CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

Well, I lied. I told you all that I'd be first in line to see this mess but I wasn't. Actually, I didn't lie; I mispredicted. I waited until today to drag my sorry ass to Revenge of the Sith and I just got back.

Was it as bad as I said it would be? I'd be lying again if I said that it was a big epiphany for me and that George Lucas sure surprised me with a classy finish to his 28-year-long story. That's why I waited two weeks. I read all the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, read all the spoilers on the other blogs and watched all the George Lucas interviews on TV. Then I watched all five of the other movies again. One featured an interview with George, who was asked if he could sum up the entire series in one word. "Unpredictable," said George. Unpredictable? Indigestible, maybe, but hardly unpredictable.

If you Google the term "special effects" you'll see several sites selling weird contact lenses and the rest selling fog machines. That's pretty much all that the internet associates with the term "special effects". Makes my blog pretty hard to find, doesn't it?

There were only two special effects in Revenge of the Sith: fog machines and weird contact lenses. Okay, Obi-wan rode around on a giant computer-generated Komodo dragon lizard (which meant he was really sitting on a stool) but it was the best part of the movie. All the rest was green-screen computer-generated fractal geometry. If you haven't seen it yet, wait for the DVD so that you can mute the volume and fast-forward through two-thirds of the film, otherwise you'll be forced to listen to Natalie, the Valley Girl, burble lines like "Annie, you're breaking my heart." I leaned over to my wife and whispered "Dude!" Then we both blew cherry Coke out of our noses. It was that kind of movie.

Acting? Horrible! Dialogue? Horrible! Plot? Duh. CG effects? If I had to choose another favorite besides the lizard, I'd select the "rust animators." They were the folks who followed the "mechanical artists" and "texture-mapped" the rust spots onto all the machines to make them look real. I liked that a lot. It saved me from thinking about things, like:

Why did Anakin Skywalker go over to "The Dark Side?" We never found out. He just said something like "No! No! Well, all right...I guess it sounds like a good deal." Supposedly it was because he loved Padme and didn't want her to die in childbirth, like he was excited about that! "I'm going to have a baby, Annie!" Annie: "Whatever." Nah, that wasn't the reason. Also: why does a race like the Jedi who can fly, predict the future and read people's minds from light-years away not suspect that Padme is carrying twins until she delivers the second one? Where was the Bettie Droid? She was probably not PG-13. What was supposed to be PG-13 was the "King Herod Slaughter of the Innocents" where Anakin kills all the kids. Now, I would have paid matinee prices to see that. Unfortunately, it was never shown.

It's passed, like a kidney stone, but now I read rumors of a TV series...two TV series! Dude! Without popcorn? It'll never work. We went home and watched the first Star Wars (the real one) to see the segues of the sets and costumes 28 years back in time. Those were well-done but I'll bet Peter Mayhew never wants to smell that Wookie suit again.

posted by C. J. # 6:44 PM