We've been had

Rating: 3/10 (20 May 1999)

Seeing TPM yesterday afternoon was the most disappointing movie-going experience of my life.
I had studiously avoided pre-release information about the movie. I didn't read magazine articles, or watch the trailers, or the snippets that have appeared on TV. I didn't know Yoda would be in the film, or Ewan Macgregor, or Natalie Portman. I went in "fresh". The opening 3 minutes (Fox fanfare, LucasFilm logo, crawling text..) were great. "Oh man, it's Star Wars all right, and I haven't seen it twenty times before." The next 2 hours were a slow slide into disappointment and boredom, as I wondered how much longer this underwritten, over FX-ed mess would run.
There was next to no plot, and a lot of filler. The pod race dragged on, and on, and on. The visuals (eyepopping as they were) left me cold, as I sat there wondering where the movie had gone, and why I was now watching the Laff-a-lympics. The whole sequence felt like some awful Disney movie. Spending so tediously long doing nothing on Tatouine indicated to me that Lucas had little idea what the film was about, and had to kill some time. I cannot see the attraction of Jar Jar Binks, one of the least likable characters in any movie I've seen in some time. His ghastly faux-Jamaican accent grated from his very first scene, and I was stunned that he wasn't just a 30-second throw away character. His whole child-IQed people (whatever they were called) were a waste of space: I would have been just as engaged by a horde of potatoes fighting the soldier-droids. It has given me a new appreciation of the Ewoks.
Scene after scene was seemingly dictated by the desire to demonstrate the effects, rather that using the effects to tell a story. The podrace, the ludicrous Senate chamber full of dodgem-cars, the water-monsters underground; all added nothing to the plot. All of them a yawn.
This film has raised the bar for movie special effects; some of the sequences were astonishing. It has also lowered the bar for what sort of junk can be passed off as a Star Wars motion picture. I hope Lucas's reason for this was so that Episodes 2 and 3 seem so much better by comparison. I fear that _Titanic_ will remain unbeaten at the box office :(