Wow...its Incredibly Mediocre!

Rating: 5/10 (27 May 2005)

While I realize there is little I can say that has not already been said and that no matter how strong an opinion I do voice it will not change the minds of the legions of "Star Wars" fans, but a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.
There are two things a movie, or virtually any form of entertainment, needs to be successful: a good story and credible, interesting characters. George Lucas was literally handed these things on a silver platter and he utterly blew it.
You know a film is off to a bad start when the director has to hire a "dialect coach" because he knows he will not be available to direct his actors much himself. It shows. While Lucas may have had a grand vision for his epic, it seemed only to extend to the way his world should look. While the special effects are exceptional, they are not anything new and are way overused. A movie shouldn't be about CGI characters and big, flashy explosions: those are added to enhance a movie, but because the movie consisted of almost nothing but CGI characters and big, flashy explosions, all the fight scenes just stayed flat and uninteresting.
Though RotS did have a much better plot structure than the previous two movies (ie it had a plot structure at all) it just felt forced. Anakin's conversion to the dark side is simply not credible and comes about a scene after it should. There was just no buildup. Lucas wasted the entirety of Episode II when he could have been showing at lot more of Anakin's transition to the dark side. The series would have been much better off if he had taken the story and in Episode III and split it between AotC and RotS. There are just too many loose ends to tie up and Lucas seems more preoccupied with making us go "OOOh and AAAAh" than making sense. The last 15 minutes are flurry of references to the original trilogy:
* Chewie is a Wookie military leader....Okay, um how does he end up as the co-captain on a
two-bit smuggling operation?
* The first time we see Uncle Owen, he is dramatically posed a la Mark Hamill in that famous moment with the double suns in "A New Hope"
* Senator Organa making a point to erase C3PO's memory so what he says in "A New Hope" makes sense. (Why would they keep old droids around for 20 years anyway?)
* A ridiculous conversation between Obi-Wan and Yoda along the lines of:
Y: BTW, your dead former master has found a way to communicate from the "dead" side of the force.
O: Thats great, but there's only two minutes of movie left, why are you telling me this now?
Y: So the audience will understand how you can still give Luke all your Jedi wisdom after you're dead in the next three movies.
O: Oooooh, OK then
There are some good points to the movie: Ewan McGreggor as Obi-Wan was uncannily like Alec Guinness and Senator Palpatine was just great, evil fun. But a few good performances can't keep this flat mish mash of a movie from being the big bloated piece of Hollywood wizardry that it is.