Overall I thought it was the best of the prequals. Although there are all kinds of issues that really nagged me throughout. First of all WTF was George smoking when he cast Christian Hayden as Anakin? Same goes for Nadalie Portman as Padme. Either they both are really bad actors or lucus isn't very good at handling dialogue. There are just some painful scenes between the two and I can't stop but think that there must be at least hundreds of other people who are far more qualified. The animated Anikan in the clone wars animated shorts has more emotion. Hell get the kid who plays Harry Potter or even some of the forum members here could do a better job with delivering dialogue then Mr. Hayden does.

Also what was the point of even mentioning qui gon jin towards the end of the movie? I was really excited about seeing him come back for a brief final scene in his ghostly etheral form like we've seen in the original trilogy. I'm guessing that George decided to cut the scene at the last mintue, hopefully we'll see it in an unrated directors cut when the film comes to DVD. Although I most applaud lucus for practically every scene with yoda. He probably gave the best performance in the film. I really just loved the scenes where you could see his poor little heart being wretched out as the clone troopers executed order 66. I think that yoda will be up there with Gullum as one of the best performances ever given by a CGI character. Political undertones were also very nice and forboding. If anything this prequal trilogy was less about the rise of darth vader and more so the political machinations and creation of the empire. It was Papatines trilogy, since he was the one orchestrating everything behind the scenes. Although the whole thing about him kidnapping himself in the beginning of the film was just dumb no matter how you look at it.