Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Okay, fair warning, this is very long and I do go a bit Comic Book Guy. Sorry. If this doesn't interest you why not read this interesting article about consistency in science-fiction TV and film?
Oh, and heap big spoilers.
Ouch. In the end, all there is, is the suckness of one.
Revenge of the Sith. Could I be talking about anything else? I'm actually now in a dilemma as I try to work out what sucks more, Star Wars or Star Trek. I mean, Enterprise is struggling for that title but I think Wars edges home the leader, though as they both represent the most base and conservative elements in science-fiction today we all end up losing.
If we consider Revenge of the Sith as two films then it becomes more obvious where the problems lie. The half of the film that is a story that you could watch never knowing or caring that there were more parts to follow, starts off at good and goes downhill. The half of the film that is part of the overarching six-part epic of toss, that sets up episode four, is awful and plunges to such depths that you'd be willing to sell your soul to any religion or belief system, even Scientology, if they could just take the memories of this film out of your head, no matter how, and the quicker the better. George Lucas seems to be claiming sole writing credit for this disaster and everyone knows that his scripts are worse even than those of the Vogons*, and God knows I'm wishing for a fleet of them to come along and destroy this planet before Lucas can infect the galaxy.
The opening half-hour is the best as, straight from the end of the Clone Wars cartoon (which we'll ignore as it wasn't that good), Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin 'babykiller' Skywalker rush to save the Emperor 'secretely evil' Palpatine from asthmatic cyborg General Grievous (or Devious or some other bit of truly inspired nomeclature from George 'I'm thinking of changing my name to Bestest Writer Ever Lucas to see if it helps' Lucas) and Count 'a bit shit' Dooku. I will admit, this bit looks amazing, there's a true sense of scale here that you don't often get on screen, similar to the large shots of the armies in Return of the King or that iconic first image from Star Wars itself, of the imperial ship that just keeps going on and on, filling up more of the screen.
This is the best part of the film. This is the only good part of the film. This report says that Hayden Christensen is considering giving up acting. This is quite plainly false, as RotS proves that he never started. But when you've got someone that makes the product of a Canadian logging company look expressive and you stick a Lucas script in front of him, it's like handing a suicidal person a gun with all six chambers loaded and telling him to try and survive a game of Russian roulette. Christensen sucks. Lucas sucks. Together they create... the uber-suck.
With the Chancellor safe things calm down for a while so we can have some character work. Sickbags to the ready.
I watched Attack of the Clones last weekend in preparation for this. There is some sort of neurological or psychological disorder that makes sufferers believe that their close friends and relatives are not who they say they are and are in fact imposters. I get that in the middle of Attack..., right at the point when Senator Amidala (no costume to ridiculous) out of the blue starts fancying Anakin. Ten minutes previously she's reminising about seeing him as a boy and reprimanding him for disagreeing with her, he comes over like an overeager pubescent schoolboy in first crush mode and she swoons. That scene should have been staged with Anakin standing behind a curtain... "Anakin, come out here." "Jesus, not... yet! I'm just polishing my lightsabre!"
So Padme tells Anakin she's up the duff. As one the stomachs of the audience somersault as they collectively imagine Christensen's face above them, at the moment of ejaculation. This film will turn straight women into lesbians and gay men into straights, just so they will never EVER face the extremely unlikely possibility of having sex with Hayden Christensen. Now, on the subject of Padme's pregnancy, she tells the baby murderer of Coruscant that she's pregnant. A short while later she's starting to show. Now, I'll possibly accept that several months pass between Anakin's rescue of the Chancellor and when things start to heat up again, though nothing is shown or said to make us think times has passed. But at the climax of the film Padme boards a ship looking five months pregnant to fly to the planet where Anakin is busy earning his 'killing everything that moves' Scout badge. When she leaves the planet, unconscious, she's suddenly nine months pregnant. Now, she is carrying twins, but they don't grow that fast. There's some wiffle earlier in the film about the Force being able to affect life, extending it and tampering with the very whatnot of creation, but if that's what's happened to her, if boffing the baby-slicer causes an excellerated pregnancy or his attack on her when she arrives at the end causes this, shouldn't someone mention it? Shouldn't Threepio have a line about "goodness me Mistress Padme, you're looking more beachball-like than you were half an hour ago"?
So, Anakin and Padme have been having good, clean, Republican-approved sex and the inevitable has happened. Anakin has premonitionary dreams that Padme will die in childbirth and does what any sensible husband and father-to-be would do, he turns psychotically evil and starts murdering everyone, including a passel of Jedi babies (yes, this has been sticking in my mind somewhat. Did you notice?). While Obi-Wan goes off to find Wheezius and break his inhaler Palpatine seduces Anakin (not like that! God, that's even more disgusting than the idea of Padme and Anakin doing it!) by making him his envoy to the Jedi council. For some reason the Jedi council is suspicious of Palpatine and don't believe that he'll give up his emergency powers when the war is over. Mace 'who's the black jedi who's a sex machine to all the chicks?' Windu is especially suspicious of both Palpatine and Anakin. This is more of the odd. In the middle of Attack Windu was lukewarm to Anakin, since then they've fought in that war against the Trade Federation, Anakin has been a squad leader in the Clone Wars (which are canon, even if only the more absolute fans would have bothered watching them), graduated as a Jedi and rescued Palpatine and Obi-Wan, killing Dooku** in the process, and Windu still doesn't like Anakin? Maybe Windu is scared that the only brother on the Jedi Council is going to be replaced by Whitey. Maybe he really hates overachievers. Before heading off to spend some time with the Wookies Yoda mutters something about how the prophecy that Anakin brings balance to the Force might have been 'misinterpreted'. Great, a supreme and wise Jedi master and this only occurs to him now?! You can view the film two ways, either the prophecy IS wrong because Anakin kills everyone or it's right because Anakin kills everyone. George Lucas finally finds a way not to lose.
