If you like good acting, well-written dialog, decent plotting and an all 'round enjoyable story and movie experience - Sorry, this ain't it.
I loved the first movie of the series. Then I enjoyed the second two, and found the next two weak (although I hated and continue to hate Jar Jar Binks.) Still, for some strange reason I had real hopes for this last movie.
Hopes dashed.
Even the good parts of the battle scenes are brightly colorized versions of a Horatio Hornblower sailing ship battle badly transferred to space and backed up with strange loud noises. It is mostly a light-show without any real human interest. The Hornblower movies did it a lot better. Essentially Lucas substituted flashing colored lights on a massive screen with Dolby sound in place of any consideration of what a space battle would be like. And after five earlier movies built around light saber fencing matches, there really isn't much left to be excited about now.
In the first Star Wars movie I really liked the battered equipment used by the scavengers. It provided a setting that was both foreign and credible against which the story could play out. Then, the bar scene is unforgettable. So is the Wookie as a copilot. Since then, the use of digital imaging seems to have lost all the detail that made each scene unforgettable and replaces it with the flashing lights and loud noises that do nothing for the story but seem to fascinate the computer kids.
In RotS a decent actor playing Anakin SkyWalker could have saved the movie if he was provided with adequate dialog and a decent plot. It doesn't look like Lucas even tried. Apparently George Lucas doesn't know any adequate actors and doesn't know anyone who knows an adequate actor. Without an decent actor or writing to save this movie, RotS became the worst movie I have seen in the 21st Century.
I shouldn't have expected much. I already knew that Lucas doesn't know decent writing. No surprise there. I just got what I should have expected. For some strange reason (hope over experience?) I still wasn't expecting was a movie that was worse that "Dune" (starring "Sting" though I am sure he would like to forget it.) But Dune had an excuse. It was a failed effort of love to put an over-long and very detailed story from a greatly loved book into a mere three hour movie. RotS did not have the same excuse. The story could fit the time available. It's just that no craft was applied to acting, dialog or story.
I admit it. I am a science fiction connoisseur. I started reading Science fiction in the early 50's when I read "Cosmic Engineers" by Clifford D. Simak. I read the three great Asimov future-history books ("Foundation", "Foundation and Empire" and "Second Foundation")shortly after they came out. I still remember the movies "Forbidden Planet" and "Destination Moon" from when I was in High School. There were also some ZaZa Gabor science fiction movies of the same period that are better forgotten, but I use them as a standard for how bad a movie can get.
RotS was several orders of magnitude below ZaZa Gabors' movies. The Gabor movies at least had a humor or "camp" aspect. RotS was an attempt at serious movie making.
Coming out of the written science fiction camp, I have long been aware that what movie people call science fiction and what literary science fiction people call science fiction are two different genres. Written science fiction developed out of pulp fiction to tell good, well-crafted stories with decent characters based on plausible ideas.
Movie science fiction developed as a platform to display the latest special effects, and generally ignores anything else. Not surprising. Movies are massively expensive. The audience can see how much was spent on special effects, but can't tell how much the writers were paid. The result is that science fiction movies tend to emphasize special effects over good writing.
When good special effects combine with a good story in a science fiction movie, it is almost always because some science fiction writer wrote a good story that was later turned into a movie. This is what happened with Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic. Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter movies are good fantasy books similarly turned into good movies. Notice that the upfront investment in writing occurs BEFORE the movie is begun.
But a Science fiction movie that was initially written as a movie script rarely has developed a good story. The first Star Wars movie promised something different - a made-for-movies science fiction movie that had literary science fiction qualities. Sadly, Lucas has now failed to live up to his initial effort in five tries.
I should have known better about RotS - it was George Lucas after all - but I am really disappointed.
My kid tells me that RotS was really a good movie. Apparently because I don't have years of study in literature and symbolism, I am just missing what made the movie good. I don't buy it.
If it takes years of reading classical literature and studying the pronouncements of Joseph Campbell to understand and "enjoy" the movie, then something is seriously wrong with the movie. Some generic political commentary, Yoda making fake zen-type statements in language that resembles a linguistic form of Reverse Polish Notation (Hewlett Packard calculator uses will know what I am talking about) and something that my kid claims is symbology, metaphor and allegory simply don't save a movie disaster.
Movies are the first real mass media. If a media requires years of study to understand and enjoy, it is not a mass media. And this movie sucks.
Today was not all bad for me, though. I did just see the final TV show of the "Andromeda" series today. It tied up all the story lines, and gave me a last chance to watch Lexa Doig acting. (Romie) I'm sorry to see it go, but it, also, had writing problems. The Roddenberry shop ran out of ideas over a year ago. You could always tell when the Roddenberry writers couldn't come up with a good script. It started with the second of the series. They would bring in the the omnipotent and irrational "Q" to build a story around or some other such idiocy.
In this final Star Trek - enterprise they used time travel the same way the earlier writers used "Q." The writers could write themselves into blind corners and then just go back in time to make it all go away. Good science fiction writers don't do that. Hack TV and movie writers do it all the time.
The Andromeda crew has just spent the last season trapped in some strange man(?)-made star system, wondering around metal tunnels and being surprised by one hidden secret after another. Nothing connected the various story lines all year. It was just one surprise after another with no rhyme or reason.
This final show did tie it all up. It turns out that the avatar of the great antagonist, the Abyss, had created the Vedran Star System just to manipulate Captain Dylan Hunt who had for no previously apparent reason been revealed to be "The Paradigm" at the beginning of this final season. The writing disaster in the show has been clear for a year now.
No surprise that Andromeda and the final Starship Enterprise series have both ended with this season. The Rodenberry legacy is finished.
Rodenberry himself was a science fiction writer first. He knew how to write science fiction and he knew how to judge the writing other writers offered him. The result was good stories. Remember that was what created the first three years of Star Trek. It sure wasn't the production qualities or the acting abilities of William Shattner. Rodenberry frequently hired published science fiction writers to write his shows. The quality stories he built the shows around was what created the Star Trek dynasty.
Since Rodenberry's death the shows slowly have trailed off. The key is the inability of TV and movie writers to write decent science fiction stories.
George Lucas' problem is that he wasn't trained as a writer. His training was in film-making. He originally pushed the envelope of special effects, but when that ran out, he had nothing left to offer except his excessive reputation with people who might know movies, but don't know story-telling and REALLY don't know good non-movie science fiction.
So. I was really disappointed in Revenge of the Sith. I should not have been surprised though.
Don't waste your money seeing the move.
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