Best of the last three -- not that that's difficult

Rating: 1/10 (20 May 2005)

Spoilers, oh, yes spoilers. Anakin turns to the dark side. Padme dies. The children, Luke and Leia are separated and put up for adoption.
This movie will give you an appreciation for many directors. Watch Lucas misuse Christopher Lee and marvel and the genius of Peter Jackson. See Portman's obvious reading of her lines ("Oh. He. Couldn't. Have. Turned. Against Us!?!") and pine for the way she glowered in "The Professional." Let's face it, frowning with one eye hidden through a cowl is not emoting.
An exception is Ewan MacGregor, who is actually good. He is especially good in the scene in which he is forced to to leave the burned and mutilated Anakin, when goodness and honour would say to finish him off. You can see the moral torture in poor Obi Wan who is forced to choose between what is right and what the director says.
On the other hand, the movie is beautiful and breathtaking in every scene in which there only humans to provide scale against the machines.
Sad, though, is the numbering. If you watch the series numbered in Lucas's revision, then every bit of surprise and shock in the last (first?) three movies is reduced to sad anticlimax. You can even be creeped out by Luke eyeing Leia as it's happening rather than in retrospect. Lucas sucks the life out of his own story, and hasn't the wit to sue himself for it.
This lacks the offensive series of racial and national stereotypes in Episode 1. It broadens the emotional range of peevish, petulant, and priggish that were in Episode 2. So it is easily the best of the last three. But still -- one feels that the Jedi deserve everything they got, as they are stupid and arrogant and blind. It is good to see that Lucas seems to think that democracy (government where kings and queens get together and vote on things) is actually a desirable form of government. But I was looking forward to seeing Anakin behead Jar-Jar as I'd been told might happen, and alas, that does not. (There -- an actual spoiler.)