But it gives Darth a reason to hate the emperor. And a reason to kill him in the end.
Holy bejesus, yes. The years as moisture farmers sure weren’t kind to her and Owen, though. Either that or kid-Luke’s whining just wore them out.
I’ve seen it twice now since its release, and I really can’t praise the job they did with Yoda enough. I didn’t notice it the first time, but the second time I noticed how they got light transmitting through the tips of his ears. That was a really, really, REALLY nice touch. And then there was this point when they were walking through a corridor on the Tantive IV and he did indeed look real. There were none of the telltale signs of CGI or puppets or anything like that. I sure hope it gets at least a nomination for SFX because of that.
Jimmy Smits really kicks ass as Bail Organa. He’s got a presence that really carries on the legacy of the original trilogy well. I’ve never seen NYPD Blue, but he must be a really great actor. Add him to the list with Ewan McGregor of actors that made this film.
On a personal note, however, I have to mention that Natalie Portman has many features in common with my ex. The eyes, the eyebrows, the lips, the hair, even the way she blinks and sniffs when she’s all upset and crying and stuff. Considering how aggravating things were towards the end of our relationship, whenever Natalie’s despair got the best of her, I couldn’t divorce her performance from the parallels with my ex and therefore couldn’t help but laugh.
I don’t think it was. I think the bit where he said “he taught his apprentice everything he knew” was a lie - one Sidious later copped to - but from the way he told the story and the way he smiled at the end, I think we were to believe the rest of it was the truth.
I saw it too.
Good, maybe I wasn’t hallucinating. The rest of you keep your eyes out if/when you see it again. I think it was the bottom right quadrant of the screen, just above the surface of the planet.
It’s funny how my eye was drawn to it. The shape of that ship is part of the “furniture of my mind”, to quote Douglas Adams.
At this point it’s a six page thread and I can sit here and try to read through it for a few hours and then respond or just post my thoughts after seeing it last night and I’ve chosen the second option.
It wasn’t as bad as Ep 1 and Ep 2 but it still stunk. I wasn’t planning on seeing the movie but I have friends who wanted to go so I went and saw it with them. Lucas managed to squeeze eight more bucks out of me on this.
Apparently to turn to the dark side you have to be a complete and total idiot and once you do fall you go from ambitious Jedi to loony, psycho killer immediately. There were several points where Anakin should have just walked away from Sidious regardless of what he had done before. “Oh, I don’t know how to actually save someone but I’m sure we can figure it out.” “Now that you’ve slaughtered all the Jedi, would you mind killing a few dozen guys on this planet for me rather than addressing the things you’re really concerned about?” Anakin may have been lost to the dark side but there was no real reason for him to follow Sidious.
Also, anyone stupid enough to lead an army of an unknown origin with unknown loyalties into battle deserves to get shot in the back. That was one of my big problems with Attack of the Clones and the fact that even after that were stupid enough to take the army there the Jedi really take slow thinkers prize for not spending the past few years going over all of their training and methods with a fine tooth comb.
Apparently Padme’s people don’t show pregnacy at all for the first several months and then go through it all in a couple of days. I kept thinking that a few weeks or months had passed every time they went back to her and she was larger, but then the dialog established it was the next day.
It didn’t help that it felt like anytime Lucas was stuck on the next line or next shot he just cribbed something from one of his previous movies.
So it was weak. The action set peices were better than the previous two movies, though, and if someone likes that kind of thing (and there’s nothing wrong with that) then they’ll probably like it more than me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how one falls to the dark side and that ruined it for me.
That was my reaction, too. Anakin submits to a total jerk-off. Anybody else would have told Palpatine to stick it any number of times, no matter how far down the Dark Path he was.
Total waste of money and time.
Okay, I’ve “finally” seen it with my 11 year old son.
Hokey script? Check!
Wooden acting? Check!
Needless cameo roles by popular characters to enhance merchandising possibilities? Check!
Plot holes you could fly one of those new Airbus jobbies straight through? Check!
And I’d watch it again.
It’s not a classic for the ages. But it’s beautiful eye candy! It’s two hours (and a bit) of escape into a fantasy world with Good and Evil practically wearing nametags so you can’t confuse them! It’s serious special effects! It’s unexpected bits of comic relief! It’s sword fights! (Swords, lightsabers; tomayto, tomahto.) It was fun, that’s all there is to it.
