Well, Lucas did it again.  That fat necked, no writing, egomaniacal son of a pig blowing bitch, did it again.  He took a generational piece of Americana, melted it down, put it on one of those clay wheels from Ghost, shaped it into fourteen inch phallus, covered it in digitized gold, and fucked me right in the ass with it. 

 

Episode III: Return of the Suck.

 

Now, I understand how Lucas could’ve screwed the pooch with Episode I: The Phantom Malice.  He was much older, after all, and had thus matured beyond the whimsy, imagination, and underdog ambition that allowed him to create the original Star Wars.

 

After I first saw the first prequel, I wanted to put my arm around Lucas and say, “Hey, don’t worry about it, big guy.  Everyone makes mistakes, no biggie.  I forgive you, just don’t do it agai- AHHHHH!!!  STOP IT GEORGE, THAT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO GO THERE!!!”

 

No sooner than I’d started to hope that Episode II: The Blown Wars wasn’t gonna lick rhinoceros scrotum, BAM!!!  I get it right in the poop shoot.

 

Tonight it happened for a third time, and I’m so mad right now I could boil a rabbit.  Ironically, I’m not really all that big of a Star Wars fan- I’m just a fan of good movies, and these prequels COULD’VE been good movies.  I honestly feel like George and I are on a playground, and he keeps going, “Hey Mike, what’s that on your shirt?”  And then when I look down, he kicks me in the balls- only, instead of ripping his extra chins off and smothering him with the lard, I sheepishly get up, brush myself off and mutter, “Aw shucks, that was a good one.  You really got me there….  Huh?  Something’s on my shirt?”

 

* Ugh! *

 

This is SOOOO the problem with Hollywood.  People are so eager to reach the top that they constantly kiss ass to get there.  Thus, I’d imagine that- ever since the original trilogy- Lucas has been surrounded by sniveling little bootlickers that are constantly going, “You’re so great, Mr. Lucas.  Everything you do is art.  Don’t listen to the naysayers.  They just don’t understand you.”

 

And so he’s been allowed to make three steaming piles of dogshit in a row, never actually “called” on his mistakes because the diehard Star Wars geeks are even more willing to take it in the ass than their counterpart Lucas minions in Hollywood.  I bet you a million dollars that there are thousands upon thousands of Vader nerds typing their little hearts out on web pages all over the net, but their vigilance isn’t being spent on praise or genuine discussion.  No, they’re defending Episode III like a therapy group of battered housewives.

 

“What’s the first thing an abused woman does when she gets out of the hospital?  The fucking dishes, if she knows what’s good for her!” -George Lucas.

 

God DAMN it!!!  It’s not that people like me don’t “get” Lucas’s vision, it’s that these movies just plain suck, and Lucas is too convinced of his own greatness to learn from his mistakes.

 

Still, I’m gonna try and be objective so that I can fairly express just what a ham-handed waste of four thousand million gazillion dollars this film is.

 

1. The Special Effects.

Everybody always goes on and on about the special effects in the prequels, but the truth is, they suck too.  Computer generated stuff is simply too cartoonish to bring you “in” to the world of the film. 

 

Take Yoda, for example.  Man, he RULED in Empire and Jedi!  Why?  Because he was a fucking puppet!  Yeah, I said it.  In the original movies he had a tangible presence, something you felt the actors on screen could touch and interact with, (because they actually could).  In the new movies, Yoda is all CGI, and it shows.  I never once felt like I was watching a living, breathing, thinking being.  It was, again, just a cartoon.  As such, Yoda just doesn’t generate emotion.  You don’t care about him as a character.  

 

On a grander scale, the literal star wars sucked in the same manner.  Compare if you will the opening battle scene in Revenge of the Sith to the final Death Star battle in Return of the Jedi.  No contest.  Jedi blows it out of the water.  When I watch Jedi, I feel like I’m seeing actual machines flying through actual space.  I feel like they’re being piloted by actual people in a manner consistent with Newtonian Physics, and that allows me to completely suspend my disbelief.

 

Sith, on the other hand, is so full of impossible shit that, again, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not real.  Tonight I found myself constantly rolling my eyes and groaning, desperately wanting all the glitz and glamour to be over so that I could maybe, just maybe, get into the movie.

 

Never happened.  Anytime I started to suspend my disbelief, Lucas would fuck it up with another stroke of his digital dick.  I’m not saying that CGI is altogether bad; it’s just that you don’t have to use it all the time.  You’re not impressing anyone, you delusional hack!  I mean, look at the Lord of the Rings movies.  Sure, they had digital stuff, (they couldn’t have been made otherwise), but Peter Jackson used CGI to its most effective minimum, relying instead on real actors and real sets whenever possible.

 

Lucas lacks the humility to understand that flashier doesn’t equal better.

 

2. The Plot.

Nonexistent.  Lucas is not a writer.  That’s it, and that’s all.  He WAS a writer when he penned his first trilogy.  The story made sense, it fit together, it had just the right amount of characters, just the right amount of insinuated back story, and just the right amount of situation-driven action to make it work.  It wasn’t high art, but it was definitely fun and engaging.  In Sith, (as with the other prequels), you’ve got so many things going on, that nothing’s really happening.  The whole point is to get Anakin Skywalker to turn to the dark side, but that never believably happens.

