Visually Stunning, But Has The Soul Of A Droid

Rating: 4/10 (25 May 2005)

When I saw Revenge of the Sith on Thursday in Westwood at the Village it was with a packed house of hyped-up mostly under 30 fans, in other words the optimum type of crowd to be in the right frame of mind to like/love it. There were light sabers all over the place and several people had sneaked in big beach balls that the crowd started flying around. Then the house lights dimmed, the curtain lowered and the applause level really took off.
The first trailer was for Stealth, Rob Cohen's "See, it's The Terminator combined with Top Gun" killer robot plane movie. If this group was any indication, it won't be box office darling this summer as it garnered huge boos. The rest of them did better, War of the Worlds, Fantastic Four and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Surprisingly, it wasn't Fantastic Four that got the biggest applause, but Smith. Guess when you have both Angelina and Brad in a movie, there's someone for all members of the audience to want to screw.
Then the Fox logo came on with it's rather Prussian march and extended Cinemascope score. When the Lucasfilm logo, followed by the immortal words "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away..." came up, the roar of the crowd drowned out the music. Finallly the movie started in earnest with what I saw in hindsight was the spectacular giant space battle that Lucas could not end the movie with. Yet once this was over and the story had to return to scenes involving dialog and characters - two things that cannot be fussed with later using CGI - Lucas was back where he is the weakest.
You could sense the excitement falling as the minutes ticked by, helped appreciatively whenever the audience had to endure yet another wince-inducing Anakin/Padme moment (even this crowd was having big belly laughs over "Hold me like you did that time on Naboo" and other such lines). I think a collective sense of diminishing expectations kept those critics who have written near-raves of this thing from seeing what should be apparent to all: this is actually the biggest failure of the entire double trilogy. All you have to realize is that this film works or does not work based on one simple premise: do we care about Anakin and Padme? This entire thing revolves around us becoming emotionally involved in their relationship and ensuing plight.
And... We... Don't...Give...A...S**t. Without them to hold the center, the rest becomes the longest product reel for an effects house ever. Hell, yes, the battles were impressive, the CGI work at times so well done they looked like live effects instead of optical ones.
But this film has the soul of a droid. Towards the end, Lucas seems more occupied by his paint-by-numbers attempt to shoe-horn every bit of saga arcana that harbingers events in the ensuing trilogy withing the last 15 minutes of Sith. "See, this is why Yoda ends up on Dagoba." "Look! It's the ship from the next one!" "This is why Obi Wan lives so close to Luke." Instead, we should be having our hearts broken along with Padme and gripped by Anakin's wretched decent into evil.
Lucas has always been weak when it comes to emotional things. He once remarked that if you wanted to affect an audience that way all he had to do was show it a kitten, then strangle it. The films that have moments of genuine human moments between characters were written and mostly directed by someone else. Han and Leah in Empire, Indy and Marion in Raiders, Luke and Leah in Jedi. What you have here is Lucas strangling the life out his main characters, but many of us just didn't care.