How Disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (30 May 2005)

The last two Star Wars movies sucked dead fish with a straw. (That's a film criticism term.) I had high hopes for this one.
Well, it dutifully linked up all the plot threads, explaining all that would happen later. And if you like fight scenes amid lava flows, you'd love this movie. If you rate movies by the size of the ammunition budget, you'll like this movie.
But there wasn't a bit of wit or character. Aside from the line about "So this is how democracy ends," Padme spends the whole movie whimpering and crying, so much that you just want to slap her out of it. For a plot that has such potential majesty and grandeur, its driving force is Anakin's sustained adolescent sulk; this may make sense for those who are still adolescent. Yoda has a momentary flash of substance when he confronts Palpatine but then that, too, is gone on the wind before it's even there. Poor Ewan McGregor labors manfully as Obi-Wan but doesn't have lines to work with and Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu could have been replaced by a wooden cigar store Indian for greater dramatic effect.
Millions for special effects and they got the script at a 99 cent store. There was a rumor in the press that Lucas brought in Tom Stoppard as an uncredited script doctor on this one. If he had, the patient died. But it's an easy rumor to refute: the only thing in common between this script and Stoppard's work is that both contain vowels. I once saw an interview where Lucas said he doesn't enjoy script writing. I believe it; this one is as if it were squeezed into being through a non-existent birth canal.