 

Why does he turn?  Hmmmm…  Okay, to save his wife’s life, because he’s had a couple of dreams that make him think she’s going to die in childbirth.  Anakin bases the validity of this doom on the fact that his mother died, and that- supposedly- he dreamt about that happening too.  Well, Lucas spent so little time exploring the power and forebodingness of Anakin’s dreams in both Sith and Clone Wars, that it doesn’t fly.  It’s just not enough of a motivating factor to make him abandon his friends and his moral code for a life of child-murdering evil. 

 

But, let’s say it IS enough of a motivation.  Well, that would DEMAND that Anakin love Padme’ more than anything, so, even when she tells him that she thinks his going to the dark side is fucking up their marriage, Anakin would logically tell the Emperor to go blow himself and instead revert to the man Padme’ fell in love with.  This is a logical course of action if Anakin’s self-sacrificing devotion is as strong as Lucas tries to convince us it is. 

 

But no, Anakin tries to choke Padme’ to death with the patented Vader “stink hand” just because she calls him on his bullshit. 

 

Bad, bad, plot move.  The characters simply aren’t flushed out enough to make this believable.  In fact, Lucas tries to justify it by rapidly assigning Anakin all kinds of underlying, power-hungry agendas.  Maybe if George had spent less time jerking off wookies, and more time on personality definition, (both in Sith, and in the first two prequels), we could buy the turn. 

 

3. The Dialogue.

While the dialogue in the original trilogy wasn’t Shakespearean, it had a certain appeal, a certain innocence, an enduring tongue-in-cheekiness that audiences could really get into.  In the prequels, however, this brand of comic book writing feels forced and lazy.  I mean, Sith has every verbal cliché you can think of, a lot of ‘em clichés from the original trilogy.  This oral vomit is made doubly terrible because the characters are two dimensional and cardboardish.    

 

This is the most infuriating aspect of the film because it’s so easy to correct.  Get a capable writer, for Christ’s sake!!!  I mentioned Lord of the Rings before, and I’m going to do so again because, in that film, the dialogue captures the vernacular “magic” of Middle Earth without sounding hokey.  The original trilogy did the same thing.  The new trilogy does not. 

 

The most memorable crapfest of an example is when Anakin is rebuilt as Vader.  From his staggering zombie-like escape off the operating table, to his screaming “NOOOOO!!!” when the Emperor tells him that Padme’ is dead, you just get the feeling that Lucas is TRYING to send us out of the theater with a big ole “Go fuck yourself, fans!”.  Who the hell could intentionally write a scene like that?  It’s absolutely, positively, B-movie terrible. 

 

4. The Little Things.

a. Did anybody notice that Obi-Wan’s eyes kept changing color?  In one scene, they’re Ewen McGregor blue green.  In the next, they’re shitty Acuvue brown.  I got popcorn during the trailers, and didn’t get up to go piss, so how did I miss the scene in which a space guinea pig spewed diarrhea in Kenobi’s peepers?

 

This is inexcusable.  How much did this movie cost to make?!?  Twice the national debt of Mexico, was it?  Then why the dick didn’t Lucas’s crack team of editors notice the ocular ambiguity?

 

You’ve gotta have some set of balls to let something like this get buy, either that or an incomprehensible dose of, “Eh, I don’t give a fuck.  Just send it to print.  Nobody’ll notice.  And even if they do, it’ll be too late because they’ll have already paid the $8.50.  MooHooHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

 

I noticed, asshole, and you’ll never see ME playing a trailer frame by frame in quick time to get my rocks off.

 

b. What’s with all the shitty space vehicles?  X-wing fighters were cool.  Tie-fighters were cool.  Star Destroyers were cool.  But how “sci-fi” can you make something before it just looks stupid?  Most of the vehicles in Sith were such a weird barrage of shapes and colors, I got the impression that Lucas considered his viewers a bunch of ADHD kids. 

 

c. Explain to me WHY the Emperor gets his face all fucked up again?  I know that Jules from Pulp Fiction is a bad motherfucker, (it says it on his wallet), but is he SO bad that simply deflecting a lightening attack makes the Emperor’s forehead turn into a wrinkled white butt?  And how come this also causes the Emperor to gain forty pounds?  Is it me, or did they overdo it with the makeup?  The Emperor was scary in Jedi, but in Sith, he turns into a fatass pumpkin head. 

 

Conclusion.

Star Wars fans will undoubtedly find ways to defend this movie, just as they did Phantom and Clones.  But the simple fact of the matter is that a good film defends itself.  FUCK Lucas and his arrogance!  FUCK his “doing it my way no matter what” mindset!  FUCK his inexcusable refusal to learn from past mistakes! 

 

This was your last chance at redemption, chuckles, and you blew it.  Thanks for making it impossible for me to enjoy your early work, your pure work.  You remember that, don’t cha?  Those movies you made twenty years ago?  The ones that captured the imaginations of a generation and held them fast?  The ones that endure to this day because you weren’t yet a pretentious prick with an invincibility complex?

 

Being thirty one years old, and anything BUT a true geek, I’ll have probably forgotten Star Wars all together by tomorrow morning, leaving it for another night five years or so from now when I rent the original trilogy to remember what it was like to be a child.

 

Until then, Lucas, please feel free to stick a lightsaber up your audience indifferent ass…