great effects, awful acting, atrocious script

Rating: 5/10 (4 June 2005)

Eagerly awaited and an infinite improvement on entries 1 and 2 in the series, Revenge of the Sith is fatally flawed by mediocre acting, due I suspect to an over-reliance on special effects, poor casting, and a dreadful screenplay. Ewan McGregor is like a crude caricature of the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. His efforts to sound like his great predecessors of the English school left me numb with disbelief (competing with boredom). The feeble efforts of Natalie Portman and the overparted Hayden Christensen brought memories of school plays rushing back into my memory: how could such a pricey film end up with such risible, pure-high-school acting? But then Star Wars isn't about dialogue or drama, is it? It's about cowboys and indians in space, and we got plenty of that. But almost three hours of bad acting, set into sharp relief by superb performances from Samuel L Jackson and Ian McDiarmid, cannot be compensated for by the sumptuous images and richly drawn 'aliens'. All in all, I'll settle for acting and drama any time.