I’m one of those people. You know, the people who can forgive George Lucas for lots of grievous foul ups, and still love Star Wars. The idea of it. (That will not only read all those damn books, but also give them a great deal of priority over a host of far better options.) I think at the heart of it, I attach to saga’s, and I’ve attached to this one. So deal with it. What follows is a critique of the most recent movie. I hope you enjoy. I liked the story, but then I like all the stories. It connected the two stories very nicely, and in most respects it answered the questions that I thought needed to be answered. And of course, I have a few nits to pick.

  • Mace Windu, refers to Palpatine as “Emperor” as, or shortly after Palpatine, makes his ascension speech to the Senate. Windu should have refereed to him as Chancellor. It’s an editing glitch, but the fact that I noticed it, and I’m usually not that sharp for these kinds of things, says something to me.
  • The scene where Anakin becomes Darth Vader, not the appearance of the black cloaked figure we all know and love, but the sort of “moment” is a complete waist. Palapatine says, “come join me in my dark dark plans for dominion” and Anakin says “Ok, I’ll do whatever you want.” And the shame of it is, the proper motivation and reasoning was there. It wasn’t like they screwed up the whole point of the book, it was just in the delivery of that scene was pretty bad.
  • Minor quibble, but Padame, shouldn’t have died on the table. Leia remembers her mother, vaguely, when Luke asks of her in RotJ. Now of course, it’s possible to think that you have memories of things you didn’t actually observe, but I doubt that this psychological phenomena was what they had in mind.
  • Darth Vader is always described as one of the Emperor’s greatest servants, which I see as problematic. Now of course this is more a problem with Episodes 4-6. Sith Apprentices always kill their masters, eventually. And Vader, knows this, and I suppose this goes back to the motivation in my second comment, but that person (Anakin Skywalker/Vader) is rebellious enough that I don’t think the characters jive.
  • Lets remember, that there are twenty years between the end of revenge, and A New Hope (IV). Now even if you grant that the sequence at the end where they show Palpatine and Vader standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, working on the Death Star, as being somewhere between the bulk of the movies, it’s still problematic. First of all, the bridge looks a lot like that of the Executor which wasn’t even built until after the Battle of Yavin (so the time’s way off).
  • Captian Antilles, who apeared as one of the Naboo pilots, in the first movie, and now seems to be somehow tied to Bail Organa’s Ship, (and presumably Wedge’s father), is somehow from Correllia? Right. If it’s true, it’s an impressive record.
  • I would like to say that I liked the many nods to events to come, and cameo’s that were sort of thrown in there. Like there was a shot with Grand Moff Tarkin. The implication that the Artoo the second trilogy, “remembered” the events of the first. Things like that made it delightful.

So that’s where I am with that. If anyone has similar comments I’d love to hear them.