Utter, pointless waste of time, money, the universe

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2005)

Bottom line: George Lucas can't direct, he can't write, and apparently he can't hire a decent casting director or a high-def-video-cinematographer who can keep Natalie Portman from looking like a middle-aged Hispanic man, either.
I suppose it's my own damn fault for failing to learn after the last Harry Chamberpot movie that when the media starts hyping a sequel as a big improvement on the $150 million pieces of crap that preceded it, they're merely trying to protect the parent corporation's investment. Relative improvement is still within the context of born and bred crap.
The story is tiresome and unaffecting; taken as backstory, Darth Vader's evil personality and scarred body made him an impressive, relatively complex villain by comic book standards, but with his unhappy childhood and adolescence spread out in realistic detail over three films, it's as if Wagner had written three operas explaining what drove Colonel Klink to become a Nazi. Basically Lucas seems to want to make Godfather II (it is I, Francis C., who am the master now) and seems clueless that a comic book universe is not dimensional enough for that kind of story and character development. Of course, the fact that he totally pulls his punches and Annakin/Vader is a nice boy who is fooled into becoming a psycho killer by bad old Palpatine only makes his story that much weaker. It's as if Raging Bull ended with a reconciliation scene in which Jake LaMotta explained to his brother that being a world class jerk was just his way of showing that he loved him.
The action scenes are so busy you can rarely even spot what it is that's going on, and even when you can, they reveal nothing, say nothing about character, amount to nothing. More than once we cut to some CGI marvel and I had no idea who or even what planet we were looking at. I guess the reason he called him Annakin Skywalker is because calling him Curtiz Skywalker would be such a blasphemous joke.
However, in the interest of helping Fox and Lucas toward the extremely unlikely goal of recovering their investment in something so patently awful, I submit the following possible blurbs for the newspaper ads:
"ALONE IN THIS CAST, EWAN MACGREGOR ALMOST MANAGES TO GIVE A PERFORMANCE!"
"AMONG HIGH-NUMBERED SEQUELS WITH CHRISTOPHER LEE, EASILY OUTSHINES Dracula A.D. 1972 AND POLICE ACADEMY V: MISSION TO MOSCOW!"
"IAN MACDIARMID GIVES THE BEST CAMPY OLD QUEEN PERFORMANCE SINCE Micheal MACLIAMMOIR AND HILTON EDWARDS IN WELLES' 'FILMING OTHELLO'!"