Episode III better than EP I and EP II but doesn't quite tie in right!

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2005)

Let's forget for a minute that Lucas totally sold out big time on promoting this film... (ie)pepsi, burger king and m&m's to name a few overly embarrassing plugs.
The film as a whole is pretty good. It kept my interest and was pretty entertaining. The battle scenes and lightsaber fights rock.
R2D2 has some great scenes and is much more mobile with cool new features like jumping and jets that let him fly around a bit. The problem with all of this is that in the original films, he needs a crane to get in and out of air-craft and is very clumsy. This is just one of several flaws in tying in the whole story.
The scenes btwn Padme and Anakin are again embarrassingly painful to watch. Lucas is clearly a lousy dialogue screenwriter. The story of how Anakin became Darth Vader is pretty cool and overall rather well done. As are the wicked cool scenes in the middle of the movie when the Jedi are on the run and are being eliminated.
The end of the movie is where it all falls apart for the true Star Wars fan. Lucas seemed to feel the need to explain the whole Jedi coming back from the dead to talk to other Jedi in the future via the blue soul thing. Which was terribly done and can be figured out w/o explanation from him. Also the splitting up of Luke and Leia at the end of the movie is completely off from the stories in the original series. Padme dies right after childbirth and the kids are split up. However in Return of the Jedi, Luke asks Leia if she has any memory of her mother: her real mother. To which she responds...yes a little she was very beautiful and kind but sad. How is this possible for her to say now that Lucas screwed up and killed Padme off on the delivery table? Lucas killed the ending a bit and really botched some of the tying in of the stories. But all in all this was a decent movie and a huge improvement from the other two he just made.