Spoiler warning: None here, or below, but there will be lots of them in the final discussion of the plot. You will be warned before you scroll through it by accident, though.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 2
Action: 7
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 4
Overall: 4

As you can see, my scores are very extreme. SW3 is a gorgeous movie with beautiful special effects and a lot of interesting action scenes. They all had big logical holes in them, which is why I couldn't score them higher, and even my 8 is pretty generous; Lucas is lucky I like lizards so much.  But the acting and script were so horrible that I hardly knew how to react to some of the stuff onscreen. People, the women around me particularly, were literally groaning out loud at almost every bit of love dialogue between Padme and Anakin; it was that cheesy. So with half my scores 2 or 3, and half 8, do I average it out or what?

Sometimes, such as with Constantine, one or two aspects of a film work so well for me that I score the whole thing a lot higher than it deserves to be scored, while admitting that my score is almost entirely due to one category working super-well. With Episode III, nothing bad was so horrible that it ruined the film, and nothing good was great enough to overcome the general mediocrity. So I'm splitting the difference on the low side, while wishing I felt strongly enough to take a stand in one direction or the other.

My biggest complaint is a simple one; I was bored. I didn't care about the characters, and thanks to Episode 4-6 I knew just how this one was going to end, so I just kept sighing through one long and pointless plot-related scene after another, wishing the movie were 45 minutes shorter. I knew where the "plot twists" were going, and the film on the screen wasn't good enough to be enjoyable of itself, so I just wanted them to cut to the chase, even though the chases weren't really any good either. It was an odd sensation; lots of times with bad movies I keep watching to see how they'll turn out, even though I don't really care. This time I knew how it would turn out, and I didn't care, but I kept watching anyway. Because I wanted to see how it was going to get to how I knew it was going to turn out? 

As always, I wonder how this movie would work for someone who didn't know about Episodes 4-6. I felt zero suspense since I knew Obi Wan would live on as a hermit on Tatooine, Yoda would end up Dagobah, Anakin would get burned and mangled and turn into fetish-suited Darth Vader, Padme would leave Anakin and give birth to a boy and a girl he never knew he had, etc. So the plot twists were straight lines, and the story-related suspense was non existent. Would I have been on the edge of my seat if I hadn't known though? Would the characters have been more interesting and the plot involving? I don't think so, since the writing was so cheesy, but there's really no way to say for sure. I've seen other reviewers say that the movie hardly made sense and wouldn't have been comprehensible for someone who didn't know all about the Star Wars series and mythos, and maybe they're right; I can't say for sure.

Here's some more detail about the individual score categories, with the spoiler-filled plot discussion below them.

Script/Story: 3
In most movies this would be the weakest link, but thanks to the acting and performances the script/story was only the second worst thing in this film. The plot is ridiculous, and there are a lot of logical holes in it, but I'll comment on the spoiler stuff below.  Suffice to say that the less you know, especially about medicine or science, the better the story will work for you.

A lot of this aspect sucking was due to me knowing how the movie was going to end, though. That's a problem, since I don't really know what Lucas could have done to fix it. He couldn't wind things up and then have an epilogue in which major events occurred, and he can't make us all forget how Episode 4 opens. So when there's a pair of major duels taking place near the end of the film, and we know that all four individuals in the fights are going to live at least another twenty years... where's the excitement? There are two fights, and they're both going to be draws. Real edge of your seat action there.

The single worst script element though, was something completely unnecessary. The ham-handed political analogies. Even though I agreed, more or less, with the factual basis for the sentiments, they were inserted in such a blunt and thudding fashion that it was groaningly obvious what Lucas was after. The Sith are basically depicted as the Bush Administration, as they lie their way into a war with the Jedi as a power grab, and then use the war as an excuse to roll back liberties at home and give themselves more absolute power. Best of all, they do it all by playing the victims, and therefore get the ignorant sheep in the senate to go along with it. There's no extended analogy to the media, since as far as the film imagines, there is no such thing as a media. It's not really necessary anyway though, since there's also no TV or Internet or general public to communicate news items to. Information travels somehow, since people are forever just hearing about something, but how we never see.

