Tuesday, May 17, 2005

The final Star Wars film, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith premiered at the Cannes Festival on May 15, 2005, with George Lucas and the stars of the movie in attendance at the Grand Theatre Lumiere.

At the subsequent United Kingdom premiere on May 16, 2005, fans turned out in costume. Outside London’s Odeon cinema in Leicester Square, dozens of fans dressed as storm troopers, Jedi knights, and other characters for the film.

The movie is about the temptation of a Jedi knight to the Dark Side of the force, and his fiery transformation into the arch-villain Darth Vader.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is scheduled for general release in the United States on May 19, 2005, and is rated PG-13.

Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian described the climax of the film as following “what seems like seven hours of CGI action as dramatically weightless as the movement of tropical fish in an aquarium”. Bradshaw said the leading characters “gaze out over massive futuristic cityscapes resembling the photorealist artwork once used for 1970s sci-fi paperbacks: pointy buildings with swarms of pointy aircraft criss-crossing overhead, often bathed in crimson sunsets”.

He described Ewan McGregor‘s accent as “a simperingly lifeless Rada-English accent, a muddled and misconceived backdating of the Guinness original”, and said of Hayden Christensen that “If Princess Diana had gone to the Dark Side, she would have looked a lot like this”.

Describing Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L. Jackson as “acting as if on some kind of medication”, Natalie Portman as “incorrigibly clunky”, Bradshaw concluded that the film was “a product of George Lucas’s overweening production giant Industrial Light and Magic. No magic, little light, but an awful lot of heavy industry.”

Wendy Ide from The Times commented that “any spark of humour or irreverence that might have been present in the earlier films has been all but extinguished”, and accused the film of being carpeted by “a bombastic and overbearing” musical score.

Ide concluded that the film was “a textbook example of style over substance and, more importantly, soul”.