Okay, personal history with the movie time! Me and my older sister got tickets for a midnight screening 12:05. There were 5 other screenings, all within a minute of each other. That night, people were lined up, some in cosplay (One of whom we met years later on a construction site), all excited to see the closing chapter to trilogy.
My feelings towards this one soured way sooner than Attack of the Clones and this has been the one that I’ve balked against the most. After Clones rewatch of last week, I decided to approach this one without expectations. And now? Now, I’m just confused.
So this seems to be the strange marriage of both Phantom Menace and Clones. We have the pulpy one-liners and Obi-Wan swashbuckling of Clones but the boring politics and cartoony CGI of Menace. Fortunately, there’s more chemistry between Anakin and Obi-Wan this time but there were many scenes that just left me bored and some that left me puzzled.
A good example of this came at the scene of Obi-Wan explaining to Padme what happened. . Um, I started laughing so hard that I had to stop the movie. Seriously, what is this scene? This is straight out of a daytime soap, guys; the writing, the staging, the lingering final shot. All that was missing was the soft lighting and worse music. I had to pick up my rewatching the next day and even then, I had to brace myself for the cheese. And then minutes later is this scene which makes me wonder at Lucas and company all over again.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some high points. There’s a lot of picturesque shots (and some that didn’t age well) and they foreshadowed some of Palpatine’s past and future deeds nicely. Lucas also seems to have predicted the Alt-Right method of “See, they did something wrong too so they’re wrong too!” years ago.
For the prequels, Lucas tries to shake things up by adding another genre into the third act. In Phantom Menace, it was the fighter pilot war movie. In Clones, it was the war movie/Apocalypse Now with the Stormtroopers in battle and the helicarriers. This time around, it’s the monster/disaster movie with Anakin in the role of Frankenstein’s Monster. Unfortunately, this both makes the Big Bad Villain of the original trilogy more sympathetic and make your current Good Guys, The Jedi, look bad.
Gif: https://grayscale-starwars.tumblr.com/
Looking back, I would have liked to see more of this supposed anger and rage that Anakin instead of the sad gaslight victim but honestly, this was a hard balance to create, even if they had someone more capable of writing these movies. Most of the antagonists of the MCU, for example, are just bitter white guys in suits who have no more motivation than “YOU HAVE THE THING I DESERVE. GIMME!!”
Weird sentence alert: So I wish I would have seen more of the Palpatine gaslighting Anakin in Clones. There’s actually quite a lot I wished Clones would have done now that I’ve watch Revenge of the Sith. I’m wondering if this was a downside of having the Clone Wars cartoon. I’ve only watched a few episodes but with how many seasons there are, a good chunk of character development has gone into it, some of which might have down the movie some good.
Gif: https://grayscale-starwars.tumblr.com/
I’m curious if there could have been a way to transition Vader’s fall from grace more slow than this and Clones managed. I’d like to blame one person for it but other franchises have made similar fumbles and this feels more like death of a thousand cuts, not by the single bullet. I guess we’ll always have Yoda fights….
Oh and because my thoughts on this is WAY too long for a bulletpoint thought, I’m saying this now. George Lucas cares more about robots/Cyborgs than anyone human. Seriously, R2 and C-3P0 just take up more screentime than they deserve. Why was R2 basically being the third person on their team? Actually, I can’t complain too much because he’s always done that but there’s where he was in A New Hope and where he was in this. He cares more about them than he does about Obi-Wan and Padme because they’re the only ones of the cast with a consistent personality.
BULLETPOINT TIME!
Gif: https://grayscale-starwars.tumblr.com/
- *Speaking on fight scenes, lightsaber fights are definitely better when the actors/stunt people have put in the work or when both fighters are CGI. One being CGI and the other being a person makes it look cheesy
- *Did we have to need the “Killing the Younglings scenes?
- *WHO IS THE EDITOR OF THESE MOVIES? The scene transitions in these movies are weird.
- *This movie has no right to be that long.
- *Grievous doesn’t help disprove my Lucas robot theory
- *I should have done a drinking game of how many times I’ve said “What is this?” At least that way, I would have been entertained.
- *Did they really have to go that hard on Palpatine’s make-up?
- *Jimmy Smits is handsome. That’s all. I’ve been holding that in for a while now so I figured I’d say it now.
- *Admittedly, I really did enjoy this scene of him making his decision. Good job, Christensen!
- *Obi-Wan Kenobi… So instead of giving an old friend, someone whom you’ve known since he was 8, a quick death, you left him there to burn to death. Are we really sure that the Jedi are the good guys here?
- *Speaking of the Jedi, Mace straight up killing Palpatine is murky, man. I get that he’s Super Bad but you can’t go around being Judge Judy and Executioner.
- *Yes, I just made a Hot Fuzz reference. I just watched Revenge of the Sith, let me have my joy
- *So did Dooku come before or after Death Maul? Did no one think about what the Sith Retirement Plan was?
- *Again, anyone who talks crap about Rose and/or Canto Bight can watch them rescuing Palpatine on loop because R2 is the annoying sidekick we all hate but the studio keeps stuffing in everything.
Tune in next week for The Force Awakens! Keep calm and Carrie on, y’all!!
No comments:
Post a Comment