The overall political story isn't a bad one; after all, that's how numerous tyrants have come to power throughout history. Make the people believe there is a danger and that you are their only hope to stay safe, and they'll give you anything you want and only begin to regret it once they can't get their freedom back. What made it so annoying in the film was the way Lucas awkwardly and very obviously made the Emperor and Anakin represent Bush, to the point of giving them near-exact quotes of various things Bush has said since he started stumping for the Iraqi War. There are several lines to the effect of "Only a Sith sees things in absolutes of good and evil." paraphrasing Bush's "good vs. evil" gross simplifications, and the worst one when Anakin says something like, "You're either with us, or... opposing us!"

I don't remember the exact words, but it's something like that and he says it very slowly, so by the time he's up halfway through, everyone in the audience is mentally filling in "against us." Anakin doesn't actually say that, which is jarring, but even with the slight rewording it's overwhelmingly obvious that Lucas was using the "with us or against us" line, famously used by Bush in various "we're fightin' terr'ists." speeches, to make it even more obvious that the bad guys are acting just like Bush did.

Acting/Casting: 2
Uniformly atrocious. Some reviews have said that Chancellor Palpatine was good, and he wasn't awful, but that role was every old insidious villain in the history of cinema. Lurking, hideous, malevolent, etc. Nosferatu with a glowing sword and sly manner.  Other than that, the best I've heard said about the other actors was that they escaped with their dignity. The neutral scenes are okay; people talk in weirdly-stilted ways, with absurd dialogue, but when they're simply chatting it's not embarrassing. When there's emotion though, especially love, it's physical painful.

I had Malaya on my left, another friend beside her, and a third woman on my right, and all three were groaning out loud at every bit of Anakin's earnest dialogue to Padme. It was that overdone and melodramatic. Sappy romance for women is like a car chase for men; it's goddamned hard to ruin it for the target audience. So when there's romantic dialogue that's so fake and absurd that women can't enjoy it on some level, that's an achievement. Lucas should be congratulated. Or something.

Action: 7
This score is debatable, since it's very much quantity over quality. There's action galore, but I was never very excited by any of it since I never cared about the characters involved in the action. Worse yet, I knew how most of the duels and battles were going to turn out, at least in terms of who was definitely not going to die. I suppose it's possible to have exciting action scenes that the audience knows the outcome of in advance; hell, they did it in all three Lord of the Rings movies, but whatever the trick of it is, Lucas doesn't possess it.

Making the action worse is the fact that most of it is ridiculous. The special effects in the space battles are great, but what happens is always totally stupid. Two little Jedi fighters fly across an entire gigantic battle with thousands of lasers shot at them, none of which hit. When they do get hit, it's by ineffectual little robots that start drilling holes in their wings. Meanwhile, the Jedi are protected by very thin glass cockpits that could be broken at any time, and they're not wearing space suits or protective helmets of any kind. There's also the series-long issue of space planes flying as though they're in an atmosphere; banking and such, and it's carried to a ridiculous extreme in the early space battle in SW3, when several things actually blow backwards off of a ship, as though being buffeted by the wind.

Lightsabers have really run their course too, I think. They were cool back in the early movies, when they were seen very sparingly, and they were still sort of cool in SW1 and even SW2 when we saw real Jedi using them as everyday weapons.  By now though the novelty has worn off, and we expect intelligent use of them, or else competent dueling techniques. Maybe it was ruined for me by my ongoing martial arts training, where I use and see others use sticks and swords all the time, but it's so obvious to me that no one in the films has any sword-fighting ability, and just the fact that they've got lots of speeded up camera tricks and glowing blades isn't enough to trick me into thinking they're doing any real fighting. The most grievously fake scene (pun intended) is a fight between one Jedi and an opponent with four light sabers, in which any even slightly-intelligent use of the four-weapons would have resulted in diced Jedi. The only way to fight one against two weapons, much less four, is to be faster and to move around more so they can't face straight at you and hit with all their weapons at once. If you just stand still and wave, you can't beat multiple weapons with the same reach as yours, especially when they're lightsabers and one touch is deadly and the fact that you can go two-handed and swing much harder isn't an advantage in just overpowering the enemy. 