Although, annoying Yoda becomes. Quickly. Shut up more he must.
Incidentally, my take on the turning to the Dark Side business, which may be too kind, is that Palpatine had pulled the ultimate Jedi Mind Trick on Anakin. Maybe turning the kid’s own power against him to do it, which is why P. had to wait until he could exploit A.'s weak spot to start turning him. Anakin didn’t walk when he should have found out he’d been used because Palpatine wouldn’t let him see that. Maybe it’s too kind, as I said, but it let me ignore that plot hole and enjoy the rest of the movie.
Flodjr loved it. I’m glad we didn’t take his little brother (who’s 5), however - too dark and gory for a kid that age.
Man, I should really start a new, “How Much Did you Pay to See Episode III” thread, but it’s not really necessary for just the small amount of bragging I want to do:
It cost me MX$43 pesos – that’s about US$3.91. And that was for the 12:01am showing on Thursday!
Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t count if someone bought your ticket or you won it or something like that…
Something that made me cringe:
When half a ship is plunging through the atmosphere out of control at mach infinity -1, the accompanying ship cools it down with a firehose?
And I had to giggle when the droid soldiers said “Ow” as they were mowed down by the light sabers.
On the whole, the movie sucked.
Well, I saw the movie Thursday and I’ve been patiently lurking around ever since then waiting for this question to be addressed (here and on other boards), but I haven’t even seen it mentioned in passing, so I guess I have to break down and ask myself.
Am I now to assume that the Stormtroopers we saw in the Holy Trilogy were actually clones and genetic “brothers” of Boba Fett? It’s weird (and somehow feels cheap…) now to think that they all looked alike under those helmets.
I had previously either just not given it much thought, or assumed that the clones were eventually wiped out. Order 66 though, in addition to the uniform progression, gave me a pretty strong impression that these were imperial Stormtroopers.
Was this talked about when Episode II was new and I just missed the discussion somehow, or am I just totally wrong?
Another thought on Anakin not bailing when Palpatine confessed his inability to save Padme:
He needed leadership.
Look at the progression of his life: slave -> padawan -> Jedi knight but not Master -> Sith apprentice. He was not a leader himself, despite his burning desire to be one. It’s been said that the people who most want to lead are probably not going to be good leaders. Perhaps the Jedi Council wasn’t “disrespecting” him when they refused to grant him the rank of Master. They could see that he wanted it too badly, and wanting it that much was a sign that he would not be a good leader.
The fact is, he did not have leadership skills. Sure, he was very good at what he did, whether lightsaber fighting or mechanical tasks. But he was a weapon, doing what he was told by somebody else, for all his life. From Watto to Qui Gon to Obi Wan to the Council to Palpatine, he was always being directed by somebody else.
When he killed the rest of the Jedi, he was suddenly without leadership. Whether or not he knew it or admitted it, he needed that leadership. Once he eliminated his Jedi leaders, he needed to fill that that need, and so latched onto Palpatine, for better or for worse. It’s much like a woman who goes from one abusive relationship to the next, so desperate for a relationship that she’ll put up with just about anything.
I think it’s been established, at least in the Extended Universe, that the vast majority of stormtroopers were, by the time of Ep. IV - VI, conscripts from various planets. When you consider the sheer numbers needed to staff a star destroyer, let alone the Death Star, cloning wouldn’t be able to keep up. It would also be far more expensive than simply conscripting soldiers.
Wasn’t Han Solo training to be a Stormtrooper when he turned on his superiors and saved Chewbacca?
I remember hearing (reading) that, as well, Khan.
I saw the movie this weekend. I say, as a lifelong Star Wars fan whose entire childhood was devoted to playing Star Wars, this movie was awful. I’m not trying to turn into Comic Book Girl declaring to the masses “Worst movie ever!” But my God…
Yoda wound up being Jar Jar with Jedi powers. The scenes between Padme and Anakin were more excruciating than ever. The magically disappearing pregnancy belly and Sam Jackson’s distracting performance. I have a theory that since Sam Jackson declared in several interviews that Mace wouldn’t go out like a pussy then he found out that Mace will die in a ridiculous manner, he decided the sabotage the movie.
