A lot of missing the point going on...

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2002)

One of the main criticisms of TPM is that the story is confusing and the characters are not very two-dimensional. I read a (rather over-excited) review of Episode II on the web yesterday, the author of which promises us all that AOTC will make more sense of the events in TPM. This seems to be missing the point.
All that is wrong with this movie is that it is very poorly directed. It has no centre, only a 'vision' in its most literal sense - ie. Lucas sees his milieux in two dimensions, visually and historically. He seems incapabale of imbuing his - admittedly very impressive and cohesive - universe with any real life. The universe of the first two films had a sense of completeness, it had . This new version has no soul.
Lucas' problem is that he knows the story but no longer possesses the discipline to tell it properly. It is not that the characters are two-dimensional, but rather than the creative core of the film - the director - seems to be unable to help the actors breathe life into what they have. So you end up with the veterans doing a good job (Neeson, McDiarmid, Jackson) and the kids coming across as flat (Portman, Lloyd), because the experienced cast members know how to get on with the job.
Secondly, the pacing of this film is atrocious. The editing is technically fine, but the structuring of scenes - and the movement from one scene to the next - is clumsy and confusing. Characters suddenly arrive out of nowhere, the editing seeming to rely on what the audience is forced to assume is coincidence in the narrative. Alternatively, the director assumes that we are following and are happy to go with him. This is not so - at least not here.
This film a Star Wars movie because the universe it portrays contains all the necessary symbols and it looks amazing. Its only problem is that its director lacks the maturity to "let go" - George Lucas should have stuck to imagining and producing the movie and universe and left the story-telling up to some one with a surer hand, someone who knows how to tell a story rather than simply us a story. Let's hope Lucas has learned his lesson and that Episode II truly works.