George Lucas Dropped the Ball

Rating: 1/10 (24 June 2008)

The number of ways in which this movie fails all expectations are too numerous to count. The discontinuity of story as alluded to in original trilogy is one, the overall poor acting, the awful special effects and gratuitous usage of CGI, the plot, the cinematography, the place names, the character names, the overall impact of the movie are all contributors to a film that ends one of the worst continuations of a movie series ever created. The only aspect of these movies (Episodes I, II and III) that is more distressing than the poor quality of the films themselves is the number of people that have somehow been duped into believing they are worth watching. I grew up adoring all things Star Wars, reading the literature etc. and really enjoyed the original three movies, Episodes IV, V and VI. That is until Lucas got his hands on those movies for their horrible remakes touted as "Special Editions" in which he began his heart wrenching trend of replacing any notion of quality acting with CGI buffoons.
Revenge of the Sith continues this trend by including ridiculous plot twists that I can only rationalize as some sort of pander to the mass audience he has come to covet. A few examples of the problems I have with this film include some nitpick items such as the name of a system being "Mustafar" which is just stupidly uncreative or the completely unjustified inclusion of Chewbacca in this film to the designation of the Emperor's order being 66 but there are also bigger issues such as the totally implausible bumbling Jedi council being ignorant of a massive dark side takeover or the self-exile Yoda imposes on himself simply because he "failed" to stop the Emperor after only one try. So much of this picture is unexplained and simply poorly executed, with a summation of my feelings toward the entire film depicted in the scene with the newly dubbed Darth Vader crying out a withdrawn "Nooooo" after learning of Padme's fate. How can anybody say that a movie with such a poor scene is any good? I realize that the Star Wars universe is composed of pure Science Fiction, and the very nature of the movie is to entertain, but the original three theatrical release Star Wars Movies, Episodes IV, V and VI gave a sense of something beyond a simple story and set of characters. It instilled a sense of adventure and awe. The new movies fail to capture that same feeling through bad decisions made on every level of development leaving me to cling to the Star Wars of my youth.