Review: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

I will try to write a review that only contains minor spoilers, these are included in text that must be highlighted to read.

One of the fun things was that the theater managed to get trailers for Star Wars and Revenge of the Jedi and show them before the movie. These actually ran about 45 minutes before the movie in the middle of the "preshow" entertainment. They also ran a bunch of real trailers right before the film. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe looks visually amazing and I want to see The Fantastic 4 even if the movie may totally suck.

The movie was enjoyable, but still had failings of the Lucasism variety. He has problems directing scenes that involve interpersonal relations - I find it a little hard to believe that Anakin and Padme are in as much love as their words profess them to be. However, when it comes to action scenes, the movie rocks! Luckily, most of this movie is about the action scene, so there is more good than bad.

One person I know complained about the action scenes cutting back and forth between locations. I actually like this aspect as it gives the movie viewer some indication of time parallelism. Unfortunately, I missed Mace Windu's big scene (I left to go to the bathroom during one of the aforementioned "relationship" scenes and it cut back to action quicker than I thought it would). I will leave the theater during a different scene next time.

The following paragraph is in "invisible" text. It contains the minor spoilers. If you highlight it, you should be able to read them. They are pretty minor and on the level of most newspaper reviews., but I want to give people the chance to not read it. I do discuss one scene that is indicative of the movie's PG-13 nature.

Yoda is impressive once again. When he uses the force to fight, he becomes quite the little dervish. General Grevious fighting with four lightsabers is not to be missed. Those of you with immolation issues beware. You will know when it is coming, for fear of spoiling too much, I will not say more. This scene made me cringe and look away, but burns of this nature are excessive. I actually found this scene more disturbing than the typical example for the PG-13 rating of the younglings's bodies in the Jedi Temple.

I am still not sure if we will take our kids to see it or not. I think they will be ok, but it is a MUCH darker film. There were some young kids in the theater last night and none of them seemed too upset at the end, but you have to be pretty hard core to be a kid seeing Star Wars at midnight on a school night when in grade or middle school. I'm betting they were in late grade school, but my age estimation could be wrong.