"Okay", but a bit disappointing

Rating: 8/10 (16 June 1999)

I went into this expecting something new. That was my first mistake. There is nothing new in this movie. I knew the plot beforehand, but I was really hoping Lucas would make at least a half-hearted attempt at originality insofar as the presentation goes. There is no need for anyone to see this movie, as anyone who has seen the second trilogy has already witnessed every plotline presented in Episode I. I will say that the whole sabre fight was about 8 zillion times cooler than anything in episodes 4, 5, and 6, though.
My second mistake was hoping the movie would be great. I should have realized, after seeing the second trilogy x number of times, that George Lucas is incapable of making a "great" movie. He makes fairy tale movies that are "cute". Nothing more, nothing less. He's got the large scale thing down, but he has yet to master writing a script in which the characters act in an even slightly believable fashion. The Jedi are emotionless. They're supposed to be human, so the emotionlessness makes them hard to care about/believe. I personally didn't care when characters died, since they were so two-dimensional to begin with that I had no attachment to them.
This could have been one incredible movie. I can't decide if Lucas realized the need to write at a 5-year-old's level in order sell the flick to a broader (hence, more massive and higher grossing) audience, or if he's just incapable of anything better. Had the characters been made more believable, and had the 'war' been more realistic (and not ended by some stupid slapstick accident), I would have enjoyed the movie more.
Oh, and Jar Jar needs to die. Preferably slowly and painfully.