"Luke, I am your father..."

Rating: 1/10 (9 June 2005)

"...but this is not your father's Star Wars."
Ugh. Where to begin? These movies are horrible. Each one worse than the previous one; or at least all equally dire. I think we were all fooling ourselves thinking things would get any better after seeing Jake Lloyd was cast as young Anakin and Haydn Christensen as older Anakin. Besides that, though, an inordinate amount of time was wasted on endless hordes of ugly digital aliens and droids and pod races and very little on the story. Sadly, Lucas clearly did not care for the story, dialog and acting (he's admitted as much, as I understand it) and was more interested in cramming every possible frame with some digital creature or effect.
As a result, we see no viable transition from good Anakin to bad Anakin; instead, we are subjected to possibly the worst plot contrivance ever devised, amongst a host of other ridiculous plot devices (to say nothing of the moronic coincidences that proliferate in these movies). The confounding thing is that even in this last film, where you still might be able to salvage some time and show a logical progression from Skywalker to Vader, there is plenty of time wasted and fluff to spare, including the introduction of one of the most pointless characters ever created, Count Grievous. I mean, why chronicle the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, the main protagonist of the trilogy, when you can show a coughing robot? This could have been a true saga. Instead, it is a blight on the franchise and a travesty.
As for the effects, I deplore the look of all these movies. They don't evoke the feel of the original films at all. It's all a big, headache-inducing mess. But its only fitting that the effects stink since the story is five times as repellent. "You can't polish a turd" as the saying goes, or, as that horrible little booger would put it, "Polish a turd, you cannot."