Palpatine takes this moment to reveal to Anakin that he is the big dark Sith Lord they've been worrying about for around fifteen freaking years. Anakin is shocked by this, as am I. No, really. I assumed that George Lucas would be writing the first three films believing that everyone would have seen the second three, so as soon as Palpatine's name is mentioned in Episode 1 everyone would pause momentarily from saying "Isn't this film crap?" to say "Ooh, that's the guy that's the Emperor". I assumed that the reason Darth Sidious wasn't seen clearly in the first two films was because it was going to be a surprise to everyone who'd seen the second three movies too, an evil twin perhaps or a malignant force that posessed the Chancellor. I didn't expect that Darth Sidious would actually turn out to be just Chancellor Palpatine. I didn't think George Lucas would write the story assuming people hadn't seen the second set of movies. Although, in my defense, I don't think the references to the Death Star in Episodes Two and Three would make any sense at all to anyone who didn't know Episodes Three to Six.
Shocked, Anakin goes and tells Windu. Again, this surprised me as by this point I presumed that Lucas had decided that Anakin had gone over to the Dark Side. The whole 'Anakin being seduced by the Dark Side' plot in Episode Three is much like the 'Anakin and Padme fall in love' plot in Episode Two, it has no relationship to how real people interact and is just there because it has to happen. But Anakin squeels to Windu. And despite having been really down on him, Windu believes him and goes off to confront Palpatine, telling Anakin to stay behind.
Windu and Palpatine fight, it's not nearly as exciting as Maul versus Jinn and Kenobi in Episode 1. It ends with Windu holding a lightsabre to Palpatine's head and Palpatine doing the blue-electric bolts of death thing which has the side-effect of making him look like he does in Episodes Five and Six. Therefore with good and evil stalemated we need a tie-breaker... And unsurprisingly Anakin turns up. He agonises over who to side with (or needs the toilet, the facial expressions are much the same) then chops Windu's arm off, allowing Palpatine to bolt him out of the window (though, as in Episode Six, we never see a body, so he might not be dead). With his loyalty thus proved Palpatine renames Anakin Darth Vader and sends him off to destroy the Jedi HQ. This is an advantage of having already made Episodes Four to Six, in that Lucas is unable to use his current method of naming villains, or else Anakin might have ended up as Darth Petulant, or Darth SmallPenis.
In terms of Anakin's motivation for taking up full time evil as a career, Lucas does try to throw everything at us in the hopes something will stick. There's Anakin's complete inability to follow his instructions, the fact that he's convinced everyone hates him despite the fact he's got a hot lady for a wife and is on the Jedi council, which has never happened to someone as young as him before. There's the story Palpatine tells him about the Sith Lord that became so powerful he could cheat death (I read it as implied that Palpatine was this Sith Lord's student but that may be too much), so maybe he's going to the Dark Side in order to save Padme when she goes into childbirth (it seems that in a galaxy and long time away they can build you replacement limbs should you get anything chopped off but should you be going through the miracle of childbirth then you're on your own). Maybe he's doing it because he can't tell the difference between the democratically elected Senate and the undemocratic Empire that the Chancellor replaces it with. Maybe he genuinely doesn't see any difference between being a Jedi and being a Sith (and the babykilling seems to be thrown in there to try and make us think there's a difference, because take away a lot of the ends and there isn't much difference between the Jedi and the Sith). Or maybe he's the body of an early twenty year old with the brain and attitudes of a fourteen year old ("why can't I be a Jedi Master? Ugh, I hate you that's SO unfair!").
The Chancellor makes a few phone calls and suddenly the Clone Army turns on the Jedi that they've been fighting alongside. Cue the end of all the Jedi except Yoda, who manages to escape. Is this something that has been designed into the clones since they were made on that watery planet we saw in Episode Two? Or is it something that the Chancellor installed in his troops since then? Who knows, we certainly don't after watching this film. But to be fair, it's a minor point.
Anakin storms the Jedi Monastary with a load of clones and kills everyone there, though all we see is him going into a room with a load of kids in and then Obi-Wan later going on about how the younglings have been killed. Considering how so much of the Star Wars franchise has been about getting money from impressionable children (and adults who should know better) I'd like to make a point that psychologically, at this point Lucas has taken everything he thinks he can get from the children and Anakin killing them all is a metaphor for Lucas killing the children in all of us with these crap three films. There, piece of piss. Mark Kermode, you am pwned!!1! Next up he has to go kill off those not-Chinese at all Trade Federation guys. This is obviously Palpatine throwing his new student a bone, as they have tried to kill him on two seperate occasions.
