It' Crap Guys, I know ya wanna love it - but it's Crap !!!

Rating: 4/10 (15 May 2008)

First the qualifications - I am a 40 year old male, saw Star Wars on the big screen first time out, paid twice (when it was big bucks) to see Empire and queued around the block for several hours to see the opening of Jedi in Newcastle. Since that time I have bought the films that comprise the original trilogy in three formats and watch a combined more than 250 times. . Yes, like you I wanted to love Revenge of the Sith, but like the little guy pointing up at the emperor, I have to tell you HE HAS NO CLOTHES ON!!! This is crap !!! First the plot, and there is simply loads of it. It spills out from every orifice, but so loosely strung together to be delivered like a producer pitching a storyboard to suited execs. He doesn't care if they believe it, he just wants the money - and so did George. Next - Hayden Christensen can't act - I know. We know. But George clearly doesn't, so it's time for y'all to form on of those intraweb campaign things and tell him. That way, the greatest atrocity since the election of one George W. is never foisted on the world again. Speaking of acting or lack of - Da Princess? Err..she's got no balls - and (I know girls ain't supposed to), but there is no conceivable way this Prada-shop-alike, could give birth to the sassy, bad attitude, nut cruncher that her alleged daughter Leia became and was loved for. I quote "lets go to Nabboo to decorate the baby's room...." What! And then change the course of intergalactic history for a follow up? Stay at home with the wet nurse Natalie, your light-sabre days were over before they began. Palpatine - sorry old, "very old" man, but we guessed the big reveal in Episode one, and being made to wait until E-III didn't make it any more exciting. Darth Grievious - So what? clumsy? Sorry, guys with asthma, don't threaten Jedi, they just cough a lot! One more in an alarmingly long line of vacuous, excessive characters who appear only to be slaughtered without reasonable explanation or development. No sooner had GL learned to kill off Ja-Ja that we get this Disney throwback. The biggest mistake you ever made George was the killing of the only credible villain you created in the prequel series - Darth Maul  dark, edgy and entirely believable. Even if he woke up in the shower and realised being hot-sliced was all a dream, I could have stomached the return of the Horny one far more easily than the bumbling fools, served up to take over the universe? Speaking of Disney, what about the Looney Tunes robot voices? Dangerous - you bet, laughing hurts if you do it too much? Threatening, err...not! Robots, so effete, no one would be cruel enough to send one into a war zone in case they got hurt. This movie has massive issues, the plot has to be storytold by the cast constantly. Drama lifted directly from the daytime soaps carried by foreign language cable channels mixed with the political intrigue of Watergate. George completely misunderstands the very children's demographic he was aiming for. If you want to make a kids movie, you first make a nasty adult one, and pull the camera before the censors do. Kids love the stuff we tell them they shouldn't, which is why Lord of Rings was such a success. Rich and faithful to the reality of the unreal. "Order 66" - big build up, big let down, because it all comes to quickly -Mrs. Lucas, is this one of George's common faults? Too many characters and far too many sets and locations. Take Wookieworld, how many minutes did we have left to wander around, yet Chewie's are central to the story. Leading actors have been stored up for walk-on, walk-off babble that just cannot live up to the billing - Samuel L. Jackson and Jimmy Smits are wasted, to say nothing of the palpably bored McGregor. Judged by the production, George's writing is all over the place. The film jolts along at an inconsistent pace, suddenly retreating to collect threads of forgotten story lines that fell off when it hit the bumps. This is was two hour industry commercial for the creative potential of Lucasfilm and ILM. I quote Obi Wan directly "I can't watch any more!" It desperately lacks a script of any merit, and all along just begs the question - how much would it have cost for Lawrence Kasdan to have saved this? Sith has been handicapped by the very production process should have been it's trademark. So much is done in the green room stages that the acting is pared down because the reference points have to be separately generated in CGI. The timing is awful, the dialogue blunt and clumsy. And, speaking of CGI, Sith is still trumped by being released between a string of Peter Stevens marvels LOTR and Kong. Sorry George, but you just didn't cut it with this one. Spectacular bad timing.
Good moments are few, but the opening sequence is visual chewing gum that doesn't easily loose it's flavour and just for a fleeting moment we have Star Wars of old before us. But by the final "Volcanic" chapters, we truly have descended into the bowels of the Revenge of the S-h-i-t (and no I haven't misspelled the title!). All it needs is for the cast to burst into song and you have the perfect accompaniment for this travesty. And speaking of musicals, the biggest bum note of all. Will you ever be convinced again that the rich voice of Monsieur Earl Jones somehow got grafted on the corpse (I wish) of H. Christiensen.
So can 138,000 of you be wrong ? Well, didn't lil' Luke blow up that great big Death Star? Go on admit it. Its crap !!!