There's also a movie-long running comic element with R2D2 doing cool things; holding cell phones, zapping monsters, leaping out of ship wings, flying with a rocket pack, squirting oil in a squid-like attack, and so on. All of which would be cool if you'd only seen SW1-3, but since we've all seen SW4-6 where R2 can't even get over a speedbump, it's just impossible to get into his super clever robot abilities now.  The whole droid subject has the same problem, where there are super-nimble and intelligent and powerful robots in SW1-3, and somehow 20 years later in SW4 they're rickety, slow, clumsy, fragile hunks of junk.  And of course we all know that's because Lucas could only go with existing model technology back in 1977, and it would be ridiculous and boring if the robots in the new movies were as limited as the ones in the original trilogy, but I still felt my credulity straining every time a robot leaped and ran and fought with a lightsaber, and then the movie cut to C3PO tottering around and struggling to get up a stair.

Humor: NA
There are things that attempt to be jokes, but since none of them are every intentionally funny, I'm going to be merciful and not rate this one, rather than giving it the 1 or 2 that it deserves.

Horror: NA
I guess parts would be scary to a child, but eh...

Eye Candy: 8
This is the highest score, and I'm less sure of it with every passing thought. There are many beautiful things in the film, 99% of them computer generated, but the overall design aesthetic is lame. It's been pointed out repeatedly, but the SW1 and 2 worlds were so clean and pretty and plastic that they never looked lived-in. I prefer the grungy, rusted and worn out, space trash look of Blade Runner and Aliens to pristine clean worlds like the one seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I'm biased against Lucas' "please don't litter" SW universe. That being said, must every room look like something from a Better Homes and Gardens photo shoot? Couldn't someone have a few dirty dishes out, or soda cans on their table, or posters tacked on the walls? You never see any real touches of life like that; just one immaculate designer showplace after another.

Fun Factor: 4
Since I was bored and didn't think much of the action sequences, my score isn't very high. If you like the action stuff and can tolerate the plot, then your score on this one would be much higher. 

Replayability: 4
You'd probably get inured to the terrible acting and dialogue once you sat through it a few times. I don't know if the plot would ever become interesting, or the action exciting, but I suppose anything's possible.

Overall: 4

I was going to give this a 5, but then I looked and saw 3s for Episode I and II, and knew this one wasn't that much better. So then I looked on my reviews page and checked out some of the 4.5ish scores. Movies don't all compare directly across the board, but I should have some sort of consistency on overall scores, right? The first 4.5 listed, thanks to alphabetical sorting, is Blade 2, and while that's not a good movie, it's a hell of a lot more watchable than Episode III.  King Arthur was about equally boring, though a lot less dumb, but The Rock and Tomb Raider II were both definitely better than this film, so I settled on a 4 score.

Spoilers follow!

Spoilers follow!

¤ Most of my complaints about the dumb lack of physical reality from my Episode 2 review apply to this film as well, so I'm going to talk about new stuff, rather than again belaboring issues like: every planet having a breathable atmosphere, even if it's nothing but molten rock, or the slow firing and terrible accuracy of laser pistols, or the lack of explosives or bombs, or the ridiculous "run straight at them while yelling" battle tactics, or the way that no one ever gets tired from any amount of physical activity, or the totally inconsistent usage of telekinesis by Jedi, or the amazing way radio waves can travel across millions of light years in about 5 seconds.  I will talk about some other physical oddities, though.

