Revenge of the Sith.

Spoilers ahead, so watch out.

I'm not linking to the Star Wars website because I don't think that George Lucas needs any more free advertising.  I went to the grocery store to get snacks for my book group and I had to actively LOOK for items that didn't have Star Wars stuff on them.  (So we ended up with a totally weird combination, but they're used to that at this point).

The good news:  It was better than the last two.  Significantly better.  The beginning was wonderful--it was a total throwback to the first (original, not Episode 1) Star Wars, and it was fun, fun, fun.  (The bits with R2 were especially fun).  Yoda fights a lot, and Tarzan yell included, the Wookie fighting was cool.

The bad news:  Here's the thing.  I've thought about this a lot, and Josh and I talked about it for ages after the movie:  I think that George Lucas is a big-picture kind of guy.  As in, he's crap at details.  There were so many plot/character issues that it was kind of ridiculous.  I'm sorry, but there is no way in hell that Obi-Wan Kenobi would have left Anakin Skywalker to die on that stupid lava planet.  He would have killed him.  It wouldn't have been against the Jedi code to do it.  It would have been a mercy killing.  And I don't think that the I-love-him-too-much-to-kill-him thing flies here.  If you love the guy so much, you don't leave him to burn to death on a rock after you've just cut off three of his limbs.

While I'm on the lava planet...  I'm not even going to go into the totally heavy-handed symbolic hell thing.  But the fight scene was ridiculous.  If it had been set anywhere else, it would have been great.  But riding little metal things down a lava river, less than a foot away from the lava?  No.  YOU WOULD CATCH ON FIRE.

Okay.  Jedi are supposed to be pretty good at sensing things, right?  So nobody (save Yoda, of course, since he's the best ever) sensed an ambush coming?  NO ONE EXCEPT YODA?  And, what?  The stormtroopers have no issue with this?  Come on.  When did they come up with a secret order to wipe out all of the Jedi?  Palpatine hasn't been in power for long.  Not one single guy says, "Hey, wait a minute.  This is kind of uncool"?  I don't buy it.

And Anakin didn't notice the sketchy look that passed between Dooku and Palpatine?  How oblivious is the guy supposed to be? 

Okay.  Padme finds out that Anakin slaughtered a bunch of kids.  Anyone with an ounce of sense probably wouldn't haul their pregnant self across the galaxy to the lava planet to confront the guy.  Those who did go to confront him probably wouldn't ask him to go away together.  But she did. 

That part might have worked if Natalie Portman and Hayden "couldn't act his way out of a paper bag" Christensen had a modicum of chemistry.  But they didn't.  If anything, they had negative chemistry.  Which is a problem, seeing as how they're supposed to be part of this big epic love story.  As I'd seen Episode Two, I expected crappy acting from Hayden Christiensen.  But I've seen Natalie Portman act well in other movies, so I was a little amazed to see how incredibly bad she was--"You're... breaking... my... ... heart."  Granted, the script was atrocious, but still.

But, really, it was a lot of fun.  And WAY better than the last two.