The least bad of the worst

Rating: 3/10 (12 March 2010)

After suffering through episode I and II, this movie sadly holds no surprises for me. I start watching, and after the nowadays apparently mandatory game hype sequence, once again I'm thrown straight into a scene I know nearly squat about. Before I've even had a chance to let my own fantasy make up for the missing bits, the screen starts filling up with all kinds of crap and before I know it, I'm suddenly in the middle of some sort of action. Don't really know why – don't really know what these people have done to get to where they are, but everything's moving fast and the not-so-special-anymore effects and comic relief count have already hit a six digit number, so there's really no time to try to figure it out either. Then there are some fights, count Dooku dies and a big space ship crashes, and after that, the story finally reconnects to one of the threads left hanging at the end of episode II. Although that just means that Anakin Skywalker meets up with wife Padmé Amidala and finds out that she's pregnant.
Senator Palpatine, a.k.a. Darth Sidious, starts really working hard to manipulate Anakin (in a way so obvious they could probably see it from space) and Anakin's just the kind of gullible idiot to fall for it – despite being a very intuitive Jedi. The rest of the Jedi order however seem to be really suspicious of their young colleague, so they decide to monitor him and look into why he's so popular with senator Palpatine. Only they don't; they do absolutely nothing. In the meantime, the biggest evil conspiracy in history is taking place right under their hundreds of Force guided, future-seeing noses. (One Sith is able to fool hundreds of Jedi, but the dark side isn't stronger, huh?)
After that, everything goes downhill, with the slaughter of Jedi, the rise of the Empire and the rapidly growing insanity, I guess of Anakin. Darth Sidious is exposed for what he is, and Yoda sets out to destroy him. During their fight, he falls down a couple of meters, but since the Jedi can jump very high, very fast he gets back up again and finishes what he started, since Jedi know no fear (path to the dark side, remember?). No, wait he gives up and runs for it. And here I thought killing the Sith should be a very good reason to risk your life
In the mean time, Obi-Wan is busy fighting Anakin during an endless, passionless, but very well choreographed encounter, that anti-climatically ends with him chopping off his pupil's legs and remaining arm.
"You were supposed to bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!" he cries, before leaving his old friend burning and melting on a gravelly hillside.
I might be wrong, but if you were to hand me one Sith and a whole bunch of Jedi, and then tell me to balance them up, logically I'd have to add a whole bunch of Sith, or decimate the number of Jedi to one. Balance is when the dark side and the good side are equally strong, right – or mutually powerful forces? Well, now we have two remaining Jedi, and two remaining Sith. I'd say it's nicely balanced. Was I really the only one who came to this conclusion when Qui-Gon started talking about "bringing balance to the Force"? Guess the Jedi training didn't include math or logic If I'm wrong, then please explain in what way the Force was NOT in balance. Don't reference any kind of book, though, because if you have to write books to give sense to a movie, the movie is fundamentally lacking.
And the ending: Luke and Leia are born, Darth Vader enters the stage, Padmé dies, Yoda hides, and the ground is laid for the only three Star Wars movies actually worthy of remembrance. I might even go so far as to say: The only three Star Wars movies worthy of watching.