Review: Revenge of the Shitty

I just saw Revenge of the Sith. It was like watching George Lucas's bowel movement: all this immense effort and strain, and then out comes this little turd.

The acting: to call it wooden is an insult to trees. Anakin and his lady love have the chemistry of a fossil with a relic. The dialogue was written by a drunk inspired by the sight of his own sullen vomit. I can only imagine that George Lucas has lost his mind for good. Looking at special effects for the last couple of decades has fused his synapses into cheap plastic, his brain force-fed on a million blotters of bad acid.

What was the plot? This dude dreams his wife dies giving birth to his child, and is persuaded by a man in a rented monk's habit that if he listens to this monk, he will be able to save the mother of his child from dying. He must go over to the dark side, apparently some place harboring a cosmic electric socket that sits in a dark alley, where he'll be able to charge himself with the ability to shoot sparks out of his fingers. This is beyond silly. Beyond mediocre. Beyond banal. The English language does not have the words to stoop low enough to describe this dreck.

And the music. It never shuts up. It pumps every second with a hard-breathing pomposity, trying to persuade us that we are watching something exciting and suspenseful, when all we are watching are stupid spaceships flying from one fight scene to the next. The entire movie is a string of fight scenes. No daring rescues. No chase scenes. No helpless people in peril. No reversals of fate. No surprises. No adventure. No suspense. Just one damn fight after another. Two guys fighting each other. A man and a robot fighting. A man and a metal praying mantis fighting. A man in a wheel fighting a man on a dragon. A man and a gremlin fighting. A man and a man fighting.

The art direction is as mediocre as an Elvis painting on velvet. The new worlds look like tired old sci-fi illustrations, sans the charm. There is no charm in this movie. Not a smile, not a quip, not a vestige of human feeling. Plenty of posturing, but no emotion.

This entire movie is not worth five minutes of Spiderman. Shallow isn't the word. It has the depth of a puddle. It's not fun. It doesn't make you smile. It doesn't stir you. It doesn't make you want to clap your hands with joy. It merely calls on you to endure. It offers nothing new. It has all the originality of a Big Mac with French fries and a Coke.

What were the reviewers thinking? One guy said it was better than Star Wars. It was no better than the last two pieces of putrescence. In other words, it was a big stinky nothing. The movie was emptier than the North Pole without the ice.

I felt I was the hapless victim of a cinematic mugging. The dupe of a conspiracy, like the lies that got us into the Iraq War. We live in a world where marketing screams at you relentlessly, hey, you are going to enjoy this movie, it's great, and then we sit there, splattered by the constant diarhee of special effects, and come out lambasted like tongue-tied parrots, and chant, yes, it was great. We are being lied to, and we suck it up. This is the Emperor with a tiny loin cloth forged from bits of soiled toilet tissue.

Thirty minutes in, my girlfriend said to me, I am so bored. I gritted my teeth, as on screen, some old geezer in bad Dracula makeup dithered on about the dark side of the force, the villain in an amateur school production. If this is entertainment, having a root canal is a transcendent encounter with the divine. Give it a wide miss. You're better off going to the bathroom and enjoying your own shit, instead of having to sit through someone else's.