So the wife and I went to watch this whole sith thing on thursday during lunchtime... that was and cool and all.. being with the wife that is.. wish we could have gotten dinner tho.
I mean the movie was cool and all, great visual effects, couple of cool little action scenes, etc... ... well... sorta etc.. actually.. visuals and fighting stuff.. that's about it.
See, here's what's really odd.. one of the things that you'd think a geek would appretiate most of all is all that wonderful CGI.. nah. overkill. In fact, one of my favorite 5 second scenes is the brief clip in the halls of Organa's ship after picking up Ol' Ben. A real, beautitfully real, mockup that brought the memories of the original Star Wars, and the opening fierce battle in the hallway with R2 and 3PO running away..
See, as amazing as the details and expression and the rendering of Yoda was.. he wasn't "there" ... all too often you could tell when an actor was looking at a green ball on a stick representing where Yoda would be rendered later. Ditto with the environments.. I'm not claiming the guy playing anikin (too lazy to even cut-n-paste his name)is an excellent actor or anything... but if Samuel L. "Tasty Burger" Jackson can't pull off acting in front of an entirely green scened environment.. why should the kid from TeenBeat? Too often I can imagine Lucas sitting there with a megaphone yelling "you're over molten lava" .. "it's hot, act like its hot" .. "oh, and its dangerous!, act like its dangerous!" .. he might as well have been dancing little cardboard cutouts around.
Speaking of lava.. in the desperation to raise the "drama" of this little quadrillion dollar home video.. he kept having to toss in "one more bit of tension"
... example... ok, you're fighting your life long mentor and friend....
to the death...
over rivers of molten lava...
and your balanced on a beam.. .. ...
and the beam breaks off....
and you're fighting to the death on the beam as its floating down river in molten lava while its being burned and consumed....
as your heading to lava waterfall...
come on. the crux of the "drama" was supposed to be anikin (am I even spelling that right? does it matter?) battling ben to the death in his fina turn to the darkside. the rest of that stuff was supposed to be the environment it took place in- NOT to be the tension in the scene.
Speaking of things not to do.
the whole Frankenstein / Vader awakes thing.. that hurt. had Mel Brooks done it, it would have been genius. Lucas doing it.. painful, pathetic, etc..
Yeah, that whole final transformation to Vader didn't work for me.. how did we get from this whiny kid recently put in this shiny plastic suit whining away about "where's Amadala" (again, spelling- doesn't matter, it sucked that bad) to the cold non-human, throat-gripping-from-a-distance guy with the James Earl Jones voice that scared the pee out of us in our formative years?
(actually, if they hat least let Mr. Jones so the whole pathetic NOOOoooooo! Frankenstein bit, it may have salvaged something... ... ... ... ok, maybe not)
Honestly, I can't say that I buy into the theory that this story explains the fall into the darkside. The basics? he had bad dreams about his wife dying. so he joins the darkside to get the power to keep her alive. which, of course. doesn't work out. The whole story is like that. Too many clear cut, black and white issues parading as "depth." which is only confused by the repeated flip-flopping on issues like "only the Sith deal in absolutes," compared to some of the original yoda wisdom "do, or do not. there is no try" ... (yes, that example was stolen from a post on slashdot. props to the original poster)...
At some very base level, I feel like the master story teller has failed us. As one of the strongest and most prominent representatives of Joseph Campell's works on myth and the core of every universal story- he has failed us. The telling of the tale is visually stunning and absolutely amazing. But there is no heart, no human connection, no story being told. He had the opporunity to share in a new way... we knew the outcome, he only need to share the journey. Instead, we got postcards from a cheesey giftshop.
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