I took a break from the endless packing (o, the boxes!) and took the wife to see the new Star Wars flic. Big mistake, trust me. That's almost 3 hours of my life I would like back.

Whenever the Anakin/Padme scenes came on I found myself longing to be at the house and packing boxes again. Not only did it have the trademark crappy writing, but also William Shatner-like acting. Miserable. The constant allusions back (forward?) to the cute lines in the original series were too much to take. The first few times it may have been cute, after that…not so much. "Search you feelings", "Join me", "I've got a bad feeling about this" BAH!

If Lucas could have been heavier handed in the anti-war message, I fail to see how. "So, this is how freedom dies, to thunderous applause" and "Did you ever think we might be on the wrong side?". FEH! The other films were wonderfully devoid of current-day politics. This one will have to be explained when my daughter is old enough to see the series. “Sweetheart, the filmmaker was against a war that was pretty much over when the film was made, so he injected his view into the story. What war you say? Well the Iraq war, you don’t remember it but it will be part of your recent history classes. Nobody much talks about it anymore since it ended well for us.”

The action scenes were in some ways spectacular, at other times they were too much stimulation. Did we really need a gun battle going on around the Kenobi-Grevious duel? And what the hell was that driod doing popping in the middle of the Kenobi-Vader duel at the end?

This movie could have been sliced down to one-third the length and some interesting stuff could have been added at the end to chronicle the early life of the twins as well as the training of Kenobi in the long-life arts and the early life of Yoda in the swamp. Of course, watching paint dry would have been more interesting than the "interaction" of Vader and Padme.

End of the series. We could have had more, but the series is forever ruined.