Obi-Wan has despatched the frankly crap General Grievous. The fight scene between them is somewhat less than epic. It starts badly with Grievous saying he learnt lightsabre fighting from Count Dooku, which isn't really much of a boast considering as how Count Dooku is dead from two lightsabres to the throat. Even though it wasn't Obi-Wan who killed Dooku it is a bit like fighting someone who said they learnt their battle strategy from General Custer. Then his men turn on him, which irritates him slightly. Obi-Wan escapes the planet and meets up with Yoda and Senator Organa, played by Jimmy Smits. He's also escaped from being killed by clones, though quite why they try to kill him is unclear. He's not a special enemy of Palpatine, in fact he's hanging around with him at the end of Episode Two and the start of Episode Three. And, if memory serves, Palpatine doesn't do away with the Senate until the start of either Episode Four or Five. Is Palpatine getting rid of those people close to him who he cannot trust? Is it a plot hole? Anyway, Senator Orgone Energy escapes. Obi-Wan and Yoda head to Jedi Central where Obi-Wan sees security footage of Anakin pledging his allegiance to Palpatine. Now, the Jedi Council has been suspicious of Palpatine for a while, but if they have his rooms under surveilance, how come they've never seen him talking with Grievous, Dooku or Darth Maul? Earlier they asked Anakin to spy on Palpatine, yet it seems no-one thought to check the tapes.
So Obi-Wan is extremely angry at Anakin, though mainly it seems because he killed the kids, and goes to Padme to try and find out where he's gone. She refuses to give him up but then obligingly flies off to find him, with Obi-Wan hiding on her ship. They arrive on some volcanic planet just after Anakin has killed everyone and it's about now that Padme goes from being five months pregnant to nine. She realises that Anakin is now loony and he realises that she isn't, which means he slaps her around a bit ranting that she's betrayed him. Then Obi-Wan climbs out of the ship and they fight. it's like a big can of fight and we're all invited. On Coruscant Yoda goes to Palpatine's office and they fight too. They take it upstairs to the empty Senate chambers and fight some more, with Palpatine chucking senate pods at Yoda. This doesn't really have any effect with the battle ending when they seem to get too knackered to fight any more, Palpatine senses that Anakin is in trouble and flies off to help him, Yoda senses that he is in trouble and saves his little green arse by running away.
Anakin and Obi-Wan fight in one of those 'to the death' deals. They're fighting on s kind of oil rig structure standing in the middle of what Doctor Evil would call < finger motions > 'mag-ma'. As they fight the platform starts to collapse into the 'mag-ma', and drift towards a waterfall or, more accurately, a 'mag-ma'fall. They continue to fight, not letting imminent scorchy death put them off, until Obi-Wan is on solid ground and Anakin isn't. He tries to jump over Obi-Wan, and doesn't make it. Or rather, pieces of him do, his one remaining arm, his two legs. The bulk of him lands in front of Obi-Wan, by the seashore ('mag-ma'shore). And then he catches on fire too! Excellent! Take that Hayden Christensen for ruining two perfectly good fil- two barely adequate films with your 'forty varieties of forest pine' acting! If only I could do that to the fatbeard that created you and ruined my life by making me think of you having sex! And Anakin, now that there is less of you, do you think you'd finally be able to get over yourself, Darth Doorstop?It's interesting to remember what Obi-Wan says to Luke in Episodes Four and Six, he claims Vader killed Luke's father and that then by joining the Emperor Vader effectively killed his father. This film would tend to suggest that the answer to Luke's question "Who killed my father?" is actually "Obi-Wan, mostly".
On the grounds that Anakin now has no limbs and is highly flammable, Obi-Wan feels rather justified in leaving him to die and hightailing it to a cooler part of the galaxy in Padme's ship. Of course, this is when the Emperor turns up and collects the cripy remains. Despite the fact that the Force is supposed to run through the mitichlorians in the blood and Anakin doesn't have much of it what with having no limbs and being deep fried, it seems the Emperor still wants him. Which is sweet really. Consider, maybe the Emperor IS the student of this Sith Lord that conquered death, or is that Sith Lord himself. Anakin's mother in Episode One said he was an immaculate conception, so hmmm?
So, on Coruscant the Doctors take one look at Anakin and decide the best medical course of action is to dress him in black and get James Earl Jones to speak for him. Yes, the Darth we know and love is here. And it's ironic to consider that, with Jones voice, Anakin finally sounds like he's gone through puberty. However, watching The Empire Strikes Back it always seemed that Darth Vader's habit of killing anyone that looked at him funny was evidence of malevolence, after the first three films it will always seem to be the act of a teenager who is annoyed because he doesn't get his way. The Emperor tells him that Padme is dead (presumerably to cement Vader's loyalty to him)
Meanwhile, somewhere else, which I assume is Anodyne or whatever the name of that place that Princess Leia is from, Padme is also on her way out. Yes, it seems that there are two things that far away medicine is crap at, childbirth and broken hearts (of the metaphorical kind, I presume if it was an actual broken heart then docs could do something about it in a jiffy). She pops out Luke and Leia, then snuffs it. Obi-Wan, Yoda and Senator Organa meet up to decide what to do. Yoda decides he's had enough and will retire. That leaves the question of the kids. Now, based on what the Emperor and Vader say, we can assume they don't know the kids are alive. We have to take it on faith that for twenty years Vader goes around being nasty for the Emperor and never says "By the way, I had her in the family way, I wonder if the children made it?". But of course Yoda, Obi-Wan and Organa don't know that and have to assume the kids must be hidden. So why on earth do they think the best places to hide them are in the family of a Senator who will be around the Emperor quite a bit and with a family on the planet that Darth Vader comes from and not change Luke's name? Unless Skywalker is the equivelent of Smith a long way ago...
