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    Here begins your journey into the mind of everybody's favorite asian, and I don't mean Jet Li.
What follows is the somewhat inane, mostly irrelevant, and self-important ramblings of a man on the brink of madness.
Welcome... to the Chu.

Friday, May 20, 2005
 For the Star Wars Critic...    [L]

Check out the detailed (and fun!)
Nitpicker's Guide to Star Wars series.

Oh, and I saw Episode III yesterday.

My review: What does it matter? You're going to see it anyway.

But for what it's worth, I thought it was amazing (and I'm not a breathless fanboy either - I thought Ep1 was intolerable, and Ep2 was mostly bearable). Episode III is breath-taking, jaw-dropping, tear-jerking, heart-wrenching and other noun-gerund descriptionary phrases.

Update

Ace didn't like it, and makes some good points:

4. In each of the first-trilogy films, there was a strong narrative drive. A leads to B leads to C leads to D, etc. (One exception, of a sort, is RotJ, which actually is two films-- the rescue Han film and then the assault on Endor film. But both of those stories had their own strong narrative drive.)

These prequels have nothing like that. Because there's no real narrative drive, they have to go to Jedi Council periodically and get some sort of random side-mission in order to find something to f'n' do with their time. These movies are like video games in more ways than one-- including, alas, in terms of story, where fairly self-contained and non-plot-advancing "side missions" are the norm.

There weren't any "side missions" in the first trilogy. Each next bit of action was more or less inevitable due to decisions and circumstances from the previous scenes. In each of the new movies, one could easily imagine a thousand other meaningless side-missions rather than the ones chosen without losing much at all.

Long story short: Everyone knocks Lucas on his dialogue. But any decent screenwriter can come in and give the dialogue a polish. His real failing as a writer is in terms of structure, plot, inevitablility, and narrative arc. And those problmes are much more difficult to fix, particularly if you have a headstrong filmmaker like Lucas who apparently isn't compentent enough to know he's incompetent.
A-freakin'-men.
6. Threepio gets his memory wiped. Artoo does not. That means that little bastard has known throughout the entire trilogy that Darth was Luke's father, and Leia his sister, and yet the little piece of s*** never said a word. (And he could have of course-- not only did Threepio understand his buzzes and beepings, but of course Luke picked up his musical language eventually, too.)
Luke: "Why didn't you tell me?"
R2-D2: "Beep beep whoop whirr boop!"
Luke: "What do you mean, 'I never asked you'?"
7. No one has yet explained why, if the idea was to hide Anikin Skywalker's child "where the agents of the Sith would never find him," the best place to do so was on Anikin's home world of Tatooine, with his brother's family, and under his actual given name of Luke Skywalker.

J****. You want to knock the Stormtroopers' marksmanship; but they seem to be better shots than the Imperial Intelligence Division are detectives.
As an aside, what the heck happened to Lars & Beru? They couldn't have been any older than 20 in Episode III, but when we see them again in Episode IV, which is ~20 years later, they look to be in their mid-50s. Maybe they just didn't wear sunscreen.
"The Prophesy Said the Chosen One Would Bring Balance To the Force": And of course the prophecy turned out to be 100% right. Did a single Jedi, including the incredibly-wise Yoda, ever wonder if bringing "balance to the Force" was a good thing?

In the beginning of the trilogy, the Force was quite unblanced. There were several thousand Jedi and, as far as we know, two or three Sith, tops. The Force was "unblanced," but in a good way.

Well, Anikin sure did bring balance to the Force. At the end of this trilogy, there are two Sith and two Jedi left alive (well, four, if you count the infants Leia and Luke, but you really can't count them, as they're not Jedi yet).

Balance. Two and two. Can't get much more balanced than that.

Did this stupid green puppet Yoda ever once consider the possibility that you don't want "balance" when your side is clearly winning?

Stupid.
This is why I question the intelligence of anything with a hand stuck up its butt.