Episode 3, audience 0

bugsybanana and I finally saw Revenge of the Sith tonight. Oh, man! Is Lucas deliberately telling all his actors to tone it down to mannequin levels? Even Samuel Jackson was wooden. I guess all the emoting was being saved up for the Emperor’s mad cackle-fest.

Speaking of which, all those people saying Lucas intended a commentary on recent politics were right. The parallels with Viktor Yuschenko couldn’t have been more obvious.

The romance scenes were terrible, as I expected. The scene where Anakin and Padmé argue over who loves the other more had me moaning in pain. What surprised me was how uninspired the fight scenes were. There were occasional moments of cleverness, but mostly the fights were rote and sometimes hard to follow. The fight scenes in the Clone Wars animated series beat the hell out of this.

My favorite moment may have been seeing the inside of Senator Organa’s ship, which I had recognized from the first exterior shot as the rebel blockade runner that’s the very first ship we see in the original Star Wars. The interior, while clearly new, had that obvious designed-in-the-1970s look.