Film Sagas (Return of the King and Matrix Revolutions), Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is about how the world gets totally wrecked down to the point of no hope. It is not surprising that the Episode 3 movies are considered the biggest and most epic.

There isn't really much to spoil in Episode III, because of course we all know Anakin will turn to the dark side and become Darth Vader, and that Padme will be pregnant with the twins Luke and Leia. Some who saw Ep3 were upset that the ending wasn't surprising... err... duh. Anyway, there were some surprises, and many questions answered, and these I will not spoil. They are good to watch tho, and make the story element of Ep3 shine.

It is particularly interesting to see just how you go about turning someone to the Dark Side (in case anyone should wish to know). The whole thing is set up very nicely, and the brilliant schemes of Senator Palpatine/Darth Sidious cause all the elements to align to finally cause Anakin to fall to the darkness. It's a brilliant piece of storytelling but I think most will agree that the scene in which he finally does "turn over" is quite rushed. I'd have expected either a long and gradual transition, or a single "point" where he "snaps" but there is neither. It's sort of unsatisfyingly halfway in between.

I've also heard many complaints about a) Padme's character and b) the dialogue, neither of which I personally had a problem with. In Ep2, Padme was of course the love interest, but she kicked ass at the same time. The chief complaint is that in Ep3, Padme has lost the "hero" side to her character, and she's now just the pregnant damsel-in-distress (DID) who does nothing but weep. And, well, kinda, yeah. That's what she does. But, sorry guys, it's important. The story (and I mean the really big story - the Anakin/Dark Side story) requires her to be the DID. I can't say more without spoilage, but when you see it and then think about it, it really is crucial that she be like that. I hate to sound conservative/sexist, but I've written many stories, and sometimes you just need your female characters to be DIDs. Symbolism!

Now, onto the dialogue. I think the chief complaints I've heard have been about the Anakin/Padme dialogue. Frankly I thought it was worse in Ep2. I just did not have a problem with such lines as "Anakin... you're breaking my heart." What I did have a problem with was Yoda's dialogue, which was highly ungrammatical. Moreso. Now, before people start saying "WELL DUH" I should point out that Yoda's speech has traditionally been largely conformant to the Linguistic typology of "Object-Subject-Verb". You can read the Wiki on it: Object Subject Verb. So Yoda's speech is grammatical - just not in the usual English sense. But in Ep3 I had to cringe several times at lines such as: "A prophecy which, misread could have been." This sentence has simply been placed in a blender. The "correct" OSV form of this sentence is: "Misread this prophecy could have been." ("misread" here being the object of the transitive verb "been"). Now it's very picky to analyse the grammar of this one sentence, but the problem is rife throughout Yoda's dialogue. The only other dialogue I had a problem with was Darth Vader's - with him saying lines like "Is she alright?"... it's a very Anakin thing to say, and not becoming of the man-in-the-black-mask. (I'd have imagined Darth to say "Is she alive?")

Speaking of Darth, err... where was he exactly? Just popped in for a quick hello at the end. His much-lauded return could only be classified a "cameo", for all he really did was walk around and say a few lines (as James Earl Jones). I can't believe they made a special new mask just for that. In the same boat was the wookies and Chewbacca. There was supposed to be an epic battle on the planet Kashyyyk (that's three... count'em, three 'y's), the wookie home planet, but I'm afraid our walking-carpet friends did next to nothing and were simply flashed back-and-forth to for some battle shots. Chewie was there, but you couldn't be sure if it was him or just some other wookie until the very end of the sequence. So, hi Chewie, see you when you have some actual stuff to do. On the flipside, one character who had a very minor role and I'm sure nobody missed was Jar Jar Binks. Kudos to Lucas for listening to fans and their death threats addressed to the blundering blubbering floppy-eared waste of rendering-time.

But the final gripe I have is with the transitions. Lower your head in shame editors. Star Wars has traditionally had wipes. Wipes are good. Wipes give Star Wars some of it's character. Two kinds of wipes: Line wipes, and circle wipes. In Episode III, it felt like a Year Eleven media student had just opened iMovie and had discovered the transitions panel. We had all sorts of crazy over-the-top wipe effects, including clock wipes, all sorts of wierd ones where two separate linear or radial wipes would meet each other in the middle, and most ghastly of all (and unfortunately repeated many times) the dreaded box-wipes, where the whole screen is divided into twelve-or-so boxes and each box has a separate line-wipe applied to it. Fortunately, there *were* no star-wipes but it had to remind Simpsons fans of the time Homer got his hands on an edit-suite and went crazy with star wipes.
(By the way, hence the title of this blogpost).

So that's just about it for me. I'll end on a happy note by saying that the music and visuals were fantastic, as we'd expect. John William's amazing score will once again be in the fans' minds... particularly the awesome "A hero falls" piece heard during the final battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan. (Which, by the way, was very cool). The piece was sort of a cross between the "sadness" theme from the orignial trilogy (which you hear, for example, when Vader is being cremated in Ep6) and the "Duel of the Fates" theme from Ep1 (Obi/Qui-Gonn vs Maul battle music). But err, can you spot the music lifted right out of Return of the Jedi? ;)

So, good. Really good. Must-see. But, flawed slightly.
And, it gave me (finally) the opportunity to say this as I was walking out:

(Walking out of the cinema, past a queue of people going to see "The Empire Strikes Back")
"I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father!"
- Homer Simpson

"And star-wipe..."
- Homer Simpson