Great film, with disappointments

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2005)

We start off with your typical STAR WARS, but go down to a non-typical fight. TIE fighters everywhere, beautiful special effects, but from the ongoing camera movements and the bright colors on the screen, it got a little disorienting. The reason for this? Well the clone war is ending and a new villain has entered the series known as General Grevious, half alien half machine with four arms, who from what I've read all over the internet was suppose to be a Jedi killing mother, which brings me to disappointment number one.
General Grevious. This thing does not kill one Jedi in this entire movie. In the scene were OBI-WAN enters and Grevious tells the others to back off, he takes out his four light sabers ready to own. I get excited expecting to see the 2nd best light-saber battle in the whole series. Yet, what we get is a short 2 minute if that fight. First of all, no way can Kenobi block all the light sabers from this guy with his one, yet he does and he manages to slice off two of Grevous's sabers, then the little guy runs away, his end comes by a gun, shot by obi-wan, what a waste of my time, that was pathetic.You expect to see this guy kick major ass and he's taken out of the picture so easily, which is one of my problems with the whole prequel series (Darth Maul/Jango Fett)
This movie of course is darker then the first two and probably darker then Empire Strikes Back, it also carries the most light-saber battles/action scenes in the entire series.....but after seeing so many light sabers battles they kind of lose their excitement. YODA VS EMPEROR....while great, kinda let down by the shortness and how they did not use their "arena" to the full potential. ANAKIN VS OBI-WAN, people have been waiting for 20 years for this battle and it finally comes, it was good, you can even say epic in a way. But worth the wait of 20 years......I think not. Mace Windu and random Jedi VS EMPEROR....boy did those JEDI get it in 3 seconds or what, it looked like he was literally slow as a snail going uphill when he stuck the light-saber in them and yet the still take the hit. MACE Windu owned the emperor in the battle and the glass shatter was a great. The best light-saber battle is still DUEL OF FATES
Excited to see old characters such as Chewie and VADER, even though you know for a fact that they will have little screen time you can't help but feel disappointed with what they do in that screen time. Vader has no more then 5 minutes on the screen and the Frankenstein tribute was totally stupid in my opinion and took away from the awesomeness of VADER. LACK of Chewie.....lack of Wookies in general. The battle between the Wookies is very short.
What are the absolute worse things about this movie, well you probably would have guessed it, since it does not improve what so ever over the other two...dialogue and acting. A lot of the times I found myself rolling my eyes at the utter stupidness of some of the lines.
"You're so beautiful.." "Only because I'm so in love." "No, it's because I'm so in love with you."
HAYDEN is still bad as Anakin until the transformation takes place. Ewan is probably the worst one here.
"hang on were smarter than this"
That is said after being trapped in an energy shield and of course the unbelievable scene where he sees his PADWAN a person who he calls his brother and person he loves kill the young lings (another gripe....just call them children) and all he can say in a monotone voice is something along the lines of
"I can't watch this"
Please it looked/sounded like he was just reading it from the script. Not all the acting and dialogue is bad in this film, the highlight of the movie is PALPATINE....like Ebert said in his review, he has the hardest job of playing a character on both sides and he pulls this off marvelously. He owned this movie, even more then YODA....who owned the second.
Yes this is the better of the first two prequels for the fact that we get more into seeing why things are the way they are....Luke/Leia, Emperor and his disfigurement, that's about it, yup they don't really tie the two films together very well in my opinion. I was just waiting for more things to pop up to tie them together. There are still plot holes. Which I do not want to read the books to find the answers to, this should have been addressed in the film.
1> Who is Cyphis Deus? 2> How does Leia remember her birth mother
We all know what happens in this film and everyone is only going to watch it to see how these things come to be, but I was hoping/praying for one thing to be a surprise, one little thing. I remember reading somewhere that a line is spoken that shatters the STAR WARS universe, where is this line? We all know the Anakin becomes VADER and I was impressed with the story behind why he did this, but not with the amount of time it took for him to do this....it was so quick, I understand the time frame but come on, the movie went by so fast you could of put more time for the transition. The movie is 2:30, but with all the action it flies by so fast. When ANAKIN VS OBI-WAN came up I was thinking to myself, already? I didn't like how he chose the dark side to save Padme's life, but tries to kill her at the same time.