Pope Yoda and the Revenge of Sooky La-La

Rating: 3/10 (27 May 2005)

I was all prepared to like this movie. I found the other prequels dull but had read all the good reviews of RotS by others in the same boat. So how disappointed was I.
I could whinge about all the let downs, but a lot of people have already done that. So my main points on what I loathed and how Lucas let us all down are as follows:
What exactly did we gain from watching this movie? We all knew Anakin was going to turn to the dark side, and that's basically what happened. Over the course of three films a petulant, sooky, talented kid grew up to think too much of himself, showed off his lack of intelligence and fell for the dark side for no apparent reason. Right, he'd had some dreams about Padme dying. So, he believes the evil guy is going to help him. Maybe believable before he found out Palpatine was the Sith Lord, but afterwards it smacks either of an IQ somewhere in the low teens or Lucas being too lazy and/or preoccupied with CGI to come up with something believable.
However, part of me did not blame Anakin for turning to the dark side when the other option was to be a priest in the thou-shalt-not church of the Jedi. We were seriously wondering if anything wasn't the path to the dark side. I mean, if you went up to Yoda and said "Hey Yoda, let's do lunch!" would he reply with "the path to the dark side lunch is"? In this movie, probably.
Women are generally not portrayed well, portrayed at all, in sci-fi movies. However, in the original Star Wars films, we had the brilliant character of Leia to compensate for all the Y chromosomes flying around. In TPM, Padme seemed to almost fill the void, in AotC she did sporadically, but in RotS she became a spineless sop with no backbone or brain. The one time she expresses her views on the war Anakin gets angry at her so, instead of having an argument or at least sticking up for herself, she goes "Hold me" and chickens out. After Anakin tries to kill her, instead of asking if the bastard's good and dead, she's all "Is Ani OK?".and I seriously wonder if she was wearing a corset under the multitude of pretty clothes that were her only voice in the movie, and if all she did whilst pottering around in that apartment was embroider and sigh, since Lucas assigned her the 19th Century fate of dying from a broken heart. If roles were reversed, Anakin would hardly have died of a broken heart, would he? Nooo, cos he's a man, man.
One potential for drama in this movie, which I was looking forward to, was the hunting down of the Jedi. Lucas should have watched 'Elizabeth' before shooting those scenes, because they lacked even the hint of dramatic tension or suspense.
Basically, what Yoda should have said was "gullibility path to the dark side is" or "mind- boggling naivety to the dark side leads." Because that is the main moral of the story, and all the rest was a load of computer-generated excrement