Serious question: Is this a bona fide critique of Lucas or a sly parody of the lengths to which “Star Wars” nerds will go to find fault with him? My memory of that film, which I’ll never, ever see again, is that the fight scene at the end was reasonably exciting and frenetic. I wasn’t paying attention to whether Ewan McGregor was actually a few inches outside of Darth Maul’s reach; I didn’t think I was supposed to. The point, I thought, was to gape at these whirling dervishes jumping around and swinging at each other, hopefully at a brisk enough pace that there’s no time to get caught up in the niceties of where everyone’s lightsaber is at any given moment. But maybe my memory’s been colored by the fact that this really was the only fun part of the whole flick. When you’ve spent hours wandering through a desert and you finally stumble upon an oasis, you don’t pause to worry about how tasty the water is. Shoot, this didn’t even make it into the epic Harry Plinkett takedowns of the prequels. (Or did it? Can’t recall.)

Maybe this is actually an indictment of Lucas for being cheap? You’d think a guy with his own license to print money might go out and hire a director from Hong Kong to make the fight scenes genuinely stupendous. Could be he blew the whole budget on computer F/X instead. Good call, George.