Old veteran actor versus muppet!!!

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2010)

Yes, when the highlight of the film is an aged Christopher Lee battling a little green dude who really is not there the movie is just not a winner. Wisely, Lucas pulled back the usage of Jar Jar and replaced the young Anakin Skywalker with another actor. However, the movie is not much better than the last film and has way to many groan inducing scenes involving Anakin and Amidale who is now a senator as the planet she is from obviously has serious flaws in the way its government is structured. This one starts out with an assassination attempt on Amidale and great scenes like those Lucas ripped right out of the film "The Fifth Element" and had people selling death sticks (oh, what a clever jab at the tobacco trade). This film offers nothing new in the way of establishing a decent plot, other than the brief mention of the clone wars from the original Star Wars film. The guy they got to play Anakin was rather bad at his lines and was even stiffer than Ewan though I really think Ewan's main problem is that he did not want to really be in these films. We also get the origins of Bubba Fett as a guy who had less than ten minutes screen time in the original trilogy really needed a whole section of the movie dedicated to how he came about. Really this should show movie makers do not make scenes based on the fans wishes. Sure for some reason Bubba had his fans, but in the end his character was not important enough to merit this much attention. The only thing more stupid was making C-3PO a creation of Anakin even though he was a widely recognized protocol droid in the original series and adding Chewbacca for the heck of it in the final film in this rather badly written trilogy. There are scenes here and there that are good though (though not any scene where Anakin and Amidale are acting cutesy). Then Christopher Lee comes in and acts rings around everyone else and has the most entertaining fight in the movie as he takes on Yoda. So in the end, a rather sad attempt at trying to write a story around characters that were never really important to begin with and trying to set up a bit of Anakin's switch to the dark side.