Talking about Star Wars bullshit

Yeah, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is the best of the prequels, but it's taken too long for George Lucas to get this film done. By taking nearly 30 years to produce the entire series, he gave up some of the opportunities he might have had if he had compressed the project into, say, an eight year period.

Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) us showed how to do a monumental series: Do them all at once while all the actors are alive and before time takes a toll on them. I mean, suppose George wanted to do a flashback of Princess Leia saying something to Luke Skywalker. For Christ's sake, Carrie Fisher is now nearly 50 years old. She was 21 when the original Star Wars was made.

But let's set that aside. The biggest problem with Revenge of the Sith is that we've outgrown that sort of movie. Years of watching The Discovery Channel and The Science Channel has shown me the absurdity of the whole thing.

Have you noticed that the characters can hop in a spacecraft and be on the other side of the galaxy in about the time it takes to drive from Oakland to San Jose? Oh, yeah, there's a gizmo they use for doing this, but at least in Dune we got an explanation (albeit a severely wacky one) as to how it's done. In this film, we simply have to take it for granted.

Now, this story takes place "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away," but everyone speaks English, even though England won't exist until far, far in the future in a galaxy far, far away. And did you notice that most aliens seem to be built on the homo sapiens model? And this even though homo sapiens only evolved on the planet Earth about 250 million years ago, which in the cosmic scale of time, measured in billiions of years, is not very long at all.

Then there's the rather byzantine and questionable politics in this film. We know that Chancellor Palpatine is an evil dictator bent on becoming Emperor of the Galactic Federation, but is the correct solution to suspend the Constitution and violently overthrow Palpatine? I don't have the answer, but the question had me squirming in my seat. I literally could see Anakin Skywalker's point of view, which was that the Jedi were throwing their own principles out the window in order to fight the Sith. How good are principles, one has to ask, if they don't work for you when the chips are down? In these times of girding our loins against terrorists, we have to ask ourselves questions like this.

And here's a funny question for you: Did you notice that before every fight, a Jedi will drop his cloak to the ground. You never see the warrior pick it back up, and most of the time when the fight is over they are far away and quite possibly heading off in an entirely different direction. Once I noticed this, I could hardly control my laughter every time a warrior dropped his cloak. I guess when you become a Jedi, you are granted an unlimited supply of cloaks.

I enjoyed the movie, but mostly because I've seen all the others and I wanted to see how it all turned out (or began, to be precise), but I think the series has become far too juvenile for most adults to take seriously. It's child's fare at the Saturday morning cartoons level. To tell you the truth, The Matrix movies give one much more to think about, if deep thinking is one's thing.

I'll give it four stars if you've been following the series. Two stars otherwise.

Now, supposedly this was "the last Star Wars movie." However, it set box office records the day it opened, so what do you think? Have we seen the last of Star Wars? Personally, I think Hollywood is far too greedy to leave a golden goose like this alone.

So, I'm calling them liars for saying we've seen the last of this series. When they do make the next three installments of Star Wars, though, I think they should get Peter Jackson to direct. Otherwise, I'll be dead before the series is done.