The curtain closes on Star Wars...

I bought my tickets on Fandango yesterday morning. It was my first time to use the service and I was very pleased. When I got to the theater to pick up my tickets around 2:00p.m., there was a line at the theater. After I'd been in line about 10 minutes, a theater worker came out and said all Fandango purchasers could come inside to get their tickets. We 3 Fandango'ers went in and were done in a jiffy. I also picked up an iSight for my my mac while I was out as I was wanting a good way to shoot reference video for my animation (more on that later).

My wife came home, laughed at my ref video for the lip sync I'm getting ready to work on and we headed to dinner at Chic-fil-a. We got to the theater about 30 minutes before the start time and there was no one in our start time line which surprised me. They did have a Chewbaca look alike and Jedi wanna-be there to entertain. We got in theater and were amused by the teenage peanut gallery behind us giving running commentary on the theater ads. I've gotta get out more cause I didn't have a clue what half the questions were about...on second thought, perhaps that is a good thing.

SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW

The movie started and it was pretty much a non stop ride. R2-D2 transfigured into a robot Jedi in the first few minutes and was highly amusing. I found the new characterization of the robot army a strangely comical departure with their new almost cartoony action and comments. The action sequences were pretty sweet and the Jedi combat was intense. However, being a big fan of the Cartoon Network Clone Wars series, they seem a bit diminished in light of that representation. That was especially true for General Grievous who was simply amazing in the cartoon series.

The character animation overall was much better than the last movies and Yoda by far was my favorite animated character. Most of his shots were tangibly believable. I was a little disappointed by the Wookie planet which is so beautifully described in the the trilogy of books written to take place after Return of the Jedi. Yes, I'm a geek and enjoyed the series thoroughly until the death of Chewbaca after which I lost interest. The wookies are described as having these wicked claws which I was looking forward to seeing rip through some droids. The may have been in one shot, but it went by to fast for me to be sure.

The shot where Obi-wan blurts out "Only the Sith deal in absolutes!" really puzzled me as the whole seduction of Anakin to the dark side was a philosophy of relativism where as the Jedi adhered to a world view of right and wrong which by it's very nature requires absolutes. I'm into philosophy so I doubt many other people even noticed that. It irked me nevertheless.

Overall, it was better than the other two prequels but not as good as five or six. I think Empire is still my favorite, but this one will still find a place in my DVD collection. It's gonna be weird someday when I have kids and they're old enough to watch them and they start asking, "Why do the first three look so good, and the last three...." Will they say the same about 7-9, I guess we'll have to wait and see if Lucas has a few more cards up his sleeve.