Revenge of Lucas

So Mrs. X and I saw Episode III last night. It was good. It certainly was the best of the prequel trilogy. I’d have to see it again before if I could decide whether or not it was better than Return of the Jedi. So right now, it’s hovering between 3 and 4 on my rating of the 6.

Good things:
* The good things about the movie included a much better repartee between Anakin and Obi-
wan.
* There was a lot more of the dry humor that flavored the original trilogy.
* The lightsaber duels were quite impressive.
* Ian McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor put the full force of their acting abilities into their roles
and steal most scenes they are in.
* Yoda was a much more three-dimensional character, both in terms of the effects and his
dialogue.

Bad things:
* The overall dialogue still stinks. In a movie driven for nearly an hour by political intrigue, the
simplistic dialogue renders many actors wooden.
* The chemistry between Anakin and Padme was very forced. A shame since both have shown
to be very good actors in other movies, but neither seem to be able to struggle out of the bad
dialogue and lack of direction that Lucas gives them.
* Padme is severely underused as a character and then given a very weak death, out of line with
the way she was developed in the first two movies.
* Sloppy answers to existing questions. Lucas answered most of the questions people felt
needed to be answered, but several of them were very rushed and to the point. Further
development of these should have been explored.

I’d still recommend it to see, although not necessarily in the theater Mrs. X and I went to. It was old and the sound wasn’t that great, but we expected that since it only cost us $4 to see it. The worst though was the audience. A few rows back of us was a kid maybe 4 years old who was very fussy and shouldn’t have been in there at all. There were other people, including the couple sitting next to us, who kept running commentary throughout the movie and that was highly distracting. Lower price also seems to invite lower class.