A Missed Opportunity

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2005)

As everyone no doubt already knows, Star Wars Ep 3 is the one where we see Anakin Skywalker's descent to becoming Darth Vader (cue evil music), and the Republic's change into the empire. The movie is fitfully successful in tracking these changes, but it is hampered by two main flaws. The first of these is longstanding, but did not prevent the first movie becoming a classic - George Lucas often has a tin ear for dialogue. This leads to some really dire moments (especially in the Jedi Council), but does not, of itself, stop the movie from working.
What did detract more seriously is the weakness for action scene upon action scene. Lucas has a lot of ground to cover in this movie. We have to believe in Anakin's transformation in the face of the revelation of Chancellor Palpatine's identity (which should come as no surprise to movie goers, but does to him) and in the republic's willing acquiescence in Palpatine's constitutional coup. The number and length of the various action (especially lightsaber combat) scenes was, to me at least, so bombastic and time-consuming as to prevent the film from fully meeting the needs of these transformations. I suspect that a few more quiet moments of introspection/dialogue covering the two major transformations would have made the action scenes more effective when they came.
In the end I enjoyed the movie (much better than episode 1 say) but would feel hard put to it to give more than a Luke-warm recommendation of the movie to people who do not belong to the gung ho fan club.