Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Gosh. Wow. Gee whillikers. And that’s about it.

But I guess I can’t just leave it at that. They’re saying this is the best of the series since The Empire Strikes Back, and they’re right … but then I realize I didn’t really like Empire that much. Star Wars, the original, was one of the most stunning movies I have ever seen. I can’t tell you how much I loved it. But you can only be stunned so much. There were bits of the others I liked, but with years between them and no wish to really learn much about them, I sat down to this one and realized I didn’t remember what a Sith was. And I got up not much wiser.

We are way, way, way past the point where hugeness and complexity and mind-numbingly quick action and big explosions and spectacle is reason enough to make a movie. We have come so far since 1977 that the blue-screen wallpaper behind any given scene in Revenge of the Sith is 100,000 times more complex than any scene in the original. There must be 400 or 500 shots in Sith that could not have been done in the original for any amount of money.
And ho-fucking-hum.

At some point you realize how completely, stultifyingly boring a light-saber battle is. Granted, this one had more of a story and more character development than the last two … but that says a lot more about the last two than it does about this one.