I saw it the weekend of the week it came out, at the Odeon in Leicester Square. My heart sank very early into the film. The title crawl didn't exactly reel me in from the outset, read like some very bad fan fiction I thought. The opening shot - what was meant to be THE opening shot for the entire saga! - was utterly forgettable too, though the Star Destroyer opening from Star Wars is damn-near impossible to top to be fair. It was seeing the absolutely awful masks, bad accents and lip-sync on the Nute Gunray character and his minions that made me think this film was going to be bad. Then there was the introduction of Jar-Jar Binks... and I just sank deeper into my chair hoping it would redeem itself at some point... I was sank so deep into it when the film ended I think I was sitting in somebody's lap a few rows behind...!!! ;)

When the film ended, everyone just exited the cinema in stone-cold silence. You could sense the confusion and shock. Then outside we all suddenly started coming out with desperate "well parts of it weren't so bad" comments. I sat there in the pub with my friend and we both knew full-well it was a steaming pile of utter shite, that Lucas had utterly dropped the ball, but where too shell-shocked to admit it. I've never - before or since - been so disappointed in a film, though Prometheus came a little close.