The only highlights for me were the Jedi extermination and Anakin’s burnt body. Even the big Obi Wan/Anaking duel was a letdown. If it’s a battle to the death, with good and evil at stake, why the hell did they get on a conference table to do battle? The baby naming scene had me on the edge of my seat. Would she name the babies Stan and Mabel? The Darth Vader resurrection scene was ruined by the “Noooo!” I call it a force version of Streetcar Named Desire.
The movie was a big let-down. I’ll just cling to my happy childhood memories and pretend the prequels never happened.
Well, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, and I won’t totally disagree with you. When viewed in light of the Holy Trilogy, these movies (especially the first two) really are a big let-down.
If you take them out of context though and view them as totally seperate movies (which is what they are - don’t let Lucas fool you into thinking that Star Wars “was the story of Anakin Skywalker from the start”), they are pretty damn good summer popcorn movies.
Think about it: What recent sci-fi “blockbusters” do we have to compare them to? The Chronicles of Riddick? Crap. The Matrix sequels? More crap. Any recent Star Trek movies? Most of the post-Spider-Man comic book movies? Crap crap crap crap crap.
Revenge of the Sith was more than watchable to me. It had some bad parts, yes, but it was leaps and bounds beyond what the genre has been giving us in recent years.
This is something I’ve seen in a lot of reviews, as well (not specifically the baby’s names, but prior knowledge of certain events), and I don’t understand it. Well, yeah, you’re not going to be on the edge of your seat wondering what the names are going to be. Sure, you’re not going to sit there wondering if Anakin will really fall to the dark side. You’re not going to be actually thinking that Obi-Wan will lose the final showdown.
But this is all stuff that you knew about going into the movie. Why then complain that the knowledge of these events ruined the experience in any way? This is not to point out the OP, but the quote above reminded me of that - sure, I wasn’t blown away by the choices of names, but really …was there any way to do it that wouldn’t be just pure “we already know that” exposition? Yeah, it was cheesy and all, but … well … George Lucas. This is the same guy who conceived Jar Jar and, even after an entire film, still thought it was a good idea.
The fact of the matter is that all of the events in this film are foregone conclusions that won’t surprise anyone. Really, the only way to surprise anyone is to surprise them with how everything went down. When you watch this, you have to expect that some of the suspense will be gone since you’ve known for 28 years how it’s all going to end up. For those reviewers who thought the experience was ruined by prior knowledge of its ending … don’t know what I can do for you.
You say that like the original ‘Holy trinity’ was anything else - or even aspired to be.
Star Wars is a popcorn muncher with wooden acting, silly dialogue, and every other vice attributed to the prequels - except for the ‘we know this already’ which can only happen with almost 30 years of backstory.
I’m torn, taken as a standalone movie, it’s good
as part of the trilogy, it’s mediocre though, yes the CGI and effects were brilliantly done, but there’s more to a movie than eye-candy, take away the CGI and other effects, and you’re left with a mediocre movie, laughable emoting, nonexistent plot, and blatant “Look at this, see, this is IMPORTANT!” "subtleties
yes i know they’re trying to link the movies together, but it seems like the effects linger too long on the “prototype” ships and tech…
“SEE, LOOK AT THIS SHIP, IT’S THE PREDECESSOR/PROTOTYPE TO THE X-WING, AND HERE’S A TIE FIGHTER, AND A STAR DESTROYER, OH LOOK, HERE’S THE CORRELIAN CORVETTE FROM ANH!!! ISN’T THAT COOL?!?”
still, better than most of the drek currently in theatres, i’ll see it again, just to catch little bits i missed this time, but overall, i’m not as impressed as i thought i’d be
on a scale of 1-10, i’ll give it a 6.5
ANH; 9.5
ESB; 9.6
ROTJ; 7
TPM; 3.5
AOTC; 5.0
ROTS; 6.5
one last question, when do the Clonetroopers loose their shooting accuracy, the clone troopers seem to be reasonably on-target in both AOTC and ROTS, yet they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn when standing inside the barn and using a shotgun in the original 3 movies
did the Empire cut the Blaster Marksmanship Training Course budget at some point?