At the risk of sounding like a grouchy old man...

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2001)

With each new installment, the Star Wars series just gets worse. By the end, George Lucas will have squandered his original vision and have everyone wondering what the hell the big deal was about anyway.
I saw Star Wars (the first movie) when I was twelve years old, during its first theatrical release, and was blown away. Whenever I've seen it in the years since, I still am. Lucas took elements from several ageless mythologies and movie genres and wove them together, then created something completely new and fresh.
The Empire Strikes Back was a decent follow-up; darker, more ambiguous, but a good middle story for the original trilogy, and with some much-needed character development. Then Return of the Jedi came out. Just the fact that they wimped out on the original title (REVENGE of the Jedi) should be a warning. Cutesy teddy bears, irrational character changes (Darth Vader changing into a good guy? Come on...), and a distracting, three-way final battle. Ugh.
Lucas seems to be a guy who learns to repeat his mistakes rather than avoiding them. Phantom Menace has annoying, overly cute characters (Jar-Jar Binks justifiably got some bad press, but he wasn't nearly as annoying as that bratty, overly-precocious Anakin). It also has yet another three-way battle at the end, each cutaway distracting from the others. Aside from Neeson and McGregor, the performances are stilted and wooden--especially Natalie Portman's. I know she's supposed to be a hologram or something for much of the picture, but still. And the good guys win, even though we know they eventually must lose--which is depressing rather than poignant.
The biggest problem of all, though, is that Lucas is indulging in some bad post-modernist deconstruction of what is, essentially, a fairy tale. He's de-mystifying the Force into some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. And worse, he's performing some pop-psychology retrofitting of a back-story onto what WAS one of the most effective villains in science fiction and the cinema. We're supposed to buy the implication that Darth Vader became a bad guy because he missed his mommy? Oh, please--how mundane can we get?

I don't WANT to know why Darth Vader is bad. I enjoy him for the fact that he IS bad. He is--WAS--a great movie villain. In Othello, Iago is the greatest villain in Shakespeare precisely because we don't know why he's evil; it makes him more mysterious and threatening--how can you reason with the guy? Vader was like that too--implacable, unstoppable, a fittingly awesome obstacle for the heroes to fight. His personal ties to Obi-Wan and Luke only made him more frightening--how can Luke defeat his own father?
But now Lucas has decided we need to know why Anakin became Darth. Thanks, George, but I don't want or need to know. Just like I never needed to see what was behind that black mask of his. And I don't need to know what's behind yours either. Just release the first movie on DVD and leave me alone.