I watched this again last night. As a stand-alone movie, it might be pretty good. Decent lightsaber battles and some good effects and sound. But as a prequel to Episode IV and the rest of the original trilogy, I have lots of issues with it. Yoda's light saber antics, the role of the wookies, the Emperor's lightening thing (which I didn't like in Empire either), the term "younglings" (redundancy, anyone?), etc. But the big problem is the timeline. Granted I haven't read all the books, but connecting Episodes III and IV with about 20 years elapsing is pretty hard. All the ages work out OK, but many of the comments in IV just don't line up with the clone wars being less than a generation ago and the rise of the empire so fast. The glimpse of the Death Star at the end is cool, but it takes say 25 years to build that one, and only 5ish to build the second? No matter what kind of futuristic techniques they might have, building a moon-sized hunk of metal would take generations. Even collecting the raw materials would take decades.
Anyway, I'll stop ranting about this. For now.
[update:] I had read a long time ago, and recently found, 91 Reasons to Hate Episode III. This is a good write-up, much more involved than anything I could cover. He also does Episode I and Episode II. He also touches on the original trilogy. But there's one quote there that kind of sums up EpIII: "hearing James Earl Jones's voice ask questions about Padme makes my ass ache."
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