The answer of course, is that this is the state of play at the start of Episode Four, before Lucas had decided that Luke and Leia were related, before he'd created Yoda, before he knew Darth Vader was their Dad. And this is what I meant at the start, that the parts of this film that are just to set up the next three films are rubbish in the somersaults they have to go through to make something that looks similar to our earth logic. So Organics takes Leia, and Artoo and Threepio too, though rather callously he orders Threepio's memory to be wiped. This is because otherwise Threepio should know a lot more about what is going on than he does in the next three films but now suggests that Artoo is keeping a lot of secrets from him as he seems to stay intact.
And then some weirdness. Apropos of absolutely nothing, Yoda suggests that, as Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to be spending the next twenty years living in a cave he's going to need something to do to pass the time. Well, it seems that Yoda has got some messages over the ether from Kenobi's dear departed mentor, Qui-Gonn Liam Neeson. It seems Neeson has defeated death too, and Yoda tells Obi-Wan he'll quickly teach him how to contact him. This is presumably to set up Obi-Wan for his death and future existence as a Ghost of Christmas Past in the second trilogy, which makes no sense as all other Jedi have died in the regular manner. Whether it's deliberately supposed to sound like this Dark Lord who beat death or not I have no idea, but as this is supposedly it for the Star Wars universe I wonder whether Lucas has any idea for where this goes or whether he's just emptying his drawer marked 'ideas' before the film closes. No, can't be that, he ran out of ideas at the end of Return of the Jedi.
The film closes with Darth, the Emperor and someone who does look like a young Peter Cushing looking out at the construction of a Death Star. Which means they took some twenty years to build the first Death Star but then got the second one half-completed in less than two. Presumably the destruction of the first Death Star took with it all the lazy chippies that took so long building that.
So, what else is there to say? Ian McDiarmid owns the film again as the Emperor, though once he becomes openly villainous he becomes forty percent less interesting as a character. Lucas shows once again that he can't write dialogue for shit and that he seems to have no understanding of how human beings work and doesn't trust them. The second and third Matrix films were bad, but at least the Wachowskis gave their heroes chances to be heroic, most of the characters here don't get that. Ewan McGregor tries hard with what he has, but a lot of what he has is as second banana to Anakin. I spent most of the film wanting to pop the spot on his forehead, I hope he gets that seen to before the next film he's in. Natalie portman has even less to do other than stand around looking radiant while her character fails to notice her husband is going mental. It's hard to tell whether Hayden Christensen is a crap actor or just adrift without help from Lucas (a little from box a...) I'm sure viewers aren't supposed to feel like cheering when Anakin gets sliced and diced. Once again Lucas surrounds those annoying flesh and blood things he has to work with with as many special effects as he can, this leads to the climatic duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan seeming extremely anti-climactic because we've been stupefied into submission by overwhelming visual stimuli. We were promised a film as dark as Empire Strikes Back and it is rather bleak, but Empire had characters with arcs and journeys, Revenge of the Sith is like a kid clearing away his toys, when Palpatine tells Anakin to kill Dooku, Dooku looks astonished at him, he could be looking towards Lucas, thinking "We had so much fun playing together last time, now I'm not good enough for you?". To use another analogy, Dooku is Woody and Count Grievous is Buzz Lightyear, but like him is plastic and less hardwearing. He has no presence (genuinely) and by playing him as a robot with a cough he seems weak from the get go.
The middle section with Anakin being seduced to the Dark Side is, amongst other faults, too quick. As I said, we have so many reasons suggested that it makes no sense that he should turn evil, and we've known since before the start that Anakin would turn to the Dark Side. The various lightsabre duels don't seem as interesting here as they have done in the past.
It's interesting that Star Trek has also come unstuck in the prequels business, though such is the way of Wars that even if the promos for it had Lucas giving a precis of the plot and then saying "don't come and see this film, seriously, I made it and I think it's shit" it would still break records. All I can say is, if you haven't seen it yet, there's Bittorent out there now, use that. If you feel you must see it then for god's sake, pirate it. It's really bad.
* Yes, I know they wrote poetry. But if they wrote poetry they almost certainly had a thriving film industry too. They've long been in our political system, look at Cyril Smith and Nigel Lawson.
** And did Christopher Lee look at the script and go "let me get this straight, another franchise where I do a lot in the second film and then am only in the thirs one briefly? You just better not cut me out this time Lucas, it's not me I'm thinking of but those pixels that make up the battle droids are just starting out in the business and need all the help they can get..."
