Hi guys!
It’s kind of depressing when the best that one can say about a movie is that at least it wasn’t horrible. The new Star Wars movie manages to live up to that description.
The movie begins with a frenetic space battle above the capital planet of the Republic. Obi-Wan and Anakin are swirling around and through debris, explosions, numerous droids and assorted mayhem. Once they arrive on the main ship, the action translates into more conventional Jedi-style droid slaughter. Throughout the entire sequence, you become so wound up and excited that you find yourself begging for everything to slow down. Lucas unfortunately obliges with a second act that is appalling in its banality. It’s so bad that the opening of the movie can only be seen as a device to build up capital so that it can be squandered later.
Lucas’s treatment of the love scenes between Anakin and Padmé reveal not only a an insipid outlook on the way lovers actually respond to each other, but also a clue as to why Lucas has been single for so much of his adult life. Lucas is apparently not concerned with his inability to understand basic psychology, or indeed, grade school biology, and ratchets his ignorance to profound idiocy with Padmé’s cause of death.
Other failures include the Jedi, the elite fighting force that has kept peace in the galaxy for over a thousand years, who demonstrate that they are, in the end, remarkably easy to slaughter; the Senate, where near-unanimous consent to totalitarianism can be had for anyone with the gumption to ask for it; and Yoda, who despite being one of the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy has yet to show that he can actually be victorious in a lightsaber duel.
When Episodes I and II came out, the most devoted fans complained that even though the movies sucked a lot, that you couldn’t judge them on an individual basis, but only as parts of one whole story. Well, every episode of that one story has been produced and the resulting verdict is slightly less than favorable. The entire series is one action sequence after another strung together with a shoestring of morality composed mostly out of sayings Lucas undoubtably plagiarized from fortune cookies.
This is not to say that the fans will be disappointed. Seeing the movie is a cultural catharsis for those who have waited 27 years for it. It answers many of the questions that fans have had since the first trilogy and even though many of these answers are cop-outs and Lucas forgets to explicitly answer some of the questions that he has created in this second trilogy, it’s going to make millions of dollars that Lucas is going to use to finance his next entertainment nightmare. I’m going to see it again myself.
:clapping: :tiphat: 