Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

 

Episode III begins with possibly the classic of movie space battles─classic in being overblown to the point of silliness. Never mind that all  Star Wars movies have used an unrealistic WWII naval air battle model in which small fast craft attack slower behemoths. Never mind that the small craft could only maneuver at WWII speeds or kill their pilots from excessive g's. Never mind that when defenders blasted a smaller craft headed toward them, the remains would still slam into them kamikaze style. Even with the unrealistic battle physics, the original Star Wars had panache; Episode III does not.

 

Lucas overdoes it by throwing a version of nearly every movie battle scene from the last 60 years into Episode III's opening. There is, of course, the trademark WWII naval battle stuff, but this time the small spacecraft must fly through exploding puffs of flak. These linger in space like little black clouds. First, while the black smoke did help WWII  gunners correct their aim by marking the position of exploding shells, how could it possibly help in the blackness of outer space?  Second, why would the clouds of smoke linger? The smoke particles would have an outward velocity and Newton's 1st law says they would continue moving outward at the same speed until a force acted to slow them down. On Earth the force is air resistance. In outerspace it's nonexistent. Third, using modern aiming technology at close range with high velocity projectiles traveling in straight lines, free of air resistance; how could the defenders miss? All attacks on large spaceships would end up being kamikaze attacks. But the WWII foolishness is just the beginning.

 

Next comes a mechanized version of the ominous bird swarming from Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic: The Birds—not even a war picture—followed by an attack of small droids that attach to Obi Wan Kenobi's (Ewan McGregor)  spacecraft and attempt to drill holes in it, similar to sentinel attacks in The Matrix movies. Here's a thought: bullets are cheap; droids are expensive; why not shoot a whole mess of bullets and let them drill the spacecraft? Lastly, are the pirate-ship-style attacks. Two large spacecrafts pull up within-stone throwing distance and deliver broadsides with cannons. At least these are 20th-century-style breech loading cannons, instead of the muzzle loaders of yore.

 

Okay, apologists will no doubt have a lengthy explanation, from a Star Wars publication of some type, for why the cannons are not 20th-century-style, but the facts remain: the cannons ejected empty artillery shells; they recoiled; they shot something that exploded on contact.

 

Conventional cannons would work just fine in outerspace except that they'd act like thrusters. When a cannon was fired its recoil force could significantly move even a large battleship. Remember, there's no water to help hold the ship in place. If the recoil force lined up with the ship's center of mass, the ship would move straight-line-fashion in the direction of the force. This motion is called translation. If the recoil force did not line up with the center of mass, the ship would both translate and rotate. Firing a broadside could easily cause a ship to roll and send it traveling in the opposite direction of its target. Remaining on station, not to mention firing follow up shots, would be a problem.

 

On Earth air resistance begins substantially slowing the velocity of a projectile the instant it's fired. Cannon shells fired in outerspace would have no such problems. They would not arrive on target as quickly as laser blasts but would arrive much faster than cannon shells do on Earth. With modern microchip technology the cannon's projectiles could contain guidance mechanisms to help keep them on target even if the target moved. There would be no need for firing cannons at close range. In fact, such firing would be incredibly dangerous. An exploding ship would take any nearby attackers with it.

 

Of course, the opening battle also has the quintessential rescue scene in which a pair of—who else—Jedi with their plucky robot board a crippled ship to save a crooked politician: Palpatine. (Isn't it obvious that the guy's a slime?) Following lengthy samurai-movie-inspired fights, the badly-damaged ship upends and falls straight down toward the planet it had been orbiting. (What happened to its orbital velocity?) This sends everyone aboard sliding toward the falling end of the ship. Okay, maybe "a long time ago in a galaxy far away" they understood gravity well enough to pump it like central heating fluid through the floors of a spacecraft, but if they did, why would the artificial gravity's direction change with respect to the floor when the ship fell toward a planet? It seems like an artificial gravity force would always remain perpendicular to the floor regardless of the ship's position.

 

As for the gravity force coming from the planet, keep in mind that it exists at the same magnitude and direction for an orbiting object as for an object stating to fall straight down. In either case it cannot be "felt" by an observer on the ship because in both cases the ship is freefalling: in the one case falling straight down, and in the other falling in a stable orbit.

 

On descent, the burning ship breaks in half, but not to worry, the mutilated behemoth miraculously reenters the atmosphere and lands at the nearest space port, all without disintegrating—miraculous especially since the ship's shields were disabled before it was boarded. Try that landing with a space shuttle on Earth and the result would be decidedly unmiraculous.

 

After the battle, the movie focuses on Anakin Skywalker's (Hayden Christensen) temptation by the Dark Side and transformation into the black helmeted Darth Vader. The main reason for such a complete moral decline: he had a bad dream. For heaven's sake, get the man a teddy bear and tell him to buck up. The last straw comes when Anakin lops off the arm of a fellow Jedi giving soon-to-be evil emperor Palpatine an opening to push—with lightning no less—the hapless Jedi out the window of a high-rise. The event also plunges Anakin into the depths of  moral conflict. What to do? Why, of course, drop to a knee, swear allegiance to the obviously murderous and lying soon-to-be evil emperor, then personally slay all the children in the Jedi temple. This from a person who studied under Yoda? And we're supposed to think he'll eventually be redeemed in Episode VI?

 

Anakin leaves for further murderous adventures at the edge of the Republic on a lava-covered planet. Obi Wan Kenobi tracks him down intending to put an end to Vader's betrayals, but instead ends up in a seemingly endless fight scene on floating debris in the middle of a lava flow. A lava-covered planet would be a sauna in the best of locations, but in the center of a lava flow, the radiant heat would be enough to ignite clothing. Yet, the two Jedi are able to fight on and on without so much as a sip of Gatorade®.

 

Eventually, Anakin (now called Darth Vader) is grievously injured and lies dying, burnt to a crisp. (Apparently, the radiant heat was enough to ignite one's clothing, but not until one is defeated in combat.) He is rescued by the evil emperor who—sensing Vader's travail from afar—voyages to the edge of the empire, in minutes, to save his new protégé and outfit him with his trademark black armor. Meanwhile Vader's wife Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) dies in childbirth after receiving the finest high-tech medical care available—the fatal ailment: a broken heart. Will there ever be a cure for this relentless killer?

 

Finally we get to the moment we have long awaited: the return of the baddest movie villain ever: the black helmeted Darth Vader and what do we get? "Noooooo!" Okay, we're nerds. For us Star Wars movies are an addiction. We had to see Episode III even though, after Episodes I and II, we expected little. But if—heaven forbid—Lucas ever does another Star Wars, and we are subsequently lured to watch it by the dark side of our nerdiness, we will muster all our available force to just say, "Noooooo!"