Wasted Potential

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2005)

I honestly do not understand the positive reviews that this movie has been receiving  both here and by professional critics. Yes, Episode III is leaps and bounds ahead of the horrible Episode I and slightly-less-horrible-but-still-really-bad Episode II, but that fact alone does not make it into a good movie. The entire prequel trilogy, but this more episode more than the previous two, represent a superb story that is told horribly.
The entire saga of Anakin's descent to the dark side hinges on his love for Padme, and it is the failure of that love story that dooms the movie itself to failure. The chief complaint I hear about Episode III (and II also) is the wooden acting of Christiansen and Portman, but in all seriousness, could anybody have done much better with the script they were given? To say that Lucas wrote an emotionless script doesn't even begin to describe the ways in which he failed in his writing. It's obvious why Anakin lusts  not loves, but lusts  for Padme, she is beautiful, intelligent, cute, etc. But what does she see in him? What is it about Padme that changes his feelings from lust to actual love? None of that is ever developed, over three two hour movies the romance never reaches the depth of even a simple high school fling. We're told that these two characters love each other, but nothing about the movies actually shows us that.
So, the love on which the entire story rests falls flat on its face. What about the rest of the story? Unfortunately it's just as bad. Right after Anakin helps to kill Mace Windu he slumps over, agonizing over what he has just done. He cries out in fear, pain, terror, anger, and about a dozen other emotions. And then five seconds later he is pledging his undying loyalty to Palpatine, a.k.a. Darth Sidious. He is agreeing that all Jedi must be wiped out. Umm, what? Excuse me, but did I miss something? I understand why he went to stop Palpatine from being arrested, I actually thought the scene where he and Padme were staring at each other across the city and he made his decision was brilliant. But now that he's actually done it, he needs time to figure out what he has done. He needs time to sort himself out. And we don't get that, because that time was wasted on the horrendously over done video game that was the first twenty minutes.
The love that the whole story is based on doesn't work. The transformation itself doesn't work. Now I'll briefly mention other reasons why I thought this movie was terrible: The first is General Grievous. He was supposed to be a menacing, towering, fear and awe-inspiring commander of the droid army. And yet somebody had the bright idea to make him cough and wheeze his way through all his lines? Who came up with that moronic idea? Grievous was almost as annoying as Jar Jar was in Episode I. He wasn't menacing, he wasn't fear-inspiring, he wasn't even mildly dangerous-looking. In fact, I almost laughed when he started wielding four light sabers it looked so comical. Somebody should have told Lucas that giving his bad guy four light-sabers doesn't make him scary.
I think I'll just end here instead of going on and on about the things that disappointed me. Most of you will probably wish death on me after reading negative comments about this movie anyway. The special effects revolution has been both the best thing to ever happen to movies (see Lord of the Rings) and the worst thing to happen to movies (Star Wars prequels). Lucas fell into the trap of using special effects to tell his movie rather than complement his movie, and it showed in his final product. All three prequel movies waste too much time on special effects battle scenes and spend too little time on character and plot development, and then they make up for this by telling us things instead of showing us things. Show, do not tell  the classic words of wisdom when making a movie, and in that important regard Lucas failed.
I've been only critical so far, but I did rate the movie 5/10. It had some fantastic scenes, such as the one I mentioned earlier, and also some of the final duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan (but not the fight between Yoda and Sidious, that was just stupid). McGregor showed he is by far the best actor in all three prequels. And above all else, John Williams wrote a score that I consider to be one of his best ever.
It's just disappointing, horribly disappointing. The movie could have been so much more. Lucas crafted one of the most intriguing stories ever told. It's a shame he did such a poor job actually telling it.