Stinker!

Rating: 1/10 (2 February 2001)

After Lucas' mentor Joseph Campbell passed away, Lucas lost all sense of real mythmaking and reverted to playground mentality. The plot of this film could have been told in 20 minutes at the beginning of a much better movie. The rest of the film is padded with whopper FX that are supposed to make us ignore the fact that the movie is terribly flimsy.
Furthermore, Lucas' choice of the boy to play the future Darth Vader was so far off target as to make the film turn into a cartoon. This boy would be better suited to toothpaste commercials. Consider how much better the film might have been if this one part had gone to the boy who made us really believe THE SIXTH SENSE.
This movie is such a radically lower grade piece of storytelling that it lessens the eloquence of the original STAR WARS trilogy. Hopefully, Lucas will get back into focus before rolling parts 2 and 3 off the FX assembly line.