Brother Shatterstone said:
I can't say why you gave it a 9 -- which is not to say that your number is invalid, just that I don't know you -- but I can say why I gave it a 4.
I've got bad eyes. I mean, I wear glasses to read, but I don't need glasses to drive -- I don't mean bad like that. I mean bad as in not really being huge on the environment. In real life, I get lost all the time. My wife is the one who handles directions, unless there's a map to follow -- I'm not stupid, and I can follow a map competently, it's just that if I'm on my own, I always get lost, because I don't really pay attention to landmarks and the background scenery and all the other things that help you not get lost when driving.
When I write, all of my friends know that the first draft of anything I send is going to have wonderful dialogue -- final-draft-quality dialogue, in some cases -- and almost no setting whatsoever, because I'm lousy at setting. I just don't care about setting in my writing, just like I don't care about my surroundings when I'm driving. I can tell you what we talked about in the car, possibly quoting line-for-line, and I can tell you what mood you were in while we were driving, but I probably won't be able to tell you about the scenery.
This came up in the Sin City, and it's tough to say without sounding like a snob, but I don't really think of it as a snobbish comment: I require good dialogue. Require it. If the dialogue isn't good, if the writing doesn't snap, I'm not going to be happy. And my requirements for "good" are probably higher than most people's. That doesn't make me better than most people. That just makes me different. (And my requirements for setting and environment are a ton lower than most people's requirements in that area.)
I will grant freely that Ep3 probably had marvelous special effects -- but that doesn't factor into my rating, because I don't care about special effects. That probably accounts for a few points of rating difference.
In my opinion, the dialogue was bad. Not mediocre, not less-than-stellar -- actively bad. Howlingly bad in some cases. There were a few good lines mixed in there, but the dialogue absolutely clunked most of the time. People whose hearts are breaking almost never specifically say, "You're breaking my heart!" People almost never say, "No, I'm so happy because I'm in love with YOU!" People who are feeling a specific emotion rarely directly tell other people that they are feeling that specific emotion. Learning how to get the emotion across to the audience without having to tell the audience explicitly is one of the basics of screenwriting. Lucas blew it.
Lucas set up the tragedy to hinge upon the depth of emotion one man has for one woman, and then he evidently wrote the dialogue for the scenes meant to portray that emotion on the back of a progress report on the ambient light color mixture for background shots on Coruscant in act two and never bothered to rewrite any of it.
So, if me not caring about special effects accounts for some of the discrepency, let's assume that me caring a lot about dialogue accounts for some more.
The plot had enough holes to bother me. While people have vigorously defended the logistics of Anakin's fall and come up with great backstory material to explain why it wasn't really as stupid and sloppy as it seemed to many viewers, none of those vigorous defenses make up for the fact that it still seemed stupid and rushed in the movie when I was sitting there watching it. (That's just the big major one, which was especially disappointing given the relative skill with which the lead-up to Anakin's fall was handled. The minor stuff, like pregnancy being life-threatening in a culture that has limb-replacement cybertechnology and interstellar travel or droids diagnosing people as dying because they have lost the will to live, was just the silly icing on the cake for me.)
If you're swimming in a tropical bay, and you can't see the bottom, it's either because the water is deep, or because the water is murky. Deep is good. Murky is not. Lucas's plot was not deep enough to require as much online defense of the events that took place in order for it to make logical sense. Matrix Reloaded, for all that many people disliked it, at least had some deep stuff hidden under all that silly word-of-the-day vocabulary bluster. Episode 3 did not.
Finally, the action was hit-or-miss for me. It wasn't bad, but it didn't wow me. I thought that the artistic displays during the lightsaber duels ended up hurting the overall effect in some areas, because the actual choreography wasn't that great. This is, again, likely a me-specific complaint, because I'm a fight-scene snob and enough of a martial artist to be able to watch a fight critically. I don't care about realism -- realism can go hang when I'm looking for swashbuckling adventure -- but I do care about plausible choreography. I don't care if you do lots of flashy twirls between attacks, provided that your attacks make sense -- and there were enough times when the attacks didn't make sense here that it irked me.
Oddly, it was mostly the saber-to-saber stuff that bothered me the most -- when it was jedi against droids or Obi Wan against Grievous, that didn't bother me, and in fact I quite enjoyed those fights. But almost every fight between two humanoids with lightsabers ended up with me muttering, "Why in the name of Carrie Fisher's bikini would you swing your lightsaber at a spot someone was already blocking? If you're Vader and can actually beat down an opponent's block, that's one thing, but you're fencing here. Are you an idiot, or is this some massively deep psychological trick like when Bugs Bunny switches his line from "Oh yes I will!" to "Oh no I won't!" in the middle of an argument, so that Elmer Fudd will fall for the trick and switch his argument to "Oh yes you will!" and end up shooting himself in the face with a shotgun?"
What bothered me most, though, was that especially with the lightsaber stuff, people's skill depended solely on the plot in too many places. It's the same reason that Blade 2 utterly failed for me as an action movie. Blade would be parrying and slashing and dodging and totally untouchable in one scene, and then in another scene, the big uber-vamp guy would swing a concrete column at him, and Blade would somehow forget how to dodge and just do a big dumb high block and stand there so that the bad guy could kick him. And then, three seconds later, Blade would do it again. His ability went away whenever the plot demanded it. In this movie, Obi Wan gets punked by Count Dooku for no good reason, given the skill he shows later against Anakin and Grievous. Anakin, who has taken out hundreds of battle droids with crazy acrobatic stunts and defeated Count Dooku and spent most of the fight against Obi Wan doing crazy unrealistic stunts (sure, spin around backwards, why not, the Force is gonna protect you on that, go for it), suddenly decides at the end that the best thing he can do under the circumstances is to try to jump over a guy with a lightsaber? And hey, that's not the stupidest thing he's done -- that only bothers me a little, and I can almost see the dramatic necessity of having Anakin fall because of some flashy move he felt compelled to do. But after all the crazy stuff he's done, he's now suddenly unable to block or lift his legs a bit more while jumping? Really? How many flips have we seen Anakin do? I mean, even accepting that the plot demanded he try to jump over Anakin and not off to the side, why in heaven's name wouldn't he do one of those flips and block down? It's not just the stupidity of the move -- it's the fact that he's done stupider but shown the ability to get away with it, even against well-trained and very skilled opponents.
So, to sum it up: I watched Episode 3 hoping for a really good plot, fun dialogue, and exciting fight scenes. I got a lot of special effects that were probably good but didn't really impress me because that ain't my thing, a lackluster plot, lame dialogue, and fight scenes that were hit or miss. Hence, my rating of 4. It was a very expensive, much-anticipated movie that might well have been made specificially to fail in the areas I find important.
If you like special effects, don't really care about dialogue in terms of critical assessment, didn't notice the weird stuff in the lightsaber fights because it's fast enough and quick-cut edited enough to hide it, and don't mind coming up with your own explanations to plug the plotholes, then I imagine that the movie is a great experience.
And that's a good thing for you.
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(It has worked since then though.)
