Trilogy

1979-1983 (2004) - (Lucasfilm) 20th Century Fox

	Episode IV - A New Hope Film Rating: A Disc Ratings (Video/Audio/Extras): A/B/B Specs and Features 125 mins, PG, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, THX-certified, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at 63:08 at the start of chapter 28), keep case packaging with custom slipcase, audio commentary (with writer/director George Lucas, star Carrie Fisher, sound designer Ben Burtt and special effects supervisor Dennis Muren), THX Optimizer, DVD-ROM weblink, 3 random animated film-themed menus sets with sound and music, scene access (50 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX & 2.0 Surround), French and Spanish (DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
	Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back Film Rating: A+ Disc Ratings (Video/Audio/Extras): A/A/B Specs and Features 127 mins, PG, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, THX-certified, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at 58:02 in chapter 27), keep case packaging with custom slipcase, audio commentary (with writer/producer George Lucas, director Irvin Kershner, star Carrie Fisher, sound designer Ben Burtt and special effects supervisor Dennis Muren), THX Optimizer, DVD-ROM weblink, 3 random animated film-themed menus sets with sound and music, scene access (50 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX & 2.0 Surround), French and Spanish (DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
	Episode VI - Return of the Jedi Film Rating: C+ Disc Ratings (Video/Audio/Extras): A/A/B Specs and Features 135 mins, PG, letterboxed widescreen (2.35:1), 16x9 enhanced, THX-certified, single-sided, RSDL dual-layered (layer switch at 62:38 at the start of chapter 22), keep case packaging with custom slipcase, audio commentary (with writer/producer George Lucas, star Carrie Fisher, sound designer Ben Burtt and special effects supervisor Dennis Muren), THX Optimizer, DVD-ROM weblink, 3 random animated film-themed menus sets with sound and music, scene access (50 chapters), languages: English (DD 5.1 EX & 2.0 Surround), French and Spanish (DD 2.0 Surround), subtitles: English, Closed Captioned
	Star Wars Trilogy - Bonus Material Disc Rating (Extras): B Specs and Features Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy documentary (151 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0, 12 chapters), The Characters of Star Wars featurette (19 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0), The Birth of the Lightsaber featurette (16 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0), The Force is with Them: The Legacy of Star Wars featurette (13 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0), 10 theatrical trailers & 11 TV spots (all 16x9), production photo gallery, poster art gallery, Episode III preview featurette (The Return of Darth Vader - 9 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0), Episode III: Making the Game featurette (6 mins - 16x9, DD 2.0), videogame trailer, playable Star Wars Battlefront Xbox game demo, Easter egg, DVD-ROM weblink, keep case packaging with custom slipcase, animated film-themed menus with sound and music, feature access, languages: English (DD 2.0), subtitles: none

Lego Star Wars

Fans of Legos and / or Star Wars are in for a treat with Lego Star Wars: The Videogame from Eidos. It skips the boring parts of the prequel Star Wars trilogy and jumps right to the best bits for some podracing, lightsaber dueling, action adventure game fun. It isn’t the longest or most complex game, but Lego Star Wars is undeniably fun and is worth checking out.
Kids Game? Nah ...
First off, don’t be scared by the fact that every preview and review has called Lego Star Wars a kids game. To me, it seems like a great disservice to Traveller’s Tales and Eidos to call this a kids game because that label will only scare away people that would likely really enjoy it. It isn’t the most complicated game out there and the characters are pretty cute, but I don’t see why this is a “kids game”. Sure, kids will enjoy it, but those of us that grew up playing with Legos and dreaming we were off in a galaxy far, far away will be able to appreciate it even more. Don’t be fooled by other sites that want to give everything a label and categorize it. You will enjoy Lego Star Wars whether you’re 8 or 88 and that is what is most important.

Lego Star Wars is a retelling of the stories from Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III. It skips all of the lame parts and lets you play through the best parts of these movies. You’ll duel with Darth Maul and Count Dooku as well as take part in the coliseum battle at the end of Ep II and podracing on Tatooine along with much more. Everything is built with Lego blocks which give the game a unique look and feel so it really stands out among all of the uber-realistic games we see on Xbox.

