ROTS is definitely my least favorite. It’s got the laziest, most haphazard writing of the lot. I get the distinct impression that it’s just going through a checklist of things that still needed to happen in that trilogy without any effort to arrange it into an elegant arc. The Grievous character is one of the most irksome examples of this. It seems painfully obvious to me that his only reason to exist is because they killed Dooku off too early and needed a secondary antagonist for the bulk of the movie. He’s only there to give Obi-Wan something to do while Anakin’s going bad. The infuriating thing is that Dooku had the potential to be an interesting character but they never made any attempt to pay his story off.
I’ve also never been able to shake the sense that from around the Jedi Purge onward, the script sort of treats its characters like a kid playing with action figures. Yoda fighting the Emperor has always struck me as particularly stupid as others have said, but Yoda and Obi-Wan cutting down swaths of clones at the temple has always rubbed me the wrong way too. Oh, and bringing up the thing about Qui-Gon’s ghost out of nowhere in dialogue instead of, y’know, having Qui-Gon’s ghost appear. God that movie is dumb.
I’ve actually grown sort of fond of AOTC recently. It’s not a good movie, to be sure, but it is so goddamn weird, and I just can’t help but have some appreciation for that strangeness. TPM’s got its moments for nostalgia’s sake but it’s largely a snoozefest, and I’m bothered by how slapdash and half-assed ROTS is, but I think AOTC is off-beat enough to be interesting.
