Oh come on, nobody really understands Star Wars.
Heretic. You obviously haven't read anything by Timothy Zahn.
Come now, Episode 3 wasn't THAT bad. It was light-years better than 1 and 2, though still not as good as the original trilogy.
ORLY? On the surface, I might agree with you - it comes across as a much less corny movie that 1 and 2. However, once you start to think about events, contexts, and motivations, it loses all semblance of a decent movie and plunges headfirst into WTF-ville.
For example, I'll pick on the opening scene - the space battle and subsequent "rescue" of Palpatine:
A) All is fine and dandy until those buzzdroids start dismantling the Jedi starfighters piloted by Obi-Wan and Anakin. Think about it. You're a Jedi. The Force flows through your whatevers. So when hostile little droids land on your ship and start dismantling it panel by panel, how the **** do you manage to try every trick in the book to try and shake the buggers off
except for using the Force to pluck or push them off?
B) There's this moderately large space battle going on over Coruscant - perhaps the most important planet of the entire galaxy - with ships blowing up all over the place. The sides seem fairly evenly matched in terms of ships and firepower. So where'd the battle go once Obi-Wan and Anakin crash-land the ship Palpatine was on? If both sides retreated, why? Did they just keep on slugging it out beyond the cameras? WHAT HAPPENED??!?
I could write more but I'd have to rewatch it and I have better things to do with my time, such as arguing on the internet.
FYI, there is a way to watch the entire Star Wars saga [to date] in a manner that makes it somewhat less painful. You watch the films in this order:
4, 5, 2, 3, 6. Notice 1 is missing? That's intentional. It's so terrible there's no need, as its plot is almost entirely unnecessary for the remainder.
You start the series with the strongest two films and preserve the Vader reveal, avoid the awful episode 1 entirely, jump back in time and suffer through episode 2 in the middle for some necessary backstory, proceed to the not-fabulous-but-not-unsalvageable episode 3, then finish it out with the reasonably-done episode 6.
Indeed, my brother and I are showing the series to a mutual friend in that adjusted machete order (although we did include episode 1 for sh*ts and giggles). She (the SW newb) is a film student, so she was highly critical of the production quality of Ep 4 and 5. She did recognize that they were overall far better movies than 1 and 2, however. She's also annoyed by Threepio far more than I would have imagined (like, Jar-Jar level annoyed), but she does like Yoda and Artoo. Next up is Ep 3, which should be... interesting.
