I got around to seeing Revenge of the Sith this weekend. I guess I wasn’t too late, but it was weird to me how much my priorities had changed from the first films, which were, I’ll admit, somewhat seminal in my early life. After the disappointment of the last two films, I can’t say that I was holding high hopes for this (last?) installment.
My lack of faith was not resolved completely by this movie, “it wasn’t completely awful”. In fact, from the 146 minutes there was at least 80 minutes of really good film in there. In particular, Ewan McGregor was fantastic, the effects were great, and what they did with Yoda was really impressive. I made it a point to see this in a digital projection theater, and was lucky enough to go to the Cinerama Dome down in Hollywood, so the ILM magic was well-presented.
All-in-all, I think George Lucas is a horrible director. He wouldn’t know good acting if it slapped him in the face, and this really shows with the awful line delivery in any of the episodes he’s directed versus Empire and Jedi, which had professional talent at the reigns.
I am of course going to review the Clone Wars animated series to pick up some back story and watch them all again at some point, but I rejoice in the fact that I have three unedited original copies of the first trilogy, on LaserDisc, in widescreen. My childhood memories of the original films will forever be intact in some form (now I just need to figure out how to re-master them on to DVD).
