Revenge of the Sith Discussion - (SPOILERS ALLOWED)

Well, after 11 hours in an overnight line, a throbbing 8 hour headache, and a crappy 2 hour nap, followed by 2 more hours in line - I finally got to see "the movie." My overall first impression (and it was definitely affected by the preceding 24 hours) is positive. I will say the crowd in our theater pretty much sucked. The biggest cheer of the night was for the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe trailer if that says anything.

While I really liked the idea of the opening battle and rescue, I was not as swept into it as I thought I might be. I would like to know why all of a sudden Artoo became the fourth stooge. He has been nothing but a consistent, helpful droid. Yet for the first 20 minutes of this film, he was something of a klutz. I don't mind a little comedy, but how they used Artoo didn't seem consistent with all the other films.

I thought the acting was heads and shoulders above the last two films. Even the pseudo-romantic stuff with Anakin and Padme was tolerable and nothing seemed over the top when Anakin is making his turn to the Dark Side. I personally found some of the banter between Anakin and Obi-Wan quite funny, but I guess I was in the minority, at least in the crowd I watched with.

Some of the small things I wanted to happened worked out as I had hoped. I wanted Mace to go out in a significant manner and he did. In fact, now Mace has his effect on the Emperor stamped on Ep. 4-6 which is nice and likely would have defeated Sidious alone had it not been for Anakin. As for Artoo, after TPM, I just felt he would be aware of everything and the entire history of Anakin, so when he was not memory-wiped, that was satisfying. As for Qui-Gon, while his story was wrapped up kind of in a trite way, it was good enough. I think a lot of us immediately made Qui-Gon out to be a double-agent or something. But it's nice to know his Force abilities after death will have a lasting effect on the Jedi. Also, for the final battle, I really wanted Obi-Wan to decisively win and I felt he did. I had a fear that Anakin would get swept away by some random blast of lava which would make Obi-Wan look weak. But Obi-Wan finally proved he was the man, taking out Grievous and Anakin.

Overall this film was easily the best of the new trilogy, but that's not really saying a lot. Still, it'll never replace ANH and ESB for me, so the test is, can it move ahead of ROTJ? Right now it's close. I'll need to see it again, when I am significantly more awake. The building of the story, the action, and its ability to tie into ANH were all good. There will always be small inconsistencies in the stories of the PT and the OT and how they tie together. It just comes with the nature of the way the films were made. It doesn't really bother me. The only way to fix those problems is to keep going in and tweaking the OT, which I'm not a fan of.

I don't think that Artoo looked like a klutz during that part of the film. When he got caught by the battle droids and basically kicked their butts, that was pretty awesome. When he was falling and that kind of stuff near the end, the whole ship was moving, any character would have been doing the same thing unless they had a firm grip of how to defy the law of gravity. I think Artoo kicked as much @$$ as he did in all the other films.

i thought that the movie was wonderfull, it had the right blend of action and emotion. i mean the slaughtering of the younglings was the perfect way to show just how far Anakin would go for Padme. i also liked the twist that through all he did to try to save her it was him who finally killed her.

Dal, you should have joined us in Rocky Mount. We had a BLAST! Huge crowd that filled up three theaters. We had a line party with a costume contest as well as raised over $500 for Kisses For Katie with a Star Wars raffle. You definetely need to see it again after more rest. Thats what I did tonight and it was just amazing the second time.

I have just learned that ROTS has broken the records for opening day movie, midnight showing for a movie, is #2 of all time in 3 day weekend and is tied fastest to 100 million in 3 days. Let the record breaking continue!!! Bring Titanic down Revenge of the Sith!!!!