The new Jar-Jar Yoda is

I saw SW3 late last night with Son Two. My one-word review: dull, dull, dull. It’s not that there’s no ak-shun, and it may have been the lateness of the 10 p.m. starting hour, but the movie simply never engaged me.p

The problem is that you know that the deadly conflicts between principals will leave them all alive. Yoda saber fights the emperor. It’s an intense fight, but who cares? You know neither will perish. Obi-Wan fights Anakin, who by then has already been knighted Darth Vader, and the only interesting thing about it is you learn why Vader will henceforth require a robotic, life-support exoskeleton. BTW, that part of the scene - it ends their hand-to-hand combat - is really quite gruesome.

The movie has been rightly criticized as displaying terribly wooden dialog. Glenn Reynolds says it well:

My dean’s comment was that it would have played better as a silent movie, and he’s right — you might as well be reading the dialogue off of cards, because the actors sure sound like they’re reading the dialogue off of cards.

On the way out I commented to Thomas of Vader’s actor, “Hayden Christensen would be dangerous if he could act.” The young man in front of us chuckled and nodded his head.

I could never get passionate about the movie as a viewer because the actors never got passionate about the movie as, well, actors. They just recite lines and go through motions. And, I say again, you already know where they’ll wind up at the end of the movie. Unfortunately, there’s no suspense in learning how they’ll get there.

Anakin’s journey to becoming Vader seems forced. The key impulsion is his love for his wife Padme, but in a movie filled with passionless scenes, the ones between Padme and Anakin are most deficient and so poorly serve as the basis for Anakin’s crucial career decision. The screenplay attempts to show how Anakin was seduced by the Dark Side, mostly against his will, but only hints at the psycho-battle taking place inside his will and conscience. Again, Christensen’s performance is too flat and talentless to make the seduction work.

And when he flips, it’s dramatically rough. In the key scene of the whole movie, Anakin disarms (literally) the only Jedi who could have saved the Republic, who is promptly dispatched by Palpatine/Darth Sidious. All of a sudden, Anakin realizes that Palpatine is bad! In fact, Anakin slumps to a seat and actually utters, “What have I done?” But barely two lines later he is pledging his troth to the triumphant Palpatine.

I could not help but recall Alec Guinness (ironically who played OWK beginning in SW4), playing British Col. Nicholson, uttering “What have I done?” in the closing action of 1957’s The Bridge Over the River Kwai. The colonel’s words reveal his sudden, shocked gaze into his soul as he realizes he has become the Empire’s willing ally to the betrayal of all his training and everything his has held dearest for more than 20 years as a British officer. Nicholson redeems himself in the only way he can. Just when all seems lost, he returns to the loyalties of his oaths at the cost of his life but the defeat of the Empire (that part of it, anyway).

But Anakin? Introspection? Second thoughts? Nah. Admittedly, Anakin faces a different problem than Nicholson; the life at stake is not his own but his wife’s. But the facility with which Anakin abandons his oaths and training - his trust in the Jedi - seem implausible, even to save his wife’s life.

The movie is visually magnificent, but the “sets” are as soulless as the acting. CGI is technically marvelous, but it can’t make a movie compelling. As I wrote about Kingdom of Heaven’s major shortcoming,

Alfred Hitchcock told an interviewer once that the first requirement for making movies that people want to watch is not an all-star cast, exotic sets or compelling musical score or the like. It’s the script, said Hitch: “You simply have to have a story.”

Unlike KOH, SW3 does have a story, and it’s really a darn good, rolicking one. But it is badly told and we already know how it ends, anyway. I am not sure which is the larger flaw. Lucas couldn’t do anything about the latter; coupled with the former, it just torpedoes the flick. Tonight I’ll throw the original movie on the DVD player and enjoy how great the series used to be.

Overall, I give SW3 a charitable six light sabers out of 10.

Endnote - the politics: commentary about Lucas overlaying his political views about the Bush administration into the movie are founded but way overblown. I recall only two, brief such scenes, and the overlays were so obvious that they’re just groaners, that’s all. I don’t think the people near me made the connection, anyway.

And getting really sick of Yoda’s mangled syntax I am. Learn the Queen’s English he should. Cute it once was. Now very annoying it is.

Update: Timothy Goddard is keeping a running tally of up or down reviews from bloggers.

Update, 3-21: SW3’s opening day revenue of $50 million was the most first-day take of any movie in history.

Update again: The hands-down winning review goes to The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, whose essay, “Space Case,” is criticism prose at its finest. As Yoda would mangly recommend, “The whole thing read you must!”