¤ Where do all of the bodies and broken ships land? The movie opens with a huge and confusingly-pointless space battle over the planet of Coruscant, during which ships are being blasted to bits every few seconds, and huge battle cruisers are crashing or nearly crashing into the planet. When one huge ship eventually does go down, shedding a rear section that had to be half the size of a small city while the front half keeps flying and manages to crash land on a landing strip, that scene just ends. Putting aside the fact that it was a space ship, not heat shielded or meant for atmospheric reentry, and that it had no stabilizers of any sort to keep it upright, where did the rear half of it go? It was like half the size of a small city; when it landed it was going to go off like a mountain falling to earth, with near-dinosaur killing force, yet there was never any mention of that at all. Besides that big one, what about all of the little ships that were constantly crashing and falling down?  Later in the film there are numerous windows broken on skyscrapers and bodies hurled out through them. Where does the broken glass land? Where do the falling bodies go? I mean someone's living down there.

The consistent reality of SW3 reminded me of the freeway chase scene in Matrix 2, though that scene had 50x more excitement than anything in all three of the SW prequels put together. But the similarity comes in from the freeway chase having one gigantic pile up after another, as dozens of cars crashed behind the Twins and the Agents who were chasing Morpheus and Trinity and the Keymaker. Yet the cars kept coming behind them, and when they changed direction traffic was still flowing smoothly, as though the crashes from 2 minutes ago were in some alternate universe.

¤ Why the hell do the robots talk to each other, or even to themselves, and in English, no less? I thought the scene early in the film, where the two big muscular robots were looking around the two crash-landed and abandoned Jedi fighters in the ship's hangar, was one of the silliest things in the film. Not only were the robots very stupid and slow and apparently lacking in any ability to interface with the ship's security system, they even muttered to themselves in English. They obviously do that for the sake of the audience, but it's just so silly to have all the enemy droids doing dumb things at all times.

As for R2, even aside from his rocket pack and all the other cool peripherals that have been stripped away 20 years later in SW4, why doesn't he have some more practical features?  Like an internal cell phone tuned to the com frequency of his master's cell phone? It's absurd that he has to physically hold a walkie talkie to take orders from Obi Wan; orders that can be overheard by stupid snooping guardbots. Also, how about a speech chip, rather than some sort of Commodore 64 synthesizer for his sound effects? Why can C3PO talk every language ever, while R2 can't do more than beep and whistle? It's like the old question about Disney characters Goofy and Pluto. They're both dogs, apparently, and yet one is a quadruped who barks, and the other is a biped who wears clothing and speaks English. WTF? Is R2 from a lower caste and is therefore denied human speech, or what?

Also, why is there just one of every robot? I mean R2 is clearly the best of his type, so why don't they copy out his memory or command circuits or whatever, and put those into dozens of more R2s? There would be a backup if/when he got destroyed, after all.  I had the same question about the enemy robots, including the cape-wearing Grievous; much hay was made about him being an evil enemy leader with apparently no second in command, so that if he was killed the entire droid army would collapse. I kept wondering why he wouldn't just download his memory into a bunch of other robots to carry on if he were destroyed. Apparently he was some sort of weird cyborg though, so that was one question answered, at least.

¤ What's up with the flight times? If it's really so easy to zoom across the entire galaxy in just a few hours, Star Wars is a far smaller world than I expected. Why does it take so long to find rebel bases if the Empire could get a ship to every system in six hours? The SWIII script makes the various far-flung Jedi missions sound like remote campaigns, but if they can fly all the way there and back in less than a day, and magically communicate all the time what's the big deal?  Why not send all the Jedi to each battle, to be sure it's won, if it doesn't take more than a moment to fly them all to the next fight, or back to home base.

I'd been thinking and sort of hoping that the flights were taking at least a few days that we weren't seeing, but then after the last pair of battles the Emperor zooms all the way to the lava planet in like an hour, and arrives in time to save Vader for insertion into his shiny new Gimp suit. 

¤ Speaking of lava, every movie does this, but it's silly to pretend the stuff is only hot if you actually fall into it. There is no way two men could stand just feet above endless flowing rivers of lava and not burst into flames. Just a campfire or oven is hot from several feet away, and those things are a couple of thousand degrees cooler than molten stone.

