this is not stuff you like but you can still call me Ursa and this is revenge
of the script now some of you may remember me live tweeting the Star Wars
prequels when I watched them to prepare for this episode yeah some of you are
really really enamored with my nerd rage: looking at you Steve but you see
the only thing I remembered before the rewatch was that I really really hated
something about it and I couldn't remember what it was but I remembered
that it made me mad like much madder than you should be but
knock me down with a feather if I didn't actually enjoy the first 30 minutes in
terms of time Revenge of the Sith has more minutes of movie which I enjoyed
than the other two prequels do though there's still that romance I mean it's a
bit better "no no it's because I'm so in love with you" "so love has blinded you?"
but better isn't the same as good yeah the plot of Revenge of the Sith it goeth
thusly Chancellor Palpatine has been kidnapped by Count Dooku remember him
and General Grievous while rescuing Palpatine obi-wan gets knocked out and
Anakin beheads Dooku he is conflicted about this also
Palpatine wants Anakin on the Jedi Council but the Masters refused to let
him be a master and this is starting to sound a little bit like Pokemon and
because apparently Galactic contraception cannot stand up to Jedi
sexing Padme is pregnant not just like regular pregnant pregnant with twins
pregnant which she apparently doesn't know until she's actually giving birth
because they don't have ultrasounds in space regardless
Anakin starts having nightmares about her dying in childbirth and if you
remember the last time he started having nightmares about a woman he knew and was
close to dying you know where this is going and it's nowhere good there are
some shenanigans which I will come back to, Anakin becomes a Sith Lord and
Palpatine orders all the Jedi killed including the children, and Anakin Force
chokes his wife half to death and then gets chopped to bits by obi-wan but not
enough to kill him and then he lives and some kids are born and Padme dies and
there's some narm and boom Darth Vader Galactic Empire come back in 18 or 19
years for the beginning of a new hope so the kids can sort this mess out. So let's
talk about writing when you're making a movie the writing is really important
and it has to do a lot of jobs you have to have snappy dialogue and you have to
have logic you have to have things which are inferred by the audience because you
don't want them to feel like you're spoon feeding them
but then again you don't want to have things be too subtle because otherwise
the people who are a little bit slower on the uptake aren't gonna get them at
all so it's a tricky line to walk also you have to make the dialogue sound like
actual conversations people would actually have which is trickier than it
sounds. an example of where this doesn't work in the original trilogy is where
Luke is talking to Owen Lars "he died about the same time as your father" "he
knew my father?" what why would you infer that from them
dying at the same time Luke that doesn't make any sense. although that being said
it does actually sound like a conversation that some people have
because in my experience quite a lot of people aren't actually listening to the
words coming out of your mouth their brain is just kind of scanning them for
key phrases right but like I said an attack of the clones if you have actors
who have good chemistry then you can kind of get away with clunky dialogue
but only to a point. the reason I find the average scene in
Revenge of the Sith more fun or at least less trying than the other two prequels
is because people are doing things like they're advancing the plot through
dialogue but they're also advancing the plot by piloting starships or whatever
there's a lot less sitting and talking and standing and talking and walking in
straight lines and talking you want the dialogue to be moving the plot forward
while at the same time other interesting things are going on
case in point the podrace on Tatooine is incredibly long but doesn't really
advance the plot very much if the podrace were five minutes long or ten
minutes or 15 minutes long or 20 minutes long it would carry the same
amount of plot related information. Anakin is very good at pod racing he
wins the pod race whoo. But writing is not just dialogue it's also making the
story coherent the two things I find most inconsistently handled were the two
most vital things for the continuity of the story:
1. Why is Darth Vader Darth Vader and 2. what happened to you know Luke and
Leia's mother. Especially considering that Leia apparently remembers her
mother okay so let us stipulate that I'm willing to buy that Anakin is 1.
increasingly disenchanted with a Jedi reasonable 2. terrified of losing his
wife entirely understandable 3. tempted by the power offered by
Palpatine okay fine but you still have to get us from point A to point Sith in
a logical fashion and that would either require
4a. anakin having dropped 50 IQ points because of the influence of the darkside
or 4b. anakin being dumber than a rock let me explain. About halfway
through the movie Anakin goes to Palpatine to give them an update on how
obi-wan is fighting general grievous because if General Grievous can be
killed then the war is effectively over Palpatine smarms a bit about how the
Jedi are excluding Anakin how they don't trust him and offers to teach Anakin the
ways of the dark side and Anakin is like what? Palpatine even knows that he's been
having visions of his wife's death and that he has a wife in the first place
and that it's Padme Palpatine knows everything is what I'm
saying here. So Anakin has previously been suspicious of the Jedi and thinking
that they're not really on the level which is entirely understandable
especially given the Jedi's recent actions and how Palpatine has kind of
been pushing him towards that by the things he says to him but he now knows
that Palpatine is a Sith Lord and he also knows because obi-wan said this on
screen that Palpatine has stayed in office beyond his term and that obi-wan
feels that something is up with that. so naturally Anakin goes to Mace Windu
and says Shaft this guy is a Sith Lord he's not going to give up power what are
we going to do and Windu says well we'll have to arrest
him I will go deal with it you stay here because you are too conflicted about
this to be any use to me. that is not what happens he does briefly do what
he's told and there's a pretty good scene where we let John Williams do the
talking and everybody stares out the blue-screen windows looking anxious or
teary or determined or all three then Anakin goes to confront Palpatine who's
already killed three Jedi who are presumably just kind of lying on the
floor there but has also been overpowered sort of by Windu who's
trying to arrest him trying and this is where it all starts to go to the stupid
if we just had Anakin arrives mace windu decides that Palpatine is too dangerous
to live and tries to kill him and Anakin is all conflicted about this and then
Anakin says no you can't kill him I need him alive he needs to be alive because
you know Padme. Windu says no I'm not gonna do that and Anakin decides that he
needs to stop Windu from killing him and then Windu dies and Anakin's all no what
have I done and then decides to hitch his wagon to Palpatine because he needs
to save Padme more than anything else world that would work. but no we have
this whole other plot thread stuck in there with no structural backing
whatsoever and when you mix it in with the wanting to keep Padme alive subplot
it doesn't make any sense they are in fact mutually exclusive. let
me show you.