it's an ending

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2007)

I saw this in the theatre when it came out and wasn't very impressed. It was at least the best of the 3 prequels, but that's not really saying much. But when I saw the high ratings it got here in this website, I thought I might've judged it too harshly and decided to give it a second chance. So I watched it again yesterday. Still boring. Everything I saw in the first two prequels I saw here: weak story and acting, little or no character development and no build up in tension and suspense. There were characters dying left and right. Characters I hardly new or cared about. True, on the plus side, Jar-Jar was left out and Samuel L. Jackson was finally knocked off, but these things happened too little, too late to save this film. Though at times, the special effects were nice to look at, most of the time it seemed like I was watching a cartoon. With the heavy use of CGI and colorful sets and the lack of character development and chemistry, this film probably should've been considered a cartoon.
What really bothered me about this film was that everything tied up too neatly to lead us to the next film. It seemed too convenient that within a span of say a few days or weeks or so that Anakin becomes Vader, his kids are born and sent away, Yoda and Obi-Wan decide to go into exile, the emperor becomes disfigured and takes on his current appearance, etc. The way these events happened it seemed as if they were rushed, as if Lucas was approaching a deadline and needed to tie up a few loose ends and end the story quickly. Like the first two films, this one was written with a heavy hand and without subtlety.
I would've liked to have seen a few more surprises. Maybe I was a little spoiled by the surprises we got original films. But without them, all we would've got was a rehash of what was already revealed to us in the original trilogy, that Anakin becomes Vader, his children are Luke and Leia and their mother dies. This is what we already knew from the original trilogy and we didn't get much more in the prequels. Without good character development and chemistry, this film could've used a few surprises to maintain our interest. Sure it was a bit of a surprise that the push that Anakin needed to turn to the dark side was the promise of saving his wife's life. But that was weak and didn't seem consistent with how evil he was becoming. What surprises would I have added? I'm not sure. Maybe another reason Anakin was attracted to join the emperor: he out-grew Obi-Wan and longed so much for a father figure he never had that he overlooked his evilness. As for how the droids lost their memory, anything but a simple memory wipe.
Oh well, at least it's an ending.