It's a shame the Clone Wars cartoon series ever existed. Much as its style could not have been credibly done as a live-action film ... it was as exciting, and fun, and backstory-curiosity-satisfying as any Star Wars prequel could have hoped to be. I don't think I'm alone in finding that animated series to be infinitely better than the live-action prequels (um, I guess live-action in the sense that a few of the actors were real, heheh). It's a detriment to the prequels that Clone Wars is out there for comparison.

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Hey, I'm a sucka for romance, too. I totally dug the romance in Episode II. I chaulked up the stilted dialogue and cornball acting of the love story to an homage to filmic styles of the past, like so much of the original Star Wars was.

But as forgiving as I was willing to be, the romance sunk to unfathomable depths of stupidity and vacuousness and absurdity in Revenge of the Sith. And all the meat of the tale that I'd been waiting through six years of two lead-up films for ... was also presented so poorly that I felt robbed, cheated, bent over and used.

It's not a matter of not liking the love story, not liking the poliltics, or even not liking the Anakin story itself ... it's just that it was done piss-poorly.

Phantom Menace may have been a let-down for 16 years in the Star Wars wilderness ... but Return of the Sith was a veritable elevator shaft plummet to hell in how much of a let-down it was for investing as much heart as I did in the new trilogy, hoping it would all turn out well in the end.

Frankly, if the other two films had not been such obvious and slow lead-in teasers for the last movie, not so much would have been riding on that single film's shoulders .... shoulders that I feel could not support the weight of a gnat.

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