Yesterday I saw Episode III. Now that I have had time to digest, here are my thoughts.
My biggest complaint is that there were no plot twists. From the start, you know everything that is going to happen. At no time do you stop and think, “Wow! Didn’t see that coming.” The original trilogy had great plot twists, (“Luke, I am your father.”) but this trilogy only seems to invalidate those great moments. If you watch the movies from Episode I to Episode VI, there will be no surprises. (“Well duh! We saw Vader knock up his mother three movies ago.”) This latest trilogy just seems to be milking all the work that was done with the original.
If I think about that statement for a moment though, it is clearly wrong. If you watch one to six, then one wouldn’t know that Anakin falls to evil. So I guess there were plot twists.
I’ve had people say that it was obvious there would be no surprises because “we know what will happen.” Which sounds silly to me. The twists that we know and love concerned unknowns being revealed. There were still unknowns that could be shown. For instance, somebody should explain who is Anakin’s father. Or just give me some reason to watch this movie if I’ve already seen the next three movies.
Now, with all that said, it was a good movie. On the Star Wars scale, I would rate it higher than “Return of the Jedi”, but lower than “A New Hope”. If “Jedi” lost the ewoks, it would probably beat “Sith”. I feel that George Lucas has been away from directing for so long that he needed the last two movies to warm up and figure out how to make a good movie again. (“Ohhh. You DON’T have annoying characters. My bad.”) But he doesn’t have the mythic scale anymore.