A huge disappointment

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 1999)

This was very awful. Where to start? Well, of course Jar Jar was horrible (he looked too computery & sounded awful, but worst of all he didn't do anything worthwhile, let alone 'funny'). The character of Anakin was horrible, both in the writing and the acting. The movie moves way too fast, the characters are never developed, and anything that's interested is soon passed over. The characters are blah, with only a few (Watto, Sebulba, Darth Maul) becoming entertaining & endearing.
There are several lame scenes. There's the underwater scene where the same exact thing HAPPENS TWICE! The pod race could've been great if not for the horrible announcer (more suited for a juice box commercial than a Star Wars movie. We don't need Bob Costas references in our sweeping Sci-Fi epics). The best scene in the film, the fight with Darth Maul, Obi Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn, could be cool, but it's intercut with awful scenes, like Jar Jar fighting the battle droids (that was either a really good cartoon or a really awful live action film).
There's the awful scene where Anakin hides in the cockpit of the fighter plane ("Don't move from that cockpit!" Boy, that gag was predictable) where Anakin can't kind the trigger & hits every button & switch except for the one that looks like a trigger, despite the fact that he sat in Ric Olie's ship a few scenes earlier and was able to identify every instrument in the cockpit. > In short, this was a terrible movie-going experience- not just disappointing in relation to the other films in the series, but an awful movie in it's own right. Perhaps for the next two installments Lucas will get other directors to helm the movies like he did for 'Empire' and 'Jedi', and get someone that's a talented screenwriter to polish up on the dialog (Star Wars fanatic Kevin Smith, perhaps?)