Oh, and heap big spoilers.
Ouch. In the end, all there is, is the suckness of one.
Revenge of the Sith. Could I be talking about anything else? I'm actually now in a dilemma as I try to work out what sucks more, Star Wars or Star Trek. I mean, Enterprise is struggling for that title but I think Wars edges home the leader, though as they both represent the most base and conservative elements in science-fiction today we all end up losing.
If we consider Revenge of the Sith as two films then it becomes more obvious where the problems lie. The half of the film that is a story that you could watch never knowing or caring that there were more parts to follow, starts off at good and goes downhill. The half of the film that is part of the overarching six-part epic of toss, that sets up episode four, is awful and plunges to such depths that you'd be willing to sell your soul to any religion or belief system, even Scientology, if they could just take the memories of this film out of your head, no matter how, and the quicker the better. George Lucas seems to be claiming sole writing credit for this disaster and everyone knows that his scripts are worse even than those of the Vogons*, and God knows I'm wishing for a fleet of them to come along and destroy this planet before Lucas can infect the galaxy.
The opening half-hour is the best as, straight from the end of the Clone Wars cartoon (which we'll ignore as it wasn't that good), Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin 'babykiller' Skywalker rush to save the Emperor 'secretely evil' Palpatine from asthmatic cyborg General Grievous (or Devious or some other bit of truly inspired nomeclature from George 'I'm thinking of changing my name to Bestest Writer Ever Lucas to see if it helps' Lucas) and Count 'a bit shit' Dooku. I will admit, this bit looks amazing, there's a true sense of scale here that you don't often get on screen, similar to the large shots of the armies in Return of the King or that iconic first image from Star Wars itself, of the imperial ship that just keeps going on and on, filling up more of the screen.
This is the best part of the film. This is the only good part of the film. This report says that Hayden Christensen is considering giving up acting. This is quite plainly false, as RotS proves that he never started. But when you've got someone that makes the product of a Canadian logging company look expressive and you stick a Lucas script in front of him, it's like handing a suicidal person a gun with all six chambers loaded and telling him to try and survive a game of Russian roulette. Christensen sucks. Lucas sucks. Together they create... the uber-suck.
With the Chancellor safe things calm down for a while so we can have some character work. Sickbags to the ready.
I watched Attack of the Clones last weekend in preparation for this. There is some sort of neurological or psychological disorder that makes sufferers believe that their close friends and relatives are not who they say they are and are in fact imposters. I get that in the middle of Attack..., right at the point when Senator Amidala (no costume to ridiculous) out of the blue starts fancying Anakin. Ten minutes previously she's reminising about seeing him as a boy and reprimanding him for disagreeing with her, he comes over like an overeager pubescent schoolboy in first crush mode and she swoons. That scene should have been staged with Anakin standing behind a curtain... "Anakin, come out here." "Jesus, not... yet! I'm just polishing my lightsabre!"
So Padme tells Anakin she's up the duff. As one the stomachs of the audience somersault as they collectively imagine Christensen's face above them, at the moment of ejaculation. This film will turn straight women into lesbians and gay men into straights, just so they will never EVER face the extremely unlikely possibility of having sex with Hayden Christensen. Now, on the subject of Padme's pregnancy, she tells the baby murderer of Coruscant that she's pregnant. A short while later she's starting to show. Now, I'll possibly accept that several months pass between Anakin's rescue of the Chancellor and when things start to heat up again, though nothing is shown or said to make us think times has passed. But at the climax of the film Padme boards a ship looking five months pregnant to fly to the planet where Anakin is busy earning his 'killing everything that moves' Scout badge. When she leaves the planet, unconscious, she's suddenly nine months pregnant. Now, she is carrying twins, but they don't grow that fast. There's some wiffle earlier in the film about the Force being able to affect life, extending it and tampering with the very whatnot of creation, but if that's what's happened to her, if boffing the baby-slicer causes an excellerated pregnancy or his attack on her when she arrives at the end causes this, shouldn't someone mention it? Shouldn't Threepio have a line about "goodness me Mistress Padme, you're looking more beachball-like than you were half an hour ago"?
So, Anakin and Padme have been having good, clean, Republican-approved sex and the inevitable has happened. Anakin has premonitionary dreams that Padme will die in childbirth and does what any sensible husband and father-to-be would do, he turns psychotically evil and starts murdering everyone, including a passel of Jedi babies (yes, this has been sticking in my mind somewhat. Did you notice?). While Obi-Wan goes off to find Wheezius and break his inhaler Palpatine seduces Anakin (not like that! God, that's even more disgusting than the idea of Padme and Anakin doing it!) by making him his envoy to the Jedi council. For some reason the Jedi council is suspicious of Palpatine and don't believe that he'll give up his emergency powers when the war is over. Mace 'who's the black jedi who's a sex machine to all the chicks?' Windu is especially suspicious of both Palpatine and Anakin. This is more of the odd. In the middle of Attack Windu was lukewarm to Anakin, since then they've fought in that war against the Trade Federation, Anakin has been a squad leader in the Clone Wars (which are canon, even if only the more absolute fans would have bothered watching them), graduated as a Jedi and rescued Palpatine and Obi-Wan, killing Dooku** in the process, and Windu still doesn't like Anakin? Maybe Windu is scared that the only brother on the Jedi Council is going to be replaced by Whitey. Maybe he really hates overachievers. Before heading off to spend some time with the Wookies Yoda mutters something about how the prophecy that Anakin brings balance to the Force might have been 'misinterpreted'. Great, a supreme and wise Jedi master and this only occurs to him now?! You can view the film two ways, either the prophecy IS wrong because Anakin kills everyone or it's right because Anakin kills everyone. George Lucas finally finds a way not to lose.
