Positive stuff, eh? Yeah I think that definitely got lost. I liked this movie a good bit when I first saw it and my appreciation has dropped hugely in hindsight. You may be right about Hayden Christensen not being the best choice for Anakin, but honestly I don\'t blame him for the atrocities here committed against Star Wars in particular and film in general. Normally, if you showed me a movie whose cast including Liam Neeson, Ewan MacGregor, Natalie Portman and Christopher Lee I would say GET ME TO THE THEATER. These are all really good actors and I think many more of them have the potential to be good. The problem is the writing and directing. First of all, Lucas is not known as an actor\'s director. He let others direct episodes V and VI and should have followed that trend here. He just can\'t coax out an interesting performance. Secondly, look at what they had to say! \"I don\'t like sand. It\'s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.\" I dare any thespian to make that sound good. At least we have Natalie Portman looking screaming hot in this. As long as she doesn\'t open her mouth to belch out any of Lucas\' tepid dialog, she\'s welcome on screen. Plus I enjoyed the arena fight with the beasts. It\'s nice to see some creative creatures like in the old universe. The sand people incident was not useless to the film. According to Jedi understanding, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side. We show Anakin giving in to hate and violence which is appropriate as his character moves along. What\'s more problematic is that this isn\'t given MORE attention in this movie, because his change of character ends up being far too abrupt in the first half of episode III. So... yeah. The scenes that don\'t involve explosions and lightsabres are embarrassingly painful to watch. It\'d be one thing if they were just uninteresting but it really makes you want to walk away. Padame and Anakin\'s relationship is not believable for a second and their struggle has no weight. Which is terrible because in the end it\'s supposed to be Anakin\'s great motivation and regret. Instead he\'s just really angsty, and she shows exceedingly poor judgment throwing in with him. Basically what I\'m trying to say is that any time Yoda isn\'t flipping out and killing people, the movie is balls.