Prine

In the other movies Vader was mostly kind of quiet. I would've expected him to look around desperately, or stare out of a window, or smash some more stuff or even yell incoherently. Never has a single word come so close to ruining an entire movie. It was corny and the acting was hopelessly artificial. I dunno who claims the title of worst actor. I'm tempted to say Christensen or Portman, I generally don't consider child actors in this way because most of the time I don't even think of them as 'actors' per se. So many of the characters and sets and things in the second batch of movies were just cartoons, though, that I pity the live actors who starred in those films. Hamill had a couple of dud scenes (mostly in ROTJ), but he was a lot of fun to watch most of the time, never really painful like Christensen/Portman. When a scene in a film makes you cringe, you know there's something very wrong.

Wishful thinking maybe

Heh, and he gave ROTS 5 out of 5.

This was a pretty amusing summary, I thought.

All over the place, sort of. To the best of my knowledge it began as a group of disgruntled ex-senators from the Old Republic and attracted all manner of miscreants and malcontents. When the Empire began throwing its weight around, whole systems (mostly ones on the rim) started covertly supporting the rebels, and after they'd won a few major battles those systems began openly declaring their revolt. By the end of ROTJ I guess the Empire had little in the way of popular support from anyone, since it'd already dissolved the senate (?). I thought Grievous was lame and pointless as well, apparently you had to see the Clone Wars cartoons to really get the reference.

I figure there's got to be billions of systems in a galaxy, so it's probably not a big deal if there's a few non-official ones in the game.

The movie did it for me. I've had a copy of this since I was 13, though.

The overuse of CGI irritates me, too. Probably half of any given film these days is shot in front of a blue screen with people in green suits. After a while all the high-tech editing stops looking impressive and starts looking cartoony, and actors always look awkward interacting with stuff that's not there.

I have no idea what the Clone Wars cartoon is, I suppose we don't get it here, so General Grievous made no sense to me. I hate to flog a dead horse, but there were so few decent actors in these films. The two that stood out in this one were Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) and Ewan MacGregor. MacGregor's Obi-Wan was really good here, I think he's probably the best overall actor out of all three films. Christensen and Portman are as hopeless together here as they were in Attack of the Clones. What else... another pointless reference to the first three movies, Chewbacca makes an appearance. Meh. C3PO didn't need to be in any of these films, either. R2D2's amazing droid-ninja skills inexplicably continue. "Younglings" is a stupid word, though I'm aware it was also in Attack of the Clones, and Anakin's fall was too much too fast (yes, we know Vader's cruel, but evidently not irredeemably so, so why demonize him by having him needlessly kill kids?). All those complaints aside, I think the relationship between MacGregor and Christensen was much more refined in this movie, and even though I don't think much of him, Christensen put in an admirable effort with a fairly complex character given the time constraints and rough script. The dialogue was generally not great, but it was more evenly spaced out and generally employed better here than in the last film. It tied many loose ends up nicely, and at least we got a few nifty looking Jedi fight scenes. It got me jonesing for Star Wars again, so it must've done at least a few things right.

I agree that most of the EU is utter rubbish from a storyteller's perspective. Then again I think a lot of the plot points in episodes 1, 2 and 3 are stupid too. Prequels are generally bad in that respect. If you must reconcile the clone situation, it's easiest to argue that the point of the clones was to have a ready army at the Republic's disposal rather than having to draft from the populace, which would have made the idea of a Republic army more palatable to the senate. Droids could've been used, but then there would've just been droids all over the place, and I guess Lucas had to somehow tie up that "clone wars" loose end from ANH besides. After the Seperatists were beaten and the usefulness of a Republic's army proven, the clones weren't needed as much and fewer people would've protested the idea of recruitment. I don't think the Empire were xenophobic either, I just think the core worlds which comprised the bulk of the Empire's popular support were mostly human-inhabited, and thus that's where most of their recruits came from. I don't think it's difficult to reconcile the starfighter thing. The Empire didn't need hyperdrives or life support on their starfighters; they had countless thousands of capital ships and freighters, and they basically owned the galaxy. TIE fighters never needed to go off on solo missions because they weren't designed for that. They were short-range fighters and there was always a ready transport for them to attach to. On the other hand, the Alliance fleet was spread thin all throughout the galaxy and they had relatively few capital ships. They were a guerilla force, so they needed a modicum of mobility and self-sufficiency for every craft at their disposal. The question of shields is harder though, it does seem kind of silly for the Empire to rely on unshielded fighters.