Poor execution of a possibly great movie

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2002)

First of all, I would like to state I am a very big fan of the first trilogy, and love them dearly. I have been looking forward to episodes I-III since I first heard they were going to come out. This said, I was sorely disappointed by the mediocrity of the first film. I was in awe of the breathtaking visuals and the fantastic worlds envisioned by Lucas. I was very displeased with the syrupy acting and mostly uninteresting plot development.
In terms of this film being better than episode I, I was pleased. It contained more of what the aforementioned lacked...more action and adventure, more plot (barely), and better acting (sort of).
Unfortunately, I can't say this film was an excellent film were I to rate it on its own merit. The storytelling was poor, VERY poor. Quite simply, the acting was overall mediocre, and the film focused on all the technical aspects alone, not enough story.
All the actors, if judged by their merits outside of this film, are all very capable people. The problem is that Lucas obviously set aside character development and interaction in favor of everything else. He was more focused on developing the beautiful scenery and in that respect he succeeded. But movies should also tell a story, and make us CARE for the characters. The characters had no direction...merely a slew of badly written dialogue that contained far too many one-liners and in-jokes than substance.
The only actor that provided anything to take seriously was Christopher Lee, who provided a little more weight to the gravity of the situation. But his role was very brief...as if they threw him in at the last second to provide a good "bad guy" to dislike. Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen had no sort of chemistry between their on-screen characters. How they fall in love makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, the love story aspect seemed to have been cookie cut into the film just to follow the mythos established by the original trilogy. Ewan MacGregor's Ben Kenobi was startlingly similar to Sir Guiness' performance, but ruined by corny, misplaced one-liners and boring dialogue. This film felt like a B-movie with a huge budget, if that makes sense. At least Lucas maintained the sense of awe and wonder with respect to the varied environments and alien lifeforms. Some of the more humanoid aliens came off as very campy and silly though...
The movie just seemed to have been a cut and paste job. The movie was a jumbled mix of action, then drama, lame attempts at comedy, more action, and then was supposed to end on some sort of serious and ominous note. The story, when reduced down to the conceptual base could have worked very well, but because of Lucas' focus on the details of the environments and special effects and sound, instead of the character development and storytelling, he only managed to create a cold, unpersonal, emotionless film...an exercise in technical wizardry and nothing more. In every way, this movie was superior to episode I, but in every way it is still lacking. Hopefully the third episode focusing on Anakin's turn to the Dark side holds more weight to it, if not for storytelling's sake, but for the sake of the original trilogy. It would be disappointing to see Anakin's rise to the dark side play out as mediocre and boring as episodes I and II.