Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge Of the Sith - A good movie that could have been great

So TNT had on one of its numerous Star Wars movie marathons over the weekend and I happened to catch Revenge of the Sith right around when Obi-Wan kills General Grievous and Anakin turns to the dark side. Normally when I watch movies I get totally immersed in them and just get taken for the ride. I've seen ROTS plenty of times and it's easily my favorite of the 3 prequels, and I personally may rank it 3rd after ESB and ANH to be honest.

I think the biggest problem with ROTS is that it almost is playing catch up for the eventual Vader turn since we barely get any sort of character development for Anakin at all save for a handful of scenes from the first two movies. We finally see Anakin as a competent jedi, slightly rough around the edges. We finally see Palpatine take some sort of interest in him, we finally see the character at odds with the counsel, who knows his potential for good and for evil. And then when Anakin finally turns, we get a 5 minute scene of him killing as many people as possible before delivering cringe dialogue to Padme on Mustafar.

My above criticisms aside, ROTS in the context of standing by itself in the Prequel trilogy is an entertaining movie that is pretty well-written from a plot perspective. Considering they basically opted to write Anakin's entire arc into an already 2+ hour movie, I can forgive the short but effective scenes that we do get in episode 3 showing his fall from grace. But for the first time ever, it really stuck out to me during the Mustafar scene, in particular, how bad the dialogue, directing, and acting is, and how badly the CGI has aged. It felt like watching a low-budget movie like Sharknado which is just a shame considering this is finally the movie in the prequel that appears to get its stuff together. The most tense scene in the movie is the Mustafar encounter, and we get horrible weird head shots of the two characters with horribly paced, cringe dialogue. We were all waiting to see Anakin's turn to the dark side, and it wasn't too bad. In fact, it was pretty good. But it could have been great.

Submitted October 10, 2017 at 11:28AM by scottycerm http://ift.tt/2y7awi9