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The big battle at the climax of this was so poorly-designed. There was no build-up, we're just taken from the colliseum and dropped into this war that's in progress, without a chance to get our bearings. It's just two groups blasting away at each other, with no clear goal so the audience has no stake in what's happening.

It reminded me of the Monty Python sketch "the Batley Townswomen's Guild's re-enactment of 'The Battle of Pearl Harbor.'  

kinggirlfriend,

That's really saying it all. The Yoda thing was cool for the shot where he arms himself, and then it's just silly. How this guy who has to limp around with a cane can be suddenly bouncing around like a Tasmanian Devil with a gallon of Red Bull in him is beyond me.

Lucas and his fans keep saying he "had" to do this or that because it was "in the original story." That's such a cop-out. These movies aren't based on the Bible, but on an outline or scripts he wrote years ago, most of it locked away in his office or somewhere. He could have laid out 90% of this stuff in a few scenes, or made a dozen movies on the same material--he isn't bound by anything but his own choices when it comes to dramatic focus, storyline or character development. I look at these prequels and I see a collection of scenes done "because it's there" or because the technology allowed Lucas to create whatever he could think of. Too bad most of what he thought of was cribbed from old science fiction magazines, but that would have been excused if he invigorated the imagery with interesting characters and stories. Instead he just limped from scene he "had" to put in there to "iconic" moment. How many times have you heard people say, "Wow, wasn't it COOL to see R2 and 3PO meet?" or "I was so glad we finally got to see Darth Vader as a little boy!"?

Carl Eyesnheart,

I expected we'd go way, way back, to the discovery of the Force and the beginnings of the Jedi, which might have happened in a time of wars or even little interplanetary travel--something with the excitement of the unknown. To me these prequels were like the STAR TREK NEXT GENERATION show, shrinking the vision of the galaxy in which the stories take place. I wanted prequels that related in terms of themes, not specific people, and all the 'iconic' (I hate that term) moments fell flat. Who the heck wanted to see Vader as a kid? (When I was a kid I didn't want to BE a kid in an adventure, I wanted to be the adult hero; I hated kids in such films.)

G Vallejo,

Nothing made me think they would be. I just wished they were when Lucas first said he was going to go 'back'. Then later he started to say we'd see Vader's origins. More of a wish of mine, not really an expectation, once it was made clear.

Lucas now claims he "never" planned on nine, which is dishonest. 

hermanthegerm,

I think you (and I) enjoy the concepts behind good SF, while Lucas just seems interested in the visuals. But his visual overload took its toll on me--watching the Foundation-like planet in the movies I kept thinking, "What the heck are these people DOING all day?" The best SF writers are able to delve into the changes made on humanity by SF ideas like advanced machinery, while Lucas's very clever (at first) idea was to drop Arthurian characters into a new setting.

But like so much bad SF, he didn't think about the impact of that setting on those characters. Someone said in a review of a Clifford Simak book that he liked that the hero takes his dog for a walk at one point--not a robo-dog or alien dog, just a dog, because that's what human beings DO. I don't think this kind of thing ever occurs to Lucas in his desire to visualize something--in fact, in one of the saddest chapters in THE SECRET HISTORY OF STAR WARS, the author shows that when it came time to write the script for CLONES (or maybe SITH) Lucas was so burned out from all the technical stuff for his empire that he just told the art department to start producing drawings, not based on a script, just drawings, and he selected those he liked and made a story around them.

Now, being inspired by art is perfectly fine, but what the heck ever happened to this 'massive epic that was written LONG ago'? Sue sounds like a desperate move, and not a considered artististic choice. And the results show that. I find CLONES terribly dull, andit's the only STAR WARS movie I didn't see in the theater.

HalLane,

These movies answer the age-old question "Will scenes of people sitting around talking about politics be more interesting if you can see little spaceships flying around outside the windows?" with a resounding "NO."