I'd comment more on that lava battle scene, especially the ending and Obi Wan's utterly-inexplicable mention of having "higher ground." but I don't even know where to begin. Why in the hell did Anakin want to leap right up over his head, when the rock bar Obi Wan was standing on went a long way in either direction, and Anakin was riding a hover platform that could move up or down the river, or even straight up and over Obi Wan on land, I'd think. Why didn't either guy ever bother to use any telekinesis when they were dueling on narrow platforms and fighting while zooming along over lava. You've only got to make your opponent slip and that's that. 

¤ The biggest stupidity in the plot was Anakin's motivation to turn evil.  I can see him going evil; he was pretty rebellious and scared by his horrible early life and the death of his mother and the Sand People massacre he perpetrated and was not punished for, but his entire worry is that his wife might die in childbirth, and he's mostly motivated by the older Jedi treating him like the hot-headed kid he is. First of all, what's up with the medical equipment and technology? They can graft on new arms and legs that work perfectly, but they can't keep a woman alive during child birth? True, they hardly even seemed to try, but shouldn't Anakin be most concerned about her having babies in a good hospital? He's a Jedi, you're telling me he couldn't order a C-section done a little early, just to be sure his wife would survive the birth?

¤ The whole "why can't Anakin or the other Jedi sense two life forces in Padme's belly when both are super-strong in The Force" question is a tempting one to delve into as well. No, The Force isn't an ultrasound, and there's no excuse for Padme not to have gone to get some prenatal care, but Yoda and Obi Wan can sense dying Jedi across the entire galaxy in real time, and neither can sense Luke and Leia growing right in front of them?

Another minor detail that stuck in our craws was when Padme woke up after Anakin had his nightmare... and she was still wearing the absurd maternity dress. George, no woman, especially a pregnant woman who can't get comfortable, is ever going to sleep in a satin gown covered in strands of pearls and decorated with a huge broach thingie on the chest. It's amazing that they can spend $150m and all that compute time, yet no one checks and fixes minor mistakes like these. 

I should have more sympathy, given my own recently-blogged about issues thinking up good fantasy novel names, but it's hard to view a list of names and not laugh when there are examples like, Senator Orn Free Taa, Aayla Securaj, and the Naberrie family, including Ruwee, Jobal, Sola, Ryoo, and Pooja Naberrie. The ones that really set my teeth on edge though are the "adjective with one letter changed" names that totally break the mood. Names like Darth Sidious, Count Grievous, and Chancellor Palpatine just leap off the screen at me, and I automatically think Darth Insidious, and Chancellor Palpitations. Hell, they didn't even tweak the spelling of Grievous to turn it from an adjective that means "causing or characterized by severe pain, suffering, or sorrow." Subtle!

I'm left wondering why. The frequently- silly names for major characters is a weird choice, but it's sort of consistent with the rest of the series. After all, objectively speaking, "Han Solo" sounds like a euphemism for masturbation, and "Luke Skywalker" is a simply ridiculous name. They might not quite equal "Pooja Naberrie" for absurdity, but they're not far off. But what's the point in taking sinister-sounding adjectives and tweaking them very slightly to make them into bad guy names? The real words are so obviously still there that it's distracting to adults with the vocabulary to know the words, and I can't see what the point of it is to children who don't yet know the words. It's like naming characters "Sir Coprolytt" or "Dame Fellatia" and then expecting people to take them seriously and not think about what their misspelled names actually mean.

None of the Sith ever do anything different than the Jedi, besides the Emperor with his lighting fingers, and that's not all that effective, really. They don't appear to have any special lightsaber tricks though, so what's the big difference? And what's so evil about studying the Dark Side? The Emperor gives Anakin a speech about how it's just dark to the light, and yin to the yang, and so on, and he points out, sensibly, that no one can ever master The Force without studying both sides of it. What's so radical about that, especially when that advice is contrasted to Yoda's worthless, "You must work to feel nothing and let go of those you care about." speech? Dabbling in the Dark Side sounds a whole lot more useful than going exclusively with the Light, eh? So it's about drawing strength from emotions, rather than from contemplating nothingness; why not do both?

Maybe the various SW books go into far more detail about why the dark side is bad, but from what we've seen in the movie it's just forbidden fruit and something the Jedi stay way from out of superstition.