Quite simply the worst big budget movie I've ever seen !!

Rating: 1/10 (21 May 2005)

After episodes 1 and 2 I had no expectations towards this film. But with "Revenge of the Sith" George Lucas has done the impossible: Inspite of a huge budget, incredible special effects and an interesting story he managed to create the worst movie I have ever seen!
I have watched hundreds of movies in my life, including plenty of low quality films, most of which I have managed to enjoy for what they were. While others were ranting about episodes 1 and 2 I found them amusing, although they were light-years away from the charm of episodes 4 to 6 and seemed to be targeted at an audience of six year olds.
But Star Wars III is simply off the scale. It is technically so bad, that it sucks every last bit of life out of the dramatic fall of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
The cutting is horrendous. The way the sequences jump back and forth seems utterly random. Many scenes are so badly paced that it is painfully sad to watch and takes the suspense out of even the most spectacular laser sword fight. You can almost predict the next cut by counting a 4/4 time in your head: "1,2,3,4 / 1,2,3,4 / ..."
I can only describe it by comparison to listening to a drummer who knows only one beat and one tempo. Again and again the scenes are cut in the same unchanging rhythm, killing any emotion the (mostly bad) acting could have conveyed. The beautifully created scenery and space-dwellers who inhabit it are passed over in haste only to rush into the next fighting scene. The film never takes enough time to create an atmosphere or construct a character's motivation. The actors don't even seem to get time to act. Instead of making the viewer discover and understand the emotions of the characters we are hit over the head with blunt dialogues containing just the minimum of information necessary to keep the story from falling apart. To make it worse, the dialogues are written so incredibly wooden that they are utterly unconvincing and the cinematic illusion of the story is frequently broken. (Bertolt Brecht would be proud of you Mr Lucas, if it wasn't done involuntarily...)
Final verdict: "Revenge of the Sith" is so badly made it could nearly be mistaken for a surreal satire. What could have been a great sci-fi feast combined with a capturing tragedy turns out as a big bore. I could only keep myself half-interested in this film by trying to laugh about the incompetent film-making. The last 20 minutes I was just wishing for it to be over. *** 1 out of 10 ***