a solid "A-minus" grade, but not perfect

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2005)

The cheesiness that plagued Ep.s 1 and 2 is mostly gone here. Lucas establishes that he means business in the opening action-packed sequences, replete with R2D2 kicking the asses of several battledroids. These are the types of sequences I missed from the first two: big spaceships in big spaceship battles with lots of little fighters everywhere and lasers shooting all over the place. I really dug the crash landing sequence (although, to be fair, it was a little bit convenient that a landing strip happened to be directly in front of the crashing ship's flightpath).
Still there are some fundamental flaws in this movie: I always hate it when, in any movie, the plot is driven by the failure of the good guys to kill the bad guys when they are laying defenseless on the ground. Think Optimus Prime hesitating to shoot Megatron in _Transformers: The Movie_, giving Megatron time to grab a gun and shoot Prime. Here, not once, but twice, this happens. The first time, Mace Windu hesitates to kill Palpatine when he has the perfect opportunity. Somehow, I just don't think that "Shaft" would hesitate like that. So Palpatine should've ended right there. The second time, Obi-Wan walks off and leaves Anakin still alive. Why doesn't he finish him off, put him out of his misery?
Also, there are still some pretty cheesy dialogues between Anakin and Padme ("You're beautiful" "Only because I love you" "no, you're beautiful because of how much I love you") etc. Also there is the cheesiest Star Wars line of all time delivered by Jimmy Smits: "My wife and I have been already thinking of adopting a baby girl" -- not that the line was necessarily cheesy, but the way he says it is the cheesiest thing I've ever seen. The whole crowd busted out laughing at this line when we saw it at opening night.
As far as the CGI goes, it was mostly good, but some of the CGI still isn't good enough for me. The way that spaceships fly and land just does not have as cool of a look to it as the scale-model and green-screen type of spaceships like from the original series. There is something about how smooth the ships fly, how they seem to lack any sort of mechanicalness and seem to just be, well, CGI ships and not machines. They are too clean-looking, too perfect. The CGI spaceships never break down. I miss the Millennium Falcon, that old bucket of bolts which was dirty and unreliable. You really felt like you were along for the ride in the cockpit of the Falcon.
Which brings me to my final complaint: I really hate that the prequels ignored space travel as one of the elements of the film. In the original films, you really felt like you were in the cockpit with the characters, making the jump to hyperspace when the stars would elongate and the ship would make the leap. In the new films, we never feel like we are actually flying along with the characters, inside the cockpit in the same way as during Luke's flight to destroy the Death Star or during many of the Falcon's adventures. In the prequels (and Sith is no exception), Padme just pushes one single button and the ship flies itself. We see Obi-Wan's Jedi Fighter ship make the leap to hyperspace from the outside; it just disappears and then reappears somewhere else. We don't see it from his perspective; we don't feel that we are in the cockpit with him; we don't see the stars elongate as the leap is made -- not once in all of Ep. 3.
One might say that these are the minor quibbles of a Star Wars nerd. But I think that even from a simple critical perspective focusing on the narrative and visual elements of the story, it is valid to criticize these elements because they are part of the cinematic experience. Part of the thing that made me love Star Wars to begin with was the fact that it makes you feel as if you are flying in space along with the characters, that you are along for the ride, part of the adventure. To see the characters say things so cheesy, and not kill the bad guys when they have the chance, and never get the feeling of really riding along with them through space, takes away from the overall experience of identifying with the characters. One feels more like an observer receiving a history lesson.
But those qualms aside, most people will love Episode III, and I loved it too. I think it's one of the better Star Wars movies. I especially liked the robotic General Greivous and the Palpatine scenes. I felt that Anakin's transformation was depicted adequately. The film really gives the feeling of a galaxy at war, and the battle sequences are very well done and highly entertaining. For the most part the CGI is superb: Yoda looks much better this time around (although I still miss the puppet, it would be hard to make the puppet fight like that), the robots are well rendered, and the space battles and clones are very well done. Still, there are times where the way things move seems just plain artificial, but then again there were lots of muppets in Return of the Jedi that were not that great either.
It is excellent with a few flaws that most Hollywood movies share, and are unlikely to bother most fans.