Palpatine takes this moment to reveal to Anakin that he is the big dark Sith Lord they've been worrying about for around fifteen freaking years. Anakin is shocked by this, as am I. No, really. I assumed that George Lucas would be writing the first three films believing that everyone would have seen the second three, so as soon as Palpatine's name is mentioned in Episode 1 everyone would pause momentarily from saying "Isn't this film crap?" to say "Ooh, that's the guy that's the Emperor". I assumed that the reason Darth Sidious wasn't seen clearly in the first two films was because it was going to be a surprise to everyone who'd seen the second three movies too, an evil twin perhaps or a malignant force that posessed the Chancellor. I didn't expect that Darth Sidious would actually turn out to be just Chancellor Palpatine. I didn't think George Lucas would write the story assuming people hadn't seen the second set of movies. Although, in my defense, I don't think the references to the Death Star in Episodes Two and Three would make any sense at all to anyone who didn't know Episodes Three to Six.
Shocked, Anakin goes and tells Windu. Again, this surprised me as by this point I presumed that Lucas had decided that Anakin had gone over to the Dark Side. The whole 'Anakin being seduced by the Dark Side' plot in Episode Three is much like the 'Anakin and Padme fall in love' plot in Episode Two, it has no relationship to how real people interact and is just there because it has to happen. But Anakin squeels to Windu. And despite having been really down on him, Windu believes him and goes off to confront Palpatine, telling Anakin to stay behind.
Windu and Palpatine fight, it's not nearly as exciting as Maul versus Jinn and Kenobi in Episode 1. It ends with Windu holding a lightsabre to Palpatine's head and Palpatine doing the blue-electric bolts of death thing which has the side-effect of making him look like he does in Episodes Five and Six. Therefore with good and evil stalemated we need a tie-breaker... And unsurprisingly Anakin turns up. He agonises over who to side with (or needs the toilet, the facial expressions are much the same) then chops Windu's arm off, allowing Palpatine to bolt him out of the window (though, as in Episode Six, we never see a body, so he might not be dead). With his loyalty thus proved Palpatine renames Anakin Darth Vader and sends him off to destroy the Jedi HQ. This is an advantage of having already made Episodes Four to Six, in that Lucas is unable to use his current method of naming villains, or else Anakin might have ended up as Darth Petulant, or Darth SmallPenis.
In terms of Anakin's motivation for taking up full time evil as a career, Lucas does try to throw everything at us in the hopes something will stick. There's Anakin's complete inability to follow his instructions, the fact that he's convinced everyone hates him despite the fact he's got a hot lady for a wife and is on the Jedi council, which has never happened to someone as young as him before. There's the story Palpatine tells him about the Sith Lord that became so powerful he could cheat death (I read it as implied that Palpatine was this Sith Lord's student but that may be too much), so maybe he's going to the Dark Side in order to save Padme when she goes into childbirth (it seems that in a galaxy and long time away they can build you replacement limbs should you get anything chopped off but should you be going through the miracle of childbirth then you're on your own). Maybe he's doing it because he can't tell the difference between the democratically elected Senate and the undemocratic Empire that the Chancellor replaces it with. Maybe he genuinely doesn't see any difference between being a Jedi and being a Sith (and the babykilling seems to be thrown in there to try and make us think there's a difference, because take away a lot of the ends and there isn't much difference between the Jedi and the Sith). Or maybe he's the body of an early twenty year old with the brain and attitudes of a fourteen year old ("why can't I be a Jedi Master? Ugh, I hate you that's SO unfair!").
The Chancellor makes a few phone calls and suddenly the Clone Army turns on the Jedi that they've been fighting alongside. Cue the end of all the Jedi except Yoda, who manages to escape. Is this something that has been designed into the clones since they were made on that watery planet we saw in Episode Two? Or is it something that the Chancellor installed in his troops since then? Who knows, we certainly don't after watching this film. But to be fair, it's a minor point.
Anakin storms the Jedi Monastary with a load of clones and kills everyone there, though all we see is him going into a room with a load of kids in and then Obi-Wan later going on about how the younglings have been killed. Considering how so much of the Star Wars franchise has been about getting money from impressionable children (and adults who should know better) I'd like to make a point that psychologically, at this point Lucas has taken everything he thinks he can get from the children and Anakin killing them all is a metaphor for Lucas killing the children in all of us with these crap three films. There, piece of piss. Mark Kermode, you am pwned!!1! Next up he has to go kill off those not-Chinese at all Trade Federation guys. This is obviously Palpatine throwing his new student a bone, as they have tried to kill him on two seperate occasions.
