More than the eye can see, less than the ear can hear...

Rating: 6/10 (23 May 1999)

Some people have said this movie is for the kids. I think not. I would defy any child (or adult) to describe too many details about what they'd just seen. Why? Because this has to be one of the worst recorded movies (soundwise) ever made. The characters tend to have strange accents and voices to begin with, and yet in virtually all scenes containing dialogue, there is background music being played, it at a level of about 10 decibels, while the voices are at about 7. -"What'd he say? What'd he say??"
I still don't know how to pronounce Liam Neesom's character name. I'm sure it was spoken a couple of times during the course of the movie though. I'm think I might have been able to discern maybe 6 words of what Jar Jar Binks said...
What were the commentators in the pod race saying?
Other criticisms? Okay, maybe I'm an old fart, and the constant quick cutting of things like (in)MTV videos is not my cup of tea, but for chrissakes, do we really have to have this in movies? In the pod race, in the light saber duels, would it really have killed them to keep an image on the screen for more than two seconds? A lot of movement and a hundred cuts and camera angle changes, and it's up to our own imagination to piece together what we think we've just seen...
The special effects in the movie were dazzling, but, once again, the quick cutting made them almost indiscernable. -What did I just see??
Has it ever occurred to anyone but me, that maybe the real reason we have such a glut of strange creatures and machines in these movies is so that the producers can market more cheap merchandise based on them? ("Hey, I know! Let's put one of these in this scene!! Doesn't add anything to either the scene or the plot, but we can make another billion selling an action figure of it!!")
Don't get me wrong: I like the STAR WARS series. Some incredibly imaginative and creative stuff here. Leave MTV on MTV though.
And finally: in a few years, a new generation will be watching the six movies in sequence, and they'll probably wonder why the latter 3 not only took a backward step in the special effects department, but also why the Empire did too. Let's see, in the first episode they used the advanced technology of soldier droids, but in the last 3 they used humans..? Hmmmm....