 Call it the critics' war over Star Wars. Seldom have reviews clashed as remarkably as they have with Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post praises director George Lucas not only for the remarkable special effects in the film but for his willingness to address the fundamental question, "What makes man evil?" The issue, he says, is "what drives the movie ahead -- it starts fast, gets fast and angry and ends fast and furious. And I do mean furious. Fury is its fuel, its raison d'etre and its destiny." Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun calls it "a pop masterpiece." A.O. Scott in the New York Times concludes that it is the best of all the "episodes," including the original Star Wars (renamed Episode IV -- A New Hope). Scott does mildly criticize the dialogue and the performances, but, he adds, "nobody ever went to a Star Wars picture for the acting. Even as he has pushed back into the Jedi past, Mr. Lucas has been inventing the cinematic future, and the sheer beauty, energy and visual coherence of Revenge of the Sith is nothing short of breathtaking." But clearly Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News was expecting something more. "The dialogue is astonishingly feeble, the acting unforgivably wooden," she writes. To paraphrase Yoda ... Bored I am." Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle writes similarly: "The picture is laden with plot and difficult to follow, even for someone who has seen every Star Wars installment. The action scenes are overlong and unexciting, and if anyone needs to take a bathroom break, go during a light saber duel. They'll still be fighting when you get back." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes the dialogue as "ponderous hooey" that "crashes and burns like an X-wing zapped out of the sky by a star destroyer." Many reviews fall somewhere between those two forces. Gene Seymour writes in Newsday, "The characters speak fluent billboard. The battle scenes, especially the ones at the very beginning, steal the show. And acting honors threaten to go, by default, to a 3-foot-tall special effect." Many of the critics conclude that Episode 3 is a major improvement over the other two prequels and that the special effects work is particularly impressive. Roger Ebert writes in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective." Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times remarks, "It's a tribute to the power and durability of the universe Lucas and company created in the first three Star Wars movies that we want to see this episode despite the tedium of the previous two and despite knowing exactly what will happen in it." But Turan concludes that the special effects in the movie make it worth the wait. "It's not just in warfare that Revenge's visuals excel. The film is frankly overwhelming in its ability to create a spectacular variety of alternate worlds." |