Obi-Wan has despatched the frankly crap General Grievous. The fight scene between them is somewhat less than epic. It starts badly with Grievous saying he learnt lightsabre fighting from Count Dooku, which isn't really much of a boast considering as how Count Dooku is dead from two lightsabres to the throat. Even though it wasn't Obi-Wan who killed Dooku it is a bit like fighting someone who said they learnt their battle strategy from General Custer. Then his men turn on him, which irritates him slightly. Obi-Wan escapes the planet and meets up with Yoda and Senator Organa, played by Jimmy Smits. He's also escaped from being killed by clones, though quite why they try to kill him is unclear. He's not a special enemy of Palpatine, in fact he's hanging around with him at the end of Episode Two and the start of Episode Three. And, if memory serves, Palpatine doesn't do away with the Senate until the start of either Episode Four or Five. Is Palpatine getting rid of those people close to him who he cannot trust? Is it a plot hole? Anyway, Senator Orgone Energy escapes. Obi-Wan and Yoda head to Jedi Central where Obi-Wan sees security footage of Anakin pledging his allegiance to Palpatine. Now, the Jedi Council has been suspicious of Palpatine for a while, but if they have his rooms under surveilance, how come they've never seen him talking with Grievous, Dooku or Darth Maul? Earlier they asked Anakin to spy on Palpatine, yet it seems no-one thought to check the tapes.
So Obi-Wan is extremely angry at Anakin, though mainly it seems because he killed the kids, and goes to Padme to try and find out where he's gone. She refuses to give him up but then obligingly flies off to find him, with Obi-Wan hiding on her ship. They arrive on some volcanic planet just after Anakin has killed everyone and it's about now that Padme goes from being five months pregnant to nine. She realises that Anakin is now loony and he realises that she isn't, which means he slaps her around a bit ranting that she's betrayed him. Then Obi-Wan climbs out of the ship and they fight. it's like a big can of fight and we're all invited. On Coruscant Yoda goes to Palpatine's office and they fight too. They take it upstairs to the empty Senate chambers and fight some more, with Palpatine chucking senate pods at Yoda. This doesn't really have any effect with the battle ending when they seem to get too knackered to fight any more, Palpatine senses that Anakin is in trouble and flies off to help him, Yoda senses that he is in trouble and saves his little green arse by running away.
Anakin and Obi-Wan fight in one of those 'to the death' deals. They're fighting on s kind of oil rig structure standing in the middle of what Doctor Evil would call < finger motions > 'mag-ma'. As they fight the platform starts to collapse into the 'mag-ma', and drift towards a waterfall or, more accurately, a 'mag-ma'fall. They continue to fight, not letting imminent scorchy death put them off, until Obi-Wan is on solid ground and Anakin isn't. He tries to jump over Obi-Wan, and doesn't make it. Or rather, pieces of him do, his one remaining arm, his two legs. The bulk of him lands in front of Obi-Wan, by the seashore ('mag-ma'shore). And then he catches on fire too! Excellent! Take that Hayden Christensen for ruining two perfectly good fil- two barely adequate films with your 'forty varieties of forest pine' acting! If only I could do that to the fatbeard that created you and ruined my life by making me think of you having sex! And Anakin, now that there is less of you, do you think you'd finally be able to get over yourself, Darth Doorstop?It's interesting to remember what Obi-Wan says to Luke in Episodes Four and Six, he claims Vader killed Luke's father and that then by joining the Emperor Vader effectively killed his father. This film would tend to suggest that the answer to Luke's question "Who killed my father?" is actually "Obi-Wan, mostly".
On the grounds that Anakin now has no limbs and is highly flammable, Obi-Wan feels rather justified in leaving him to die and hightailing it to a cooler part of the galaxy in Padme's ship. Of course, this is when the Emperor turns up and collects the cripy remains. Despite the fact that the Force is supposed to run through the mitichlorians in the blood and Anakin doesn't have much of it what with having no limbs and being deep fried, it seems the Emperor still wants him. Which is sweet really. Consider, maybe the Emperor IS the student of this Sith Lord that conquered death, or is that Sith Lord himself. Anakin's mother in Episode One said he was an immaculate conception, so hmmm?
So, on Coruscant the Doctors take one look at Anakin and decide the best medical course of action is to dress him in black and get James Earl Jones to speak for him. Yes, the Darth we know and love is here. And it's ironic to consider that, with Jones voice, Anakin finally sounds like he's gone through puberty. However, watching The Empire Strikes Back it always seemed that Darth Vader's habit of killing anyone that looked at him funny was evidence of malevolence, after the first three films it will always seem to be the act of a teenager who is annoyed because he doesn't get his way. The Emperor tells him that Padme is dead (presumerably to cement Vader's loyalty to him)
Meanwhile, somewhere else, which I assume is Anodyne or whatever the name of that place that Princess Leia is from, Padme is also on her way out. Yes, it seems that there are two things that far away medicine is crap at, childbirth and broken hearts (of the metaphorical kind, I presume if it was an actual broken heart then docs could do something about it in a jiffy). She pops out Luke and Leia, then snuffs it. Obi-Wan, Yoda and Senator Organa meet up to decide what to do. Yoda decides he's had enough and will retire. That leaves the question of the kids. Now, based on what the Emperor and Vader say, we can assume they don't know the kids are alive. We have to take it on faith that for twenty years Vader goes around being nasty for the Emperor and never says "By the way, I had her in the family way, I wonder if the children made it?". But of course Yoda, Obi-Wan and Organa don't know that and have to assume the kids must be hidden. So why on earth do they think the best places to hide them are in the family of a Senator who will be around the Emperor quite a bit and with a family on the planet that Darth Vader comes from and not change Luke's name? Unless Skywalker is the equivelent of Smith a long way ago...
