A most absurd and horrible debacle

Rating: 1/10 (30 October 2005)

I remain confused and confounded by those fans willing to claim that the wooden-acting of the previous two films in the prequel series is gone, replaced by something mildly palpable. The dialog, as horrible as ever, culminates in a love scene between our two star-crossed imbeciles which made an entire audience cringe as if nails were raked across a blackboard. "You're beautiful. "You only think that because you're so in love." "No, I only think that be...wait, what? what the hell are we talking about?"
Lucas has managed to nigh-on ruin the originals retroactively with atrocious dialog/ directorial decisions including, but not limited to, an offensively stupid Frankensteinian "No!" belted by Darth Vader to an equally overacting Darth Sidious ("un-LIMITED POWER!!!!")
Characters once dark and ominous are transformed before our very eyes into comical, offensively over-the-top manifestations of some banal, 1920's comic book villainy. The only truly interesting characters, Mace Windu and Darth Tyranus, obliterated from the story as soon as humanly possible. I hope Sam Jackson got his metaphorical money back from the useless and pointless conclusion to his character.
Speaking of pointless conclusions, how does one justify spontaneous genocide? Anakin went to school with these people, lived with these people, ate his meals with these people for the better part of twenty some-odd years and within ten minutes of screen time transforms into a Hitlerian figure who has no problems cutting up babies with a light saber? Are you kidding me? Never in my life have I bore witness to a less plausible "fall from grace" scenario. Not to mention his only plot motivation for committing the genocide in the first place was for the love of his life whom he almost throttles to the death a moment later.
It's possible George Lucas is the worst screenwriter in the history of professional cinema. The dialog was offensively stupid, the story inane beyond measure, and often completely contradictory to the characters' development.
Positive aspects to the film are really limited to Nick Gillard and Ewan McGregor. The former as always delivers some of the most astounding fight choreography in modern film and the latter manages to pull off even the most absurd dialog with grace and dignity. Unlike his counterpart Hayden whose career, I pray, is over with such loathsome cinematic moments as "The emperor is evil!" "In my opinion the Jedi are evil!"
WHAT?!