by Roger Bourke White Jr., May 05
First off let me say that this movie fully holds up Lucas's tradition of making a lush movie with fine Space Opera pacing. He has fully kept up on what computer animation can do to aid in story telling, so the movie is a visual feast. I recommend seeing it.
Now on to some details:
First, the good news:
I love the architecture. The sets are lush, the living areas look exotic, yet comfortable. For instance, I love watching the characters walk around exotic living rooms, then take a few steps to go out on a porch to hop into a space speeder to fly away to the next destination. This is a pre-9/11 feeling of confidence and security about living space, and I'm glad Lucas is reminding us that this is a lifestyle we can strive for.
The exotic locales and exotic peoples look exotic. Once again, Lucas has set a new standard for what exotic should look like in science fiction.
This story has a definite beginning point and a definite end point. This is an unusual constraint for a story being told for the first time. Lucas does a good job of rising to this challenge, but he still left some loose ends. Here are the things I saw as problems (in no particular order):
Darth is the third Sith Lord Apprentice in three movies. The apprentice position has as much turnover as an Enterprise "Red Shirt" (Security Guard) in the old Star Trek series. Anakin met his two predecessors in the position in the previous two movies, so he has seen this turnover first hand, yet he is still willing to take the position with no second thoughts about this. This is a big problem. What did Palpatine promise these previous appentices? Did they get what he promised? Anakin should have asked Palpatine, "Do you have references?"
An even bigger problem is that after Anakin pledges to Palpatine, Palpatine reneges on the main promise he gave Anakin/Darth: I will keep your wife alive, or restore her life, at child birth. After he is converted, Darth seems to completely forget that Palpatine made him this promise, and that it was the foundation of his conversion.
Count Dooku seems to have been converted from Jedi Knightdom to Sith Lordom instantly (it happens between Episode One and Episode Two), as does Anakin (a bit of talking and one bow does it). Given how fast he churns through apprentices, it's not clear why Palpatine should want the Jedi wiped out completely. It's also not clear why he should have been in hiding for thousands of years. In the three prequel episodes, the Sith Lord acts like a 30's-style Dracula vampire preying on the Jedi -- he swoops in mysteriously, and with a few words spoken to their souls subverts the strongest quickly and completely.
What has Palpatine to fear from the Jedi? They are a secretarial pool to him.
After he has converted Count Dooku, how does Senator Palpatine explain to Dooku with a straight face, "OK, for the next step in my... sorry... our rise to power, I want you to kidnap me. After you do, I want you to shackle me to a chair in the highest tower in your space ship, and then kill the Jedi who come to rescue me."
The logical question for the Count is, "Master, if I'm going to kill them all, why should I bother to shackle you to a chair? If I'm not going to kill them all -- if seeing you shackled and you getting rescued is important to the plan -- how am I going to survive? What does getting a few Jedi killed rescuing you get us in terms of plan advancement? Please tell me again why this isn't some harebrained scheme?"
The Sith Lord -- Palpatine -- has been living undercover for thousands of years. But as Senator Palpatine rises, the Jedi can't find enough suspicious in his background to alert them to his upcoming Year-Thousand-and-something birthday?
Last year's spring blockbuster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004) had some pretty horrible science in it. But Lucas has one scene that manages to be even more preposterous than the Day After Tomorrow scenes. This scene is early in the movie and is the climax of Anakin and Obewan rescuing Palantine. In this scene they are crash landing a burning fragment of a space ship on an airport runway. As they are aiming for the runway, two "fire engine airplanes" come flying up beside the space ship fragment and start hosing it down to control the burning. The fragment then lands safely on the runway. The bad science list starts as follows:
Anakin tells the Jedi Master Mace Windu, "Palpatine is a Sith Lord.", and Windu immediately heads to Palantine's office to make an arrest. He doesn't prepare before acting, or call a council meeting, or say, "Really? Now that's a surprise, and that changes things." He just heads off with three Jedi in tow.
Many Jedi are killed by "Plan 66". Plan 66 is something Senator Palpatine apparently arranged with many military officers well beforehand. If he arranged this plan weeks ahead of time with dozens to hundreds of military officers (who then informed their men what to do), how come no word of this plan leaked to the Jedi -- these Jedi being masters of covert operations, looking into the hearts of the weak-minded, and respected by many of these military people they go to battle with. Even more so, how come so many of these masters of covert operations let themselves get "bushwhacked" by mere mortals shooting at them with mere guns? This whole scheme was very weak. Instead of Plan 66, they needed to be arrested on trumped up charges, and massacred while being held in jail cells. (Note: this resembles Lucas' weak handling of Anakin's mother's death in Episode Two. That kidnapping and torture should have been something arranged for by Senator Palpatine to set up Anakin's future conversion. It was not told that way, and as a result added very little to Episode Two's story line, or this one.)
General Grievous -- a mechanical man -- can access The Force? (He says, "I was trained in Jedi ways." as he whips out his extra arms and light sabers.) What about the mito...mito...whatever that Anakin is carrying in big numbers? Aren't they the gateway to The Force? And... where's Grievous' anti-Jedi force shield that the roly-poly robots use to such good effect?
And this same General Grievous is a robot that coughs? Coughing is a reflex that comes with a distressed breathing system. If he's going to do something that makes him -- a mechanical man -- look sick or crippled, he should limp and spark uncontrollably or spray hydraulic fluid. (Note: in checking out the Star Wars web site, I find that General Grievous is supposed to be a man-machine hybrid. This was not clear in the movie, and it's not clear what benefit this provided him, except coughing and access to The Force. Certainly a mechanical man is not likely to be using hearts and breathing as an energy source. That role goes to the nuclear reactor that powers every well thought out mechanical man.)
The final scene shows The Emperor and Darth watching as The Death Star is being built. This means:
Finally, it is interesting how much biology has advanced since the first Star Wars movie. Back then, in 1977, covering a badly damaged person with a mechanical exoskeleton seemed like a practical solution to the badly damaged human problem. These days it looks like an anachronism. Why aren't these people using full tissue regeneration, and then putting the fully healed human in an exoskeleton?
That's my technofiction reveiw of Star Wars Episode Three. I'm glad George made the movie. I'm glad I watched it. But it's far from perfect technofiction.