A brief intro: I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago and unlike my normal slackness in writing up reviews of films, I haven’t written anything about it yet because it’s taken this long to really get my head around it. And because I’m slack.

I find it hard to think about Revenge of the Sith in terms of being a standalone film. I can’t seem to detach what happens in it from everything that’s gone before which makes it difficult to say “this is better than the first two prequels” because although it generally lacks many of the annoying elements its predecessors boasted, it still had its fair share of apalling dialogue, terrible acting and also suffered from having nothing memorable about it. That’s probably my biggest complaint about Sith - nothing has stuck in my mind about it. Impressive opening space battle? Not quite as good as the space battle in Return of the Jedi. Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan? Not a patch on the Duel of the Fates in Phantom Menace. So while it has less of the bad bits, it also seems to have less of the good bits.

The worse thing about Revenge of the Sith, however, is how lacklustre Anakin’s fall to the dark side was. For all it’s criticisms and weaknesses, the attempted seduction of Luke Skywalker by Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi is far more effective than Anakin’s descent was in Sith.

And then there’s the inconsistencies between everything we learnt 25 years ago and what we learn in this film. But I might save that for Episode 2!