very simple

I had nothing to do tonight, after a day of running errands, so I took myself to see the last installment of Star Wars. Which…well…met my expectations. The dialogue sucked, the imagery was pretty awesome, and The Empire Strikes Back is still far and away the best of the six films. I get that this is really nothing more than a vanity project for Lucas at this point, because if he really cared about these characters, he would have recognized his own limitations as a writer and gotten some help, but I was really hoping that this one would somehow, i don’t know, rise above it. And at some points it did. But it’s really like he took point A (where the last film ended) and point B (where this film needed to end so that it would lead in to Episode IV), and then stuck them, along with some minor plot points, into a cliche-o-meter.

And it’s not just that we already know how it ends. We know how the Lord of the Rings ends because the books have been around for 50 years, but somehow I was still on the edge of my seat throughout all three of those films. And now my mind is wandering off to the thought of what if Peter Jackson had been allowed to play with these characters….how awesome would that have been?

Then I wonder if maybe the original films weren’t actually that good, and I’m just remembering them fondly because I was about 3 when my dad took me to see the original (seriously, waiting on line for star wars is one of my earliest concrete memories. and yes, i’m a dork). But then I remember that in college, I somehow ended up with a friend’s box set for a semester (he didn’t have a VCR), and when we were bored, my roommate and I would have a marathon (we also didn’t have cable, and it snowed a lot in Buffalo). And we could watch those films over and over again and enjoy them thoroughly (except for the Ewoks. We always hated the Ewoks). And even if I owned the prequels, I just couldn’t imagine sitting down and watching them all the way through for the 9 or 10 hours it would take. Sure, I could see popping in the DVD and fast forwarding to the good parts (such as they are), but these films have actually made me less of a fan of the entire ouvre.

So, as a film, I can’t really recommend it. As a conclusion to a film journey that has spanned pretty much my entire life to date? it was somewhat necessary to see.

Tags: movies