"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Rating: 3/10 (19 May 2005)

I have always been a huge Star Wars fan. I've seen "the Holy Trilogy" scores, if not hundreds of times, I've read the books, I've bought the toys, I even played the card game. All of these things make me not only a geek, but a person whose soul was crushed when he saw Episode III. I can't possibly convey to you using words my disappointment and horror as a reaction to this film. Harrison Ford's old quote to George Lucas, "You can write this s***, but we can't say it!" doesn't come close to embodying the sheer awfulness of the script. There is melodrama that is laughable, and comedy that just fails on every level. Lucas has squandered a great cast and elicited some of the worst performances in cinematic history (no hyperbole), and even Samuel L. Jackson was bad. The action and CGI are amazing, but they are the only redeeming features of the movie, and there is not enough of them to make it worth sitting through two and a half hours of Lucas' offensively horrendous dialogue.
The story that every single one of us knows before we walk into the theater unfolds at such an awkward pace, that you almost feel like you're watching that one nerdy kid from high school fail to climb the gym rope. The character's levels of intelligence and skill change throughout the film to fit the needs of the plot. The Jedi who we have come to know and love are invincible when fighting the droids, but are timorous cowards when confronted by Sith or real soldiers. Anakin is stupid, and for someone who seems to have such a deep understanding of something like the Force, he seems to have an awfully hard time connecting events, judging a situation, and even telling friend from foe. This isn't helped by the fact that Hayden Christensen gives a performance that would have gotten him booed off of the stage in a high school play.
The dialogue is bad. And by bad, I don't mean punny or evil, I mean that it's poorly written crap. This is, of course, to be expected since Episode's I and II had similar problems, but the sheer quantity dialogue ranging in quality from bad to atrocious is astounding, and you can only stand so much of it. Some of the actors, like Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid, relish the hamminess of their lines and pour their heart and soul into them with mixed results. Other actors, like Jackson, seem confused as to how they got talked into actually having these words come out of their mouths while the cameras were rolling, and their performances are just bad. Finally, there is Cristensen and Portman, who are both fine young actors (Portman far better than Christensen), but whose performances are deplorable beyond description.
The movie ended up being awful, despite being wonderfully fun to look at and having great special effects and battle. I am crushed that it was so, but I must say that I saw what I saw when I saw it!