The gameplay is simple and fairly easy, but there is something about Lego Star Wars that keeps you coming back. In each level you have at least one and sometimes more AI buddies. You can switch back and forth between the characters in order to take advantage of each ones special abilities. For example: Jedi have lightsabers and can double jump. Blaster characters can’t jump as high but have grappling hooks. Some characters (such as Jar Jar …) can jump extra high and reach things other characters can’t. And there are droids that you have to use to open up certain doors. This two character (or more) system makes the game very interesting to play through because you are always switching back and forth and getting a lot of different styles of play. When you beat a level, you unlock characters as well as “Free Play” mode for that level. Free Play mode allows you to pick any characters and play levels over again to find hidden items.
All of this is well and good, but how does the game actually play? Pretty darn well, but like I said, it is simple and easy. Combat consists of button mashing to either hack through enemies with your lightsaber or shoot them with a blaster. Exploration of the levels is mostly pretty tame platform jumping stuff, nothing too tricky and you won’t ever get lost. There are a handful of trickier puzzles thrown in which keep the game interesting, but overall the game isn’t much of a challenge. Also, you can play through all 17 story missions in about 4-5 hours, which is rather short. What the game lacks in length or depth, however, it more than makes up for with sheer fun.

Revenge of the Sith

"Henceforth you will be known as Darth Vader!" These dire words, addressed to a tormented Anakin Skywalker as he crosses the threshold to the much-mentioned Dark Side, mark the definitive moment of his Luciferian journey, which will end with him in a black, neo-Wehrmacht helmet-mask, with incipient emphysema and a walk that makes him look as if he has had concrete hip replacements.

It supposedly forms the mythic heart of the gigantic Third Episode of George Lucas's colossally inflated Star Wars prequel trilogy. Yet when this moment happens - after what seems like seven hours of CGI action as dramatically weightless as the movement of tropical fish in an aquarium - I looked blearily around the cinema and sensed thousands of scalps failing to prickle. We had all been bored into submission long ago.

George Lucas is now not so much a director as chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option. And within this empire's boundaries, Lucas is so mind-bogglingly powerful that none of his lieutenants dares tell him the truth: that yet another Something of the Something title, after Attack of the Clones and Return of the Jedi, is pretty annoying. (It's actually his fourth, if you count the original script title to the first Star Wars: Adventures of the Starkiller.) But here at any rate, finally, is the end of the road, or rather the middle of the road - the moment in 1977 where we came in. Lucas has taken three pointlessly long and artificially complicated movies to get to the point: precisely how did Luke Skywalker's father come to embrace the forces of darkness?

Hayden Christensen is Anakin, the talented but mercurial Jedi pupil of Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which role Ewan McGregor wears a big and bushy beard, to indicate the aged wisdom that we know is his destiny. Their mighty contest is to be at the centre of this movie, during which in quiet moments leading characters will 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.

Once again, McGregor speaks in a simperingly lifeless Rada-English accent, a muddled and misconceived backdating of the Guinness original - the young fogey with the light-sabre. In boringness he is matched by that Jedi master of woodenness: Hayden Christensen, the flatliner to end all flatliners. As an actor Christensen must show the terrible embryo of future wickedness within himself. And how does he do this? By tilting his head down, looking up through lowered brows and giving the unmistakable impression that he is very, very cross. If Princess Diana had gone to the Dark Side, she would have looked a lot like this.

So why does Anakin desert the forces of light? It is his passionate love and concern for his pregnant wife, Princess Amidala, coupled with a sense of his own slighted dignity that are to be the tragic and fateful factors leading to the most unconvincing evil act you can imagine, an event weirdly neutralised by the bloodless unreality that surrounds everything. The vicious Anakin massacres - oh, horror! - a bunch of innocent Jedi children.

But that is not how Lucas's solemnly high-flown script chooses to refer to them. With sub-Shakespearian gravitas, McGregor intones: "Not even the younglings survived." I'm sorry, not even the what? Is that their surname or something? Are Mr and Mrs Youngling going to come home to find a nursery bloodbath?

One of the things about the previous film, Attack of the Clones, that made you think things might be looking up was the terrific performance by Christopher Lee as the sinister Count Dooku. Almost the very first thing Lucas does here is kill him off. It is a crippling blow that leaves us with a range of scandalously dull secondary characters. People such as Senator Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L Jackson as the fiercely uninteresting Mace Windu. They are acting as if on some kind of medication.

As with everyone else - certainly with McGregor and Christensen and the incorrigibly clunky Natalie Portman as Princess Amidala - a heavy blanket of self-consciousness descends, under which they must act out the stilted myth on which depend the hopes and expectations of millions of fans. There are zero comic moments. C-3PO is allowed on to whinge briefly and unfunnily.

Revenge of the Sith has some almost decent things. Yoda is good value as ever, though his character is never allowed to breathe in the airless galaxy Lucas creates, and there is a good sequence at the end showing the "birth" of Darth Vader while Princess Amidala is delivered of her twins. It has what the rest of the film so conspicuously lacks: a spark of real dramatic life. But it comes far too late and it is over immediately. How depressing to compare any of this with the fun and gusto of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in the first movie. As for the elephantine trilogy as a whole, it was all too clearly a product of George Lucas's overweening production giant Industrial Light and Magic. No magic, little light, but an awful lot of heavy industry.