The answer of course, is that this is the state of play at the start of Episode Four, before Lucas had decided that Luke and Leia were related, before he'd created Yoda, before he knew Darth Vader was their Dad. And this is what I meant at the start, that the parts of this film that are just to set up the next three films are rubbish in the somersaults they have to go through to make something that looks similar to our earth logic. So Organics takes Leia, and Artoo and Threepio too, though rather callously he orders Threepio's memory to be wiped. This is because otherwise Threepio should know a lot more about what is going on than he does in the next three films but now suggests that Artoo is keeping a lot of secrets from him as he seems to stay intact.
And then some weirdness. Apropos of absolutely nothing, Yoda suggests that, as Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to be spending the next twenty years living in a cave he's going to need something to do to pass the time. Well, it seems that Yoda has got some messages over the ether from Kenobi's dear departed mentor, Qui-Gonn Liam Neeson. It seems Neeson has defeated death too, and Yoda tells Obi-Wan he'll quickly teach him how to contact him. This is presumably to set up Obi-Wan for his death and future existence as a Ghost of Christmas Past in the second trilogy, which makes no sense as all other Jedi have died in the regular manner. Whether it's deliberately supposed to sound like this Dark Lord who beat death or not I have no idea, but as this is supposedly it for the Star Wars universe I wonder whether Lucas has any idea for where this goes or whether he's just emptying his drawer marked 'ideas' before the film closes. No, can't be that, he ran out of ideas at the end of Return of the Jedi.
The film closes with Darth, the Emperor and someone who does look like a young Peter Cushing looking out at the construction of a Death Star. Which means they took some twenty years to build the first Death Star but then got the second one half-completed in less than two. Presumably the destruction of the first Death Star took with it all the lazy chippies that took so long building that.
So, what else is there to say? Ian McDiarmid owns the film again as the Emperor, though once he becomes openly villainous he becomes forty percent less interesting as a character. Lucas shows once again that he can't write dialogue for shit and that he seems to have no understanding of how human beings work and doesn't trust them. The second and third Matrix films were bad, but at least the Wachowskis gave their heroes chances to be heroic, most of the characters here don't get that. Ewan McGregor tries hard with what he has, but a lot of what he has is as second banana to Anakin. I spent most of the film wanting to pop the spot on his forehead, I hope he gets that seen to before the next film he's in. Natalie portman has even less to do other than stand around looking radiant while her character fails to notice her husband is going mental. It's hard to tell whether Hayden Christensen is a crap actor or just adrift without help from Lucas (a little from box a...) I'm sure viewers aren't supposed to feel like cheering when Anakin gets sliced and diced. Once again Lucas surrounds those annoying flesh and blood things he has to work with with as many special effects as he can, this leads to the climatic duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan seeming extremely anti-climactic because we've been stupefied into submission by overwhelming visual stimuli. We were promised a film as dark as Empire Strikes Back and it is rather bleak, but Empire had characters with arcs and journeys, Revenge of the Sith is like a kid clearing away his toys, when Palpatine tells Anakin to kill Dooku, Dooku looks astonished at him, he could be looking towards Lucas, thinking "We had so much fun playing together last time, now I'm not good enough for you?". To use another analogy, Dooku is Woody and Count Grievous is Buzz Lightyear, but like him is plastic and less hardwearing. He has no presence (genuinely) and by playing him as a robot with a cough he seems weak from the get go.
The middle section with Anakin being seduced to the Dark Side is, amongst other faults, too quick. As I said, we have so many reasons suggested that it makes no sense that he should turn evil, and we've known since before the start that Anakin would turn to the Dark Side. The various lightsabre duels don't seem as interesting here as they have done in the past.
It's interesting that Star Trek has also come unstuck in the prequels business, though such is the way of Wars that even if the promos for it had Lucas giving a precis of the plot and then saying "don't come and see this film, seriously, I made it and I think it's shit" it would still break records. All I can say is, if you haven't seen it yet, there's Bittorent out there now, use that. If you feel you must see it then for god's sake, pirate it. It's really bad.
* Yes, I know they wrote poetry. But if they wrote poetry they almost certainly had a thriving film industry too. They've long been in our political system, look at Cyril Smith and Nigel Lawson.
** And did Christopher Lee look at the script and go "let me get this straight, another franchise where I do a lot in the second film and then am only in the thirs one briefly? You just better not cut me out this time Lucas, it's not me I'm thinking of but those pixels that make up the battle droids are just starting out in the business and need all the help they can get..."
