Brilliant effects don't mask bad dialogue, story, acting

Rating: 5/10 (3 June 1999)

Amazing vision is what we expect from George Lucas, and he doesn't disappoint. Yet if this man would just spend a few trivial dollars AWAY from the cinematography, he could get his dialogue rewritten to be, well, acceptable.
I'm a fan of "Star Wars", and a huge fan of "The Empire Strikes Back", but I didn't like "Return of the Jedi". This new "old" chapter in the story contains many of the problems that "Return of the Jedi" did: its dialogue is wooden, the actors are not given proper direction, and there is no continuity to the story.
Yet these are not the biggest problems. The biggest problem is that we basically don't know the characters. Is there anyone who didn't know, 20 minutes into "Star Wars", who Luke Skywalker was and wanted to be? Yet in this movie, we never learned anything about the motivations of Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or, most importantly, Anakin Skywalker (although he was SLIGHTLY more developed).
We're supposed to like Anakin because he's a kid and he's a slave and he's amazing. We're supposed to like Qui-Gon Jinn because he's a Jedi and because he likes Anakin. We're supposed to hate Darth Maul, but the only reason I can figure that out is because he's, well, ugly. That's not character development.
If so much time in this movie wasn't devoted to Jar Jar Binks, a most annoying, wretched character, there would have been plenty of time to develop everyone else's character. This, more than anything, spoiled the movie for me.
Yet, I'm glad to have seen it. It was a stunning vision and contained the best Jedi battle of all the movies to date. An unbelievable pod race sequence was brilliantly done. The effects were, of course, peerless.
But George, next time you do a movie, have your dialogue ghost-written and leave Jar Jar on the cutting room floor: Meesa find Jar Jar very bad, very bom-bad. And stop playing to the kiddie audience: that's not how "Star Wars" attracted viewers!