By far the best of the prequels, but not perfect

Rating: 8/10 (23 May 2005)

With the third prequel movie, Revenge of the sith, the starwars saga is finally complete and the gap between the old and the new trilogy is bridged. With this third movie, Lucas finally gives us a movie again that is GOOD, entertaining and even moving. There still are some flaws, but the overall impression is a good one.
Before I'll go into more detail, I must warn you that the rest of this review contains some heavy SPOILERS! So don't read on if you want to avoid those.
The movie begins by dropping us right into the action. After this fast-paced start full of action, the movie slows a bit down and the plot starts to unfold. Palpatine (the leader of the republic, who has gradually gained more and more power and in truth is Darth Sidious) starts to slowly poison the mind of Anakin, playing into his fears and struggles (after all, "fear is the path to the dark side"). This is portrayed very well, although Anakins final descent into the dark side comes across as being too sudden.
The manipulating moves of Palpatine are keep the first half of this movie interesting, the rest is somewhat boring and not very different from "Attack of the clones". The plot concerning the clone-wars isn't that interesting and feels like more of the same, despite all the eccentric and bizarre CGI-worlds Lucas shows us. In fact, these sweeping CGI shots of enormous buildings, huge halls or landscapes become a bit boring and repetitive after a while. Almost every scene begins with one. Maybe Lucas should use a bit less CGI and a bit more real landscapes or models(like Peter Jackson successfully did with his LOTR trilogy) because sometimes the CGI remains pretty obvious. They did a great job on the CGI overall, but if almost everything on-screen is animated, you notice it.
Besides that, there's still some mediocre acting and a few cheesy scenes in there, although there's definitely improvement compared to the previous prequels (and, let's face it, the original trilogy wasn't exactly without cheesy moments and bad acting either).
That said, the film really picks up once Anakin finds out about Palpatines true identity. This really is the turning point of the movie, the "lighter" action scenes are gone and the tone of the movie becomes really dark, as the Republic crumbles and the Jedi are being hunted down (there's some really moving shots here, with the clones turning against the Jedi). All this leads to a very impressive finale, that will have you on the edge of your seat and even has some emotional impact (something the previous prequels didn't manage to do). The final fight between Anakin and Obi-wan will comes pretty damn close to perfection, and certainly is the highlight of this movie.
Overall, the second half of the movie makes up for the first half, and makes Revenge of the Sith a very satisfying experience.