It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That said, Episode III totally sucked less ass than the earlier prequels. It's sort of like George Lucas woke up and realized that he'd left a whole lot of work undone and tried to cram everything that should have been in the prequels into one movie. I mean there's still a lot of bad; there are new, extraneous characters, like "General Grievous," a robot general that coughs and uses lightsabers. There's a whole lot of terrible dialogue, especially in the wooden romance between Anakin and Padme...

But maybe it's not the movie itself that bothers me, but what it represents...the original movies were much more human films, with characters that had meaningful interaction. The prequels feel much more like an elaborate video game, or a series of feature-length advertisements for the franchise. Why is it that we never learned where the Jedi came from, or a real history of the Sith? Why is it that in the prequels, the Jedi are little more than spectacular martial artists. Where is the wisdom of Yoda? Maybe there was a reason why we never saw Yoda with a lightsaber in the original series: because he sought other ways to influence conflicts, that did not involve the use of outright force.

The original series made me want to believe in this world, where anybody could be transformed from a yahoo tuning his speeder on a backwater planet into someone with a grand purpose. The original movies were scary; we cared about these characters. And what happened to them felt important. Somehow, that's lacking in the prequels -- the bluescreened shots and obvious CG makes the whole thing seem fake, and no matter how horrible Vader's acts, it seems somehow facile and, ultimately meaningless. The fact that the plot makes no sense and there are what seem to be obvious contradictions puts the nail in it for me. No matter how it struts and frets during its hours on stage, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And it seems to have drained dry the joy that Star Wars once gave me.