Too much FX, not enough story

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2001)

As the Star Wars saga continues, each succeeding film has gotten more and more overblown with special effects and less and less concerned with plot and storytelling. One need only compare the far superior alien creatures in the original Star Wars cantina to the muppets that sang in Jabba's lair or the cutesy wutesy Ewoks in ROTJ to see a prime example of how Lucas has altered his saga to cash in on certain focus groups.
Now it's the end of the 20th century, and CGI is all the rage. I don't know how much Lucas spent on the computer animation for The Phantom Menace, but he's DAMN sure proud of it. Look at the setting shots of the city planet...four scenes of computer generated hover traffic. Look at Jar Jar Binks, a creature created totally out of CGI and concocted specifically to give 8 year olds a favorite play toy (it didn't work, BTW) See all the battle droids, marching in perfect CGI lockstep, signifying nothing.
By the time Lucas is through, Darth Vader will have a pet Fengojuli which looks remarkably like Hello Kitty and speaks like Bubbles of the Powerpuff Girls. Obi Wan will retreat to Tatooine, only to be taken in by the lovable CGI-created Winksnoozie tribe, a race of 3 foot high mini-kangaroo type people.
George Lucas has proven that his ego is too much, and that is why Peter Jackson has smoked him with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While Lucas was rewriting his latest chapter in the Star Wars marketing saga to appeal more to 14 year old N'Sync fans, Jackson was creating a solid trilogy of movies.
It is an insult to his earlier work to call this excuse for a movie "the beginning." More like, "the result."