Simply Bad Writing

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2002)

Lucas still is able to construct a good general story line. The movie did continue to tell a good story and was filled with plenty of enjoyable action scenes. Any Star Wars fan must ultimately see this movie. Though it does feel like Lucas is milking this franchise financially instead of making good films.
Where the film fails is in the dialogue. The writing is just terrible and even good actors (Portman and McGregor) are just awful in this film. There is absolutely no chemistry between between Portman and Christensen and the same is true for the interactions between Christensen and McGregor. The teacher/student relationship is filled with simple, redundant dialogue. However, this may have been done to frustrate the audience to help them empathize with Anakin's feelings of resentment towards his teacher.
I've not seen Christensen before so can't comment on other attempts at acting. That said, after sitting through this film, I do think Lucas intentionally picks bad actors as the central character. Young Anakin was pretty awful, so it young adult Anakin in terms of acting. They are at about the same level as Scott Hamil was in Episode 4-6.

It also appears as if this film had sequences that were added purely to create some good settings for the Episode 2 video games that are coming out. Specifically, there is a scene in a factory that had X-Box and PS2 written all over it.
The last 30 minutes of the film were very entertaining.