Better than 1/2, worse than 4/5/6

Rating: 6/10 (21 May 2005)

***Spoilers***
With the deluge of bad reviews that Lucas received from his first two efforts to reinstate the Star Wars franchise, Revenge of the Sith may have more aptly adopted Episode IV's moniker as it provided A New Hope for George. While he fails to deliver in a way that the 70's films did, he does provide a neat conclusion to the special effects marvel he begun with Episode I. We get Vader, we get twins, we get wookies. We do not however receive believable performances from the film's most important characters.
Hayden Christensen continues his dismal acting job as he draws us into the internal conflict that transforms playful Anakin Skywalker into the sinister Darth Vader. This is done through a collection of dream sequence premonitions that leave Anakin desperate to save his wife. As tensions pile up, Anakin questions his loyalties and begins his descent into the dark side. Unfortunately this is done far too abruptly. We are tossed about as Anakin moves from the verge of killing Palpatine to pledging his undying allegiance to him within seconds. This allegiance is apparently strong enough to drive him to murder innocent children in what seems like moments later. What kind of struggle is this? Continuing in this line, Anakin swears all he has done has been out of love, yet he attempts to kill poor Padmé shortly thereafter. What is his real motive, love or power? This could be neither or both, but Christensen fails to achieve even a remote sense of connectedness to this conflict. He comes off more like a brooding child than a deeply tortured adult. In the later films, Vader is always portrayed as calm, cool, and collected. There is no maturation in this film, however, and Anakin remains from beginning to end passionate and overly brash. This is culminated in an absurdly ridiculous "NOOOOOO" scream near the end of the movie after Vader puts on his suit for the first time. It would be laughable were it not making a complete mockery of one of the greatest villains of all time. Other notable failures include Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal as Mace Windu. The man mostly remembered as "baddest mother f---er" struggles desperately to pull off the role of a deeply contemplative monk fighter. It would have been nice to see a little more expression out of him, especially in his fight with Palpatine, but Jackson fails to connect.
This brings me to the saving grace of this film. Ian McDiarmid is fantastic as Palpatine. His performance conveys all the latent complexity, cleverness, and malevolence that Darth Sidious should rightly hold. Ewan McGregor does a pretty decent job as Obi Wan as well, and the final lightsaber battle between him and Vader is amazing.
Dialogue in this movie is generally poor especially in Yoda's case. After "Begun, the clone war has" I didn't think it could get much worse until I heard "Not if anything to say about it, I have". OK we get it, he says things in the wrong order. That is no excuse to drag in trite drivel to overemphasize the point. I also think CGI is overrated for characters. I miss the gritty realism of the muppets. And why Chewbacca? Wookies are cool, but this specific character inclusion only reduces the believability of the coincidences required to bring him back into the story later. Oh yeah, C3PO and R2D2 get memory wipes. "Oh Dear!" Convenient? A little too convenient, if you ask me.
All in all, it was good to see Lucas return to some of the splendor he enjoyed from his glory days. I don't think he ever really recovered from the terrible casting decision he made in Anakin, however(both child and adult). Awesome special effects, decent story, poor acting. 6 out of 10