A fitting end to an awful trilogy...

Rating: 1/10 (19 January 2006)

And so we arrive at the end of Star Wars episodes one to three, a scornful and exploitative six to nine hour merchandising marathon the likes of which we will be lucky to never see again.
The bitterness of the above statement says a great deal about how betrayed I feel by George Lucas and his team, most specifically Rick McCallum, whose sound bites really brought home the cynicism with which the Star Wars prequels were made. My 'favourite' will forever be: 'The Phantom Menace succeeded as a film,' followed closely by: 'Jar Jar Binks did his job as a character.' I may have misquoted him a little but the gist of his perspective was quite clear.
Needless to say I did not like this movie. There are many reasons, some of which stem from the film itself and others from the trilogy as a whole. On the former side: this film is too long, too frenetic, has appalling blending of CGI with real people, lacks any decent acting, boasts a truly diabolical script, is without any sense of cohesion, offers some stunningly bad explanations for certain key events and is fairly incompatible with the original trilogy... and that's just off the bat.
In terms of the entire trilogy the problems with the whole are legion and not dissimilar to the list above. The script, acting, CGI, characters, cohesion, incompatibility and preposterous ideas inflicted on us, the paying audience, were just one insult after another. However, most diabolical of all must be the Star Wars marketing and merchandising.
The original Star Wars was never expected to make any money nor even to succeed. When it did its creator gained a lot of cash, especially because Fox gave up all the merchandising rights. Lucas subsequently exploited our love of the films in a way second only to Disney for sheer cynicism, though the damage was initially contained due to his minimal involvement in Empire and Jedi. This can best be summed up as follows: in recent years the House of Mouse have given us films like Jungle Book 2. George Lucas gave us the Star Wars prequels.
From the off it seemed like these films were only made to make money. There was little sense of love or, more importantly, pride in them at all. Everything was up for grabs... from child friendly characters to the cool toys on offer that any Star Wars fan instantly wanted to own. Story and other minor details were swept under the carpet in favour of situations which put young dollars in close proximity to expensive products.
For us, the fans of the original trilogy, it was one long, poisonous screeching of greedy fingernails along the blackboards of our souls. We desperately wanted a trilogy that had all the warmth, love, affection, sass and inspiration of the original. Instead all we got was a giant catalogue for Star Wars products, games and other tie ins.
Revenge of the Sith is just as guilty as the rest of them. In between chaotic space battles, touchy feely lightsabre fights, cackling bad guys and monotonous good ones, there is a constant bombardment of purchasable items. See a computer generated Yoda take on a computer enhanced Palpatine... and buy their weapons, clothes, prosthetics, voice boxes, hats, shoes, belts, spacecraft, lunch boxes, breakfast cereals, yo-yo's, boomerangs, inflatable castles, action figures and everything else. That's just two characters and one tenth of the stuff available to each of them.
For those of you who rightly say that this review fails to offer any explanation as to why I think the films are so bad I must admit that I am guilty, breaking one of my own rules for this website. However, the myriad of problems with ROTS and the other prequels are too much to discuss without settling down for several hours.
I had huge hopes for this film... and Attack of the Clones... and most of all for the Phantom Menace, having been assaulted by such a barrage of advertising and such like that said 'YES! WE FINALLY HAVE A DECENT NEW STAR WARS FILM!' Unfortunately, like all the rest of them, that hope has soured into the bitterest of disappointments and has left me hoping that, come the new Star Wars TV series, I simply won't be in a position to see them and further add to my disillusionment.