I had a bad feeling about it. I was almost right.

Rating: 3/10 (29 September 1999)

Black background. Those familiar 10 words appear in their familiar blue-green lettering. Then, in comes the music and back goes the title. It's here. A flood of nostalgia hits me and suddenly I'm seven again. Up comes the opening yellow scroll informing me of the current situation in the galaxy. "A tad short and uninteresting," I think to myself "but don't worry. This is, after all, the start of the whole thing. Not a lot's happened yet." Satisfied with my new-found belief I settle back again. Pan down and in comes a tiny freighter. Great graphics. Inside the cockpit now. A couple of corny lines said with little enthusiasm from the pilot. Cornier lines said with even less enthusiasm from some guy in a lizard suit. The high is coming down. The ship lands. Two cloaked figures are led to a small room by a mincing man in a tin foil suit trying to look like C-3PO. The sobering up process has begun in earnest. And then it happens. Ewan McGregor steps up and speaks. Seven words. Only seven but they were the words I prayed I would never hear in a Star Wars film again: "I have a bad feeling about this." AAAARRRGGHHH!!!! Suddenly so do I.
I had prepared myself for this eventuality. All through the spring months leading up to the release I was telling friends and family alike to calm down. It was not going to be a good film. In fact it was going to be awful. I said it so many times I almost believed it myself. But I refused to get sucked into the hype machine and go out of some unstoppable pull from the force. I was going to see it of course, but with my mind totally unbiased, unclouded and free from expectation so I couldn't be disappointed. The release rolled around and I gave myself a couple weeks for the initial feeding frenzy to die down. Then, off I went to see what George had made after a twenty-year holiday. My opinion: it's close. But a cigar it is not.
First things first. It's not a total wreck. You can go and see it and enjoy yourself. There's no doubt that Lucas has been incredibly clever in the way he has set up his opus. We know what the end result from this series is going to be. Our young, blond-haired, whiter than white moppet is going to turn into the evil, asthmatic lord of the universe. What we want to know is how. And, to be fair, Lucas has done a grand job of creating a whole host of pointers as to where the series is going. They link up quite nicely and he has given a great deal of thought as to how he can cover all of the bases. To go into greater depth would be to spoil the plot but trust me, the link for how we get from here to there has been very nicely handled. The set pieces are also marvellous. Lucas has not lost his touch for handling big epic battles. We have dynamic dogfights, incredible infantry battles, ravishing raids and the light-sabre duels will make your head spin (they are stunning.) And of course we have Industrial Light and Magic's finest creating visuals which will make your jaw hit the floor so often that a chin rest should be supplied with each ticket. And Darth Maul (though incredibly underused) is outstandingly cool. If he doesn't return then there will be anarchy. No problems here and much slapping of backs for effort.
However, all is not completely well. While the plot is fundamentally sound the script is occasionally good, often pathetic and doesn't really get any better than banal. How Lucas ever dared claim his script was finished is a mystery to me. You can't help but feel that if only Lucas had let someone polish it ever so slightly (the likes of maybe a Lawrence Kasdan or David Peoples) then we could have a much better time. And as for those seven, unrepeatable words? When is George going to learn that gripping dialogue they are not? Some performances leave a lot to be desired as well. Whilst the action muscles are still there Lucas's actor-handling ability seems to have atrophied. He almost killed himself making Episode 4. Here, aware of the lack of pressure and the gold plated certainty that this will make money, he's taken his foot off the throttle and is satisfied with just turning his words into pictures. They're pretty but a cake made of soap still tastes awful no matter how much icing it has. When you consider the cast calibre going into this (Neeson, McGregor, Portman and Jackson) you'd think we would get something pretty damn spectacular. What we often get is the wooden, the unsure and the downright awful. The worst is watching Nathalie Portman (one of my favourite actresses) deliver hokum dialogue in a hokum way. But then a ten-star actress cannot make five-star material anything more than what it is. She and, the rest of the cast, can only limit the damage. Jake Lloyd suffers from a similar problem. While not as creaky as some child actors he can only do the best with what he has. When he's good, he's very good. When he's called on to jump around like an eight-year-old shouting 'Yippee!' and 'Wizard!' then you want to strangle him. But at least he's better than the delegates from the Bad Actors Guild that play the Trade Federation iguanas. The pause that occurs when these locos are talking doesn't come from their strange alien dialogue but from the time it takes them to move their eyes to the next line on their cue-cards. Their make-up is a tad shaky as well and is certainly not as good as the effort that goes into making your average episode of Voyager. The CGI is out of this world but you expect this. The thrill of waiting for astounding special effects stopped for me with T2 and J-Park. I now expect CGI to be able to do anything and resent directors deliberately calling attention to their graphical box of tricks in the way that Lucas does here. You quickly forget that the CGI characters are there while watching but if you take one step back and look then it's still obvious that it's done in a computer. As for the Jar-Jar Binks debate? He's not as bad as people have made out but his presence can become irritating for anybody over five and he's about as necessary as the delegates from E.T.'s planet in the Republic Senate (Look closely. They are there.) And what's all this about metachloriwotsits and their symbiotic relationship with Jedi's. I take it that the Force has stopped being this divine, spiritual, essence of the Universe stuff and has become something akin to a germ that can be caught off a shared coffee mug.
Maybe I've ranted a little too much here but this is just how it lies. It's great fun while your watching and once it gets going it concludes with an incredible climax. But the road is rocky and the feeling of a twenty-year let down often looms. But enough of that. Episodes 2 and 3 should erase all this cutesy muck, dealing as they do with Anakins fall and the Empires rise, with a much darker tone and more serious subject matter. Think of this as George does: a Saturday morning adventure for kids that introduces the main characters and you'll be fine. Remember, we've had our dramatis personae. Lets see the real meat.