Look out! He's got a knife!

Star Wars episodes 2 & 3

I missed these episodes of the mini-series Star Wars because the first episode was unpromising. In any case, as the series was made out of order I had already seen episodes 4-6, which meant I had no urgency because I already had some clue of where 2 & 3 were going.

I'm glad to have finally filled in the missing gaps. There were no surprises here story-wise, and this show is far from perfect overall, but there were plenty of entertaining moments along the way.

There's spoilers in this review, but if you really care about Star Wars you will have already seen these episodes and if you don't really care it's not like I'm spoiling anything of great interest.

By far the biggest hurdle this series had to overcome was its actors, who were a combination of the inept and the mis-cast.

Leading the former was Hayden Christenson as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, who seems unable to deliver a line of dialogue in a believable manner. Not far behind was Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine/Darth Sidious, a terrible ham who spends his whole time putting on silly voices and pulling funny faces. Palpatine is a role that Vincent Price or John Carradine would have sunk their teeth into with relish, and sadly those days of glorious pickled ham seem to have gone forever, replaced by the likes of McDiarmid's more canned (Spam even) approach.

In the latter basket sat Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi, who seemed content to let his beard do most of the acting as his accent got sillier. By the end of episode 3, he sounded like someone imitating Peter Sellers imitating Alec Guinness. Samuel L. Jackson, an actor of unusual charisma and Force (tee hee), here does his best imitation of a temporary plywood wall. Natalie Portman was wasted in a typical Hollywood girlfriend/wife role which was more plot device than character - her character was so poorly developed that when her love interest turned against her she literally withered away and died, like the heroine of an old Gothic romance.

By far the best actor in the movie is Frank Oz as the voice of Yoda, ably assisted by a special effects team who seemed to put more work and care into this one character than into all the action scenes combined. Christopher Lee is quite good in a small role as Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus, and is very appropriate casting given his frequent horror movie co-star Peter Cushing's memorable role as Grand Moff Tarkin in episode 4.

Story-wise there isn't a lot going on, the bulk of both episodes being taken up by action set-pieces. It's just a pity that most of these set-pieces resembled cut scenes from a video game. I was actually prompted to watch these episodes because I had been playing the Xbox game "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic", and there was little qualitative difference between the story, characters, acting and story of the game and the show; in fact in some respects the game was superior.

Dialogue was weak throughout, and had a tendency to describe what was happening. A good example is the escape of General Grievous at the start of episode 3: we see Grievous enter an escape pod. "Time to abandon ship," he says. Then we see escape pods blasting off. Then we cut to some Jedi, saying something like "Grievous has escaped!" Plenty of other examples abound, with people being shot at and then saying "That shot missed!", etc.

The entire end sequence is set on top of molten lava, which the filmmakers treat as if it were water. People are able to stand on flimsy platforms floating on top of the lava without discomfort, and can jump over the lava itself without catching on fire; flaming sparks whirl around them constantly without even singeing an eyebrow or soot-blackening a nose. This makes the moment when Skywalker finally catches on fire even more ridiculous. Yes I've heard all the stupid argments, like "it's space lava", but this space lava isn't even consistent with itself from moment to moment. Big climax, but no orgasm.

It all ends in tears. There's the inevitable "shout Nooooo! at the sky as the camera cranes up" moment.

Overall this was pretty good for genre television. Despite what I said, I was entertained. The lightsaber battles were all great fun, especially the one between Yoda and Dooku at the climax of episode 2. There's not enough that's interesting about Anakin Skywalker to make the "tragedy" of his fall compelling, and in fact he's such a whiney brat that I actually laughed when he was dismembered and set on fire by his oldest friend, but this isn't really aspiring to Shakespeare so who cares. It's colourful and fun, and that's all it needs to be.

Posted by joey at July 10, 2006 12:56 PM