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06/01/2005: Thought for the Day:
But at least this journey through a galactic Thomas Kinkade gallery keeps viewers awake: Those who dozed through the C-SPAN soporifics of Attack of the Clones will be relieved to find that Sith is crammed with action. Lucas packs his latest with physics-defying deep-space dogfights and zhoozhing lightsaber battles, frequently cutting back and forth between two simultaneous melees on separate planets, deploying his signature Flash Gordon wipes. Deadly glowsticks lop off hands at an alarming rate, with at least five lost in the first hour; the picture's gruesome climactic duel goes for the legs as well, ending up with a scene out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's a peculiarly obsessive motif that probably helped garner the film a PG-13 rating. Chalk it up to either the compulsive castration imagery befitting such a famously oedipal epic, or transferred wartime anxiety about an escalating population of limbless veterans. In service of the film's near nonstop string of showdowns, each planet is filled with dramatic architecture: Ports, homes, and congressional chambers are all built on teetering platforms atop vertiginous chasms, connected by dangerously slender walkways. Somehow a galaxy-spanning civilization with faster-than-light travel and intelligent droids never got around to inventing guardrails.
--Ed Halter [The Village Voice, on the film Revenge of the Sith]
Len on 06.01.05 @ 07:58 AM CST
