Star Wars: Backstroke of the West

NOTE: The words and images displayed here originally appeared at this web address: http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html but that site has been 'Temporarily Unavailable" for a few days now.

i saw revenge of the sith last weekend at a local theater with my friend joe who was in town on business. it was much better than the first two movies and a fitting end (err.. middle) to the star wars saga. the next day i was walking past my friendly dvd salesperson and decided to check out the revenge of the sith. i was assured the quality was good and for 7rmb why not give it a shot.

aside from the counters on the top of the screen and a distorted perspective it was ok- not high quality but watchable. the captions were a direct english translation of the chinese interpretation of what the script was saying. it varied from being somewhat close to the script to being 'far far away'....


amazingly enough, the beginning scroll is mistranslated even though the words are right there on the screen!



'the backstroke of the west' is the english translation of the chinese title, which i'm not entirely sure is the 'official' title.



count dooku talks tough.



that's chancellor palpatine speaking, talking about obi wan.



general grevious gets some bad news.



the general considers punishing his troops.



sounds like something yoda might acually say... maybe.



troopseses!!!



anakin gets frustrated with the jedi council.



this seemed completely random until i figured out that 'jedi council' was being translated into chinese then back to english as 'the presbyterian church'.



i won't post any spoiler screen shots for those who haven't seen the movie yet- this is a memorable scene towards the end of the film. needless to say, obi wan wasn't actually speaking like yoda in this scene.