Behold and wonder at the utter travesty!
Some highlights:
What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.
Hearing Williams’s compositions for “Star Wars” is like being ordered, loudly and aggressively, to feel, and to feel one thing. It sounds calculated to bludgeon a viewer into submission, to create a cowed unanimity of simple and narrow emotions that are the antithesis of imagination and fantasy.
If I had seen “Revenge of the Sith” in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), “Power! Unlimited Power!,” I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement.
And before you ask, no, this is not satire.