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OK, here is the Star Wars review you’ve all been waiting for. Actually, it’s more like I’ve been waiting to give, since I read the book a while ago, and haven’t been able to talk about it so as not to spoil anything for anyone else. Speaking of spoilers, I will be talking about things that happen in the movie, so if you don’t want to know those things beforehand, don’t click on the “more…” link below, which is where the actual review will be. If you are reading this using RSS (or a direct link to just this post), you won’t have that separator, so just stop reading after the next paragraph, which is just the review of waiting in line.

As I predicted, we were the coolest people in line. As you can see above, the reporters from the paper were very interested in the DVD viewing we were running, showing episode 2 while they were waiting in line. They may have also been hanging out just to partake in some of the free pizza that Randy had ordered. I actually didn’t get there until around 8pm, but luckily Randy was holding our place since the morning, and we were first in line. As I also predicted, we were not the dorkiest, as there were several groups in costume, some of whom were sporting the > $100 light sabers and at least one group of idiots actually fighting with them. One of them apparently broke theirs in the process.

OK, here comes the review of the movie itself.

Well, I think everyone expected this to be the best of the “first” three episodes, and I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. A lot of people (including the actor) felt kind of frustrated that Anakin’s character seemed to be too mellow in the last movie, which was done purposefully by Lucas for the sake of contrast in this one. I think it worked pretty well, either that or he just got better at acting before they did this one. I think they did well at really cutting him loose and showing him “go bad”, especially the scene in the temple with the kids. That could have been bad, but I think they did it pretty tastefully.

One thing that I was relieved to see was the whole “chosen one” thing being cleared up. Randy (and others) had expressed some doubts before about Anakin being the “chosen one” of the Jedi legends, and my opinion was that they were misinterpreting the prophecy in thinking that “bringing balance to the force” meant swinging the pendulum more towards the “light” side, but it was my theory that this was an interpretation clouded in optimism, and that the balance that the “chosen one” would bring would be an actual leveling effect, which would have to be towards the dark side. I was pleased to hear Yoda suggest this exact thing to Mace and Obi Wan.

One thing I was a little confused with after reading the book was that I thought there was going to be an actual Qui-Gon appearance, rather than Yoda just mentioning that he had contacted him, and learned how to do the transparent blue ghost thing, and would eventually pass this knowledge on to Yoda and Obi-Wan. I think that this must have either been cut from the movie or not done due to conflicts with Liam Neeson or something.

The other highlight for me (other than all the obvious visual effects, and fight scenes, etc. which were probably the best yet) was the emphasis on explaining the subtle nature of the political plotting that led up to this point. This was something that I appreciated in the first two movies, but I think a lot of people were so pissed about the Jar-Jar thing that they missed the good parts of those movies. This episode really brought all that to the forefront, but you had to have been paying attention to it during the first two to really appreciate it. It’s really interesting when you consider the parallels with today, concerning wars that are being waged in the name of greater security but which obviously have other motivating factors behind the scenes, and the use of fear as a tool to sway the senate and the greater public opinion towards gladly surrendering more and more of their civil liberties until it is too late to put a stop to it.

The only negatives for me were the voice of the emperor after his “transformation” (I thought it was kind of annoying for extended dialog/monologue – they should have kept it like it was in ROTJ) and a couple kind of cheesy scenes of Vader, especially when he finds out that Padme died. There were also a couple more lines that I can’t recall right now, but I remember them setting off the cheese-meter in my head. I know those are minor points, but I didn’t think it would be a complete review without a little bit of criticism.