Best of the Prequels, but still sadly lacking

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2007)

Revenge of the Sith, the last entry in the long running series (we hope!) starts off well, with an epic space battle and a couple of nice comic moments with R2-D2. However it is not too long before everything turns sour and for mainly the same reasons as before. Please note that there are some major spoilers henceforth:- Firstly, unsurprisingly the script is woeful (yet again), making the dialogue in most soap operas look like Shakespeare. This in turn affects the acting as the players struggle to get any conviction across about what they are saying. This is particularly true of the romantic scenes between Anakin and Padme where the chemistry is so minimal that these moments are simply dull as in "Attack of the Clones." It is a pity that Christopher Lee, one of the better actors in the prequels and indeed the whole saga is on screen for such a short period of time, sidelined and killed off early on to make way for a weak robot/alien hybrid enemy  General Greivous, another CGI character. Only Lee, Ewan MacGregor, Ian McDiarmid and Samuel L. Jackson really manage to rise above the material in any way.
The special effects are overdone again, but not so badly as the other prequels where there seemed to be a desperate need to fill the background with endless distracting visuals that detracted from the atmosphere rather than added to it. ILM can undeniably create some spectacular visuals, but there is still a lack of restraint in their use, something that has afflicted the film industry as a whole for some years now. Lightsaber fights make up some of the most memorable scenes in the saga, and there are more in Revenge of the Sith than in probably the other five films in the saga put together, but unfortunately quantity does not make up for quality. Most fights look like opponents just swinging their weapons as fast as possible in the hope of hitting something rather than using any genuine strategy  not to be wondered at when half the combatants are CGI.
The pacing is poor and has been for all the prequels - compare the time-span of episodes I-III and IV-VI, and it helps explain why Revenge of The Sith is badly rushed, with so many characters killed off during the running time that it is difficult to care too much about any of them. Anakin's turn to the Dark Side is terribly executed and so easy that it makes you wonder how much goodness he had to start with if the threat of the loss of his wife in a dream causes him to betray all his friends and become a child murderer. There are also inconsistencies in the plot leading to the original trilogy  such as the fact it takes the Emperor twenty years or so to get rid of the senate when it took only a fraction of that time to end the war and destroy almost the entire Jedi order. The tone is much darker even than "The Empire Strikes Back," the best entry in the series, and there is little of the familiar trademark humour than made the equally famous weak dialogue more forgivable. When I saw it in the cinema most of the audience laughs came from moments that were clearly not intended to be funny, such as Darth Vader's "Nooooooooooooooooooo!"
Overall, Revenge of the Sith is more exciting than the other prequels, has a more coherent storyline and in fact seems to have learnt from some of the mistakes from these, but not fully enough to really stand out as a much better film. On the other hand with these films there was little onus on George Lucas to correct these things as he knew that he could hardly fail to receive a massive profit no matter what he put out on screen due to the vast number of loyal Star Wars fans.