Pretty good-not great but a worthy finale to series.

Rating: 7/10 (22 May 2005)

I enjoyed this quite a lot. Sure you have the bugaboos from the first two prequel movies--some bad stretches of dull talky scenes, klunky dialog and acting that makes you roll your eyes. But this time-King Jorge Lucas managed to avoid letting that overwhelm the rest of the film and thus we got a good, bona fide decent movie Star Wars movie here.
Ian McDiarmid as the Evil Emperor is very good. So is Ewan MacGregor as Kenobi. I have felt that if Lucas could have coaxed similar performances from either Portman or Jackson the prequels would have been that much better, but oh well....Christensen seems to be a block of wood and has an odd personality for Vader, ya know? Petulant and comes off as a blue blooded snotty youth more than anything else. Somehow or other though you buy into his transformation into Darth Vader, especially as he's so easily maneuvered by Palpatine.
Great scenes here-the 'Order 66' sequences in their Temple, the jedis being fragged all over, the younglings included, the Wookie planet, the lizard, the volcano duel....over and over. You wanna see More if anything of these things, not less.
I liked the great vaunted Duel between Kenobi and Vader too, it was well handled and the magma pit from hell far out-did anything we had imagined back in the day.
Kudos to Lucas for getting the plot working in synch w/ the rest of the film--everyone seemed to care about what they were doing here, and it does show. Some heart puts this kinda thing over in a big way.
Final shot of the twin sunset is great too.
***1/2 outta ****, it does it's job very well.