well my general opinion of star wars is the following:
lucas's directing skills are utterly non existant as are his script writing skills
ep 4 worked because it was new and different and had the right elements of everything. other than that it pretty much sucked, direction wasn't stellar, script was terrible and all that showed though to the acting (which was equaly terrible)
then there was empire that lucas didn't direct (or script) and it shows. The script is far better and it shows through in the acting which obviously isn't particulrly good but it's far better than ep4 and perfectly fine for this film genre.
samething for ep6, only real hate of that tends to be the ewoks, the rest of it as a film was again much better than ep4 (I like 5 the best though).
then we come to the new ones and lucas is directing and scripting again and they return to suckyness except this time the whole newness factor isn't there to save it and people are also expecting the quality of ep5.
ep3 is going to suck as bad as 2 and 1, imo.
/actually reads article in link
ah, I seem to have mostly agreed with them.
on the topic of annakin, there is always the possibility that Christensen can actually act to some degree, with lucas's direction and script it's not very easy to tell.