Review: SWEIII: ROTS

This is not the review you’re looking for:

Stop reading now if you're a SW lover who wants to wait til they see it themselves. There won't be whole spoliers in this, but there will be hints. Still reading? Good - anyway, we all know what happens in this one.

If you don’t, quick recap: Since SWII The Clone Wars rage between the Republic (protected by the Jedi and run by the dodgy Chancellor Palpatine) and the Separatists (Japanese lizard dudes – don’t know why they’re from Japan) who are being organized by Count Dooku and his robot sidekick, General Grievous. Dooku’s getting his orders from some evil dude in a cape called Darth Sidious – we don’t know who he is, but no prizes for guessing.

Jedi’s can’t get married but Anakin (nickname Annie – no wonder he’s got issues) Skywalker and Padme (formerly Queen) Amidala secretly are, and she’s got a bun in the oven. But he’s been having these bad dreams that she’s going to die in childbirth – the same dreams he had shortly before his mam popped her clogs.

He must find a way to stop her from dying… cue Chancellor Palpatine, who lets him know that the dark side of the force can give the power to save people from death. What will Annie do?

The Good:

• Natalie Portman - va va voom!
  
• General Grievous - nasty robot with asthma. Rumour had it he was to be played by a kid, but he’s not. He’s all CGI.
  
• Yoda tossing those floating senate boxes at Palpatine like they were digestives.
  
• Yoda shrugging as two guards approach him and they fly back into the wall, knocked out. Cool!
  
• Yoda lobbing the heads off two stormtroopers/clones.
  
• Any other bits with Yoda.
  
• Mace Windu kicking Palpatine’s ass.
  
• Palpatine kicking Mace Windu’s ass back.
  
• Grievous – when he finally starts fighting.
  
• Loads of fighting.
  
• Order 66 – the end of the Jedi. Won’t give too much away, but it’s the best bit of the film. A genuine “oh, fuck” moment.

The Bad:

• The Phantom Menace and some of Attack of the Clones. I had to watch this crap first.
  
• Jar Jar Binks appears. But doesn’t speak, thank God.
  
• Greasy hair. Anakin could’ve done with a wash’n’blowdry. Is he going bald by the way?
  
• Spots. Loads of spots. Even Natalie Portman had a few.
  
• Too many soppy love bits. I love you more. No, I love you more.
  
• God-awful script in places. Just filling time til the next action scene.
  
• Hayden Christensen’s bad acting. although we’ve seen him in indie hit, Shattered Glass and he does act well in that, so dunno what happened here. Come to think of it, Nat Portman wasn’t too good at the acting lark and even Ewan was dodgy: maybe it was all the blue-screen stuff McGregor was bitching about during production. Good actors, bad direction? After all, Lucas has gone and computer-generated the whole thing, but didn’t have that luxury when he made his orginals, which were class. Did he forget he needs proper actors too?
  
• The Darth Vader suit is only in the film for like, a minute. And when it is, it looks like an old Frankenstein b-movie scene.
  
• The way Lucas just adds in characters and creatures so he can sell more toys – like the bird/lizard/horse thing Obi-Wan rides to fight General Grievous. Pointless.
  
• How does R2D2 do it? He’s a pretty crap robot, and the robots he’s up against in this one are cool as. Take the ninja-like dudes who guard chicken-shit Grievous. But this little roller-bot still gets loads of action. Daft. What’s really funny is that they have all these amazing robots and technology in this episode and we’re supposed to believe that this is before A New Hope, where all the technology is crap.

Overall:

I was expecting to write a really bad review, but was pleasantly surprised. Bearing in mind this is a kids movie, which is something many fans fail to do, the thing is really far more watchable than the first pair, and the last hour does a great job of showing us all of the gory details of how Annie meets Darth. I'll never call George Lucas world's best director and he's certainly lost whatever he had, but still manages to recreate a bit of that old magic for one last (please, God) outing.

Ray