Star Wars

[merlinofchaos]

Things I liked:

1. Haydensen did pretty well, came quite a ways from the whiny Luke-clone from aotc.
   
2. Ewan McGregor does a fantastic Alec Guiness impression, though not quite as good in this one as previous movies.
   
3. As usual, the effects were stunning. The video-game droids factory stuff wasn't quite as present.
   
4. Ian MacDiarmid does a pretty good job in his role.
   
5. Bail's ship was the Blockade Runner in Star Wars. At first I thought it was just the same kind of ship, but no, it was the same ship.
   
6. The use of Anakin's hand to foreshadow.
   
7. Lots of ships and things hearkening to how they'll look in the next movie. Though some of them not quite enough.
   
8. The shot of Owen & Beru & baby-Luke on Tatooine. That was nicely done.
   

Things I hated:

1. Natalie Portman was completely wasted.
   
2. Unnamed Jedi suck. If a Jedi has no name, you can kill him or her by sneezing hard in his or her direction.
   
3. Vader doesn't hunt down and murder the Jedi; mostly the clones do that. All Vader does is go kill a whole bunch of younglings, which isn't much like hunting.
   
4. The Yoda-Emperor fight. Ugh.
   
5. In fact, the fights in general. While cool, they were too fucking long. By the time it got to the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight, I was ready for it to be over, which is sad. It was a good fight.
   
6. Too much action. I guess this is an extension of too many fights, but seriously, a movie doesn't need to be non-stop like that.
   
7. The ending montage was really choppy. There was too much homage to the next movie and not enough actual stuff happening.
   
8. Crappy crappy dialogue in a lot of places. Padme's death.
   
9. Overuse of foreshadowing.
   
10. Overuse of old musical themes.
    
11. I saw Mon Mothma in the credits but missed her in the movie. I'm guessing she was sitting with Bail at the Senate but didn't have any appreciable role.
    
12. Jimmy Smits was wasted. Bail could've been interesting but was just a foil.
    
13. The skeleton of the Death Star. Clearly some amount of time had to pass to get to that point. But the scene just seemed kind of awkward to me.
    

Overall, it was an ok movie. I suspect it will be as basically forgettable as AotC was for me, though perhaps a few more bits will stand out in my memory as time passes. I don't agree with those who say it's worthy to sit next to the trilogy, it's not. Even Jedi is far better. But I don't hate it by any means.

It's made $85M in 2 days. It'll make more than AotC did, I'm sure.