One thing I’ll admit to anyone who asks: I’m a geek, proud and self-proclaimed. I enjoyed the original Star Wars trilogy when I was younger, and appreciate Science-Fiction in general.
One thing I will never claim, however, is to be a fanatic. I’ve never read any of the Star Wars books or dove head-first into more of the geekier aspects of the series. Therefore, I’d like to say that my love for Lucas’ works is not without criticism.
Let’s face facts — Episodes I and II sucked like a sucking chest wound. I went into the theater for “Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith” with a skeptic’s attitude and a cautious degree of hope.
Lucas, once again, you have let me down. Please don’t get me wrong. Episode III was a major improvement over both episodes I and II, but as far as I’m concerned, Episode III had just as many problems as the first two, only in different aspects.
First of all, the acting, what little there was — the interaction between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen was just as dry and lacking in chemistry as it was in the previous movie.
The romance between them seemed to me like both were having beautiful, in-depth love scenes with different people in different movies, and the camera just happened to be pointed at them both at the time.
It would have also been nice to see an actual internal struggle with Christensen’s character, Anakin, as he begins the transition to the Dark Side, but apparently directing this boy into actually acting is beyond Lucas’ capability. Why they even chose Christensen to play the Backstreet Boy of the Sith is beyond me.
Christiansen ultimately proves that his emotional acting range extends from “angsty” to “whiningly angsty.” He even manages to get to “petulant and angsty,” but no further.
Portman has been a high-caliber actress in the past, but failed to shine in this movie.
Part of her problem was her dialogue, which had the word “love” scattered throughout it at least 937 times. I’m taking a collection to send Lucas a thesaurus for his next script-writing endeavor. I believe the other problem with Portman was her lack of direction.
Remember Harrison Ford? Remember Carrie Fisher?
These people actually acted a broad range and made us enjoy the characters, because they took the initiative and found their characters themselves. After all, these actors had no career behind them, so they had quite a bit to prove, and prove they did.
I loved the special effects of the second portion of the series, the ones that came out in the over 20 years ago, were monumental in the fact that they truly worked. Because of this, Lucas built an entire industry from scratch with the new methods he employed.
Now, Lucas has managed to take special effects to a whole new level of cartoony fakery. The one space battle scene we see is completely in the background, and the scene moves around so much that we can’t determine what’s actually going on.
I would have loved to see bits and pieces of other battles occurring throughout the area, not to mention more than one jump to lightspeed that we grew so accustomed to in the previous movies.
While the effects may have been pretty, Lucas seemed to jump on the digital and computer graphics bandwagons without truly understanding just how fake things can look without a careful hand at the controls.
And the Wookies? I’ve been hearing the hype for months about the Wookie Army and how it would be absolutely devastating in its power to both the enemy armies and the audience as a whole.
Twelve seconds. About 12 seconds of Wookie butt-kicking goodness, and we’re back to Portman and Christiansen trying to act as though they give a crap about each other.
One thing Lucas did do well was the overall story itself.
This movie finally culminated the prequels into something truly cohesive, giving us the story introduction we so needed to make this series complete. Finally, it feels as though everything has been explained and the second trilogy no longer feels as though it has no context.
All of this fits in with my belief that Lucas may be able to direct special effects with few equals in the industry.
However, his capability for directing actors, writing dialogue, or keeping up an epic pace leaves me sitting in the theater seats, cringing, hoping and counting the seconds until the next Yoda fight scene.
Originally printed in the Daily O’Collegian, June 15th, 2005.
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