probably the most expensive piece of garbage I've ever seen

Rating: Null/10 (14 December 2004)

Has anybody wasted more resources a film so bad? This is on a par with Battlefield Earth.
Lukas should be chained and shackled and dragged away from the delusions of grandeur that apparently convinced him he was capable of undertaking the writing and directing for this film. It's barely watchable garbage. I was a huge fan of the original series, and this film left me more than just 'cold.' It left me angry: angry at the hubris of a filmmaker squandering a legacy (an 'empire' if you will) that is the Star Wars phenomenon, and angry at the drone-like fans who will lap anything up with a brand-name on it.
The long and short of my review for this film? I've played *video games* that were more convincing than this film, and they had *better acting* as well! I can't blame the actors though: there's no script to speak of here. Lukas should have just built 'droid actors' to play all the parts, he would have achieved the same result. The "plot" - where it exists at all - takes a backseat and is largely just a vehicle or excuse to have our beloved Jedi knights hacking away at things with their lightsabres from the first five minutes of the film onwards. There's no buildup to anything in this film. It's ALL eye candy and no substance. And Lukas should be seriously taken to task - and possibly drawn and quartered - for the insufferable Jar Jar Binks and his racially-profiled pidgin dialect. Most of the 'creatures' in this film look like they would be more at home on the set of Sesame Street than in a science-fiction "epic". A truly laughable, horrid film.
I also think that, only a few years after its release, this film already looks horribly "dated" in a way that the original series does NOT and probably never will. That can easily be explained by Lukas' complete over-reliance on CGI technology which is developing in leaps and bounds every day. He basically boxed himself into obselescence with this one. The original series' production actually involved *designing and building REAL sets, and manipulating REAL cameras in creative and ground-breaking ways to capture scenes on REAL film - thus giving the original Star Wars a certain REAL quality that makes it 'believable' to the audience, even twenty-five years later. Instead of building on that legacy that so effectively married technology to traditional cinematic technique which found brilliant and creative ways to present its material, Lukas thinks that computers can solve all his directorial and cinematic 'problems'. The result is a film that has the longevity (and relevance) of an original Commodore 64 or Nintendo video game... In twenty years - in marked contrast to the original series - THIS film will be held up as an example as what happens when a filmmaker lets technology run amok and take the place of basic elements like story, plot, cinematography, and directing...