Well, it wasn't Gigli, but . . .

Rating: 5/10 (23 May 2005)

The good news: Revenge of the Sith is visually sumptuous; each new world created is exquisite. The CGI techs who put together the backdrops did themselves very proud.
That's it. The one piece of good news.
The acting is as bad -- or worse -- than you've been told. The script is leaden. The "turn" of Anakin isn't so much a seduction of a pure soul by evil, but the duping of a sulky imbecile by the smart guy. And so on. If there is torment, instead of petulance, on Anakin's side, it needs a better actor (or director of acting) than Christensen (or Lucas). Hayden Christensen, in this film as in the previous episode, seems like he's imitating Sylvester Stallone imitating Marlon Brando. Natalie Portman is also dull. And the pair have so little chemistry on screen, you wonder how she could have even become pregnant.
I thought even some of the editing was poor. It was difficult to see who was firing at whom in the opening sequence. It was difficult to see who was swinging at whom in the lava. It was hard to remember where the heck they had left Natalie Portman when Obi-Wan and Anakin -- er, Darth Vader -- started their fight.
And finally, even the sumptuous backdrops ended up hurting the film. One of the real charms of the original Star Wars was the scruffy landscape of Tunisia, which gave the requisite desolation without interfering with the action (or the dialogue). By contrast, all that magma distracts you from the action; as does that weird hollow planet where Obi-Wan kills Sidious; as do the constant stream of moving vehicles across the sky-roads of Coruscant. And the final irony is that with all the exotic CGI backdrops, the film ends up feeling rather studio-bound.
The final film of the series deserved to be a character piece (in the way that the Luke half of TESB was). Instead, it's a dull bit of space opera.
It wasn't as bad as Gigli (what is?), but all in all, it was a very dull, very disappointing piece of film-making. As Yoda might have said, "A shame it is, that come to this it has.