The Lucas Touch

Rating: 3/10 (2 May 2004)

After the frankly disappointing Episode I, Star Wars is back... only it's not the Star Wars any of us really wanted. A mythic hero is (re)-introduced and Anakin Skywalker, torn between his duties as a Jedi and impossible love, begins his path to the Dark Side. On the sidelines, a convoluted conspiracy continues to destabilize the fragile Republic...
It's very important at this point to understand two fundamental points about the original Star Wars trilogy. First, their humble origins are in conveyor-belt adventure serials of the 1930s, themselves of questionable artistic merit but arguably boasting a certain storytelling economy and successful aesthetic of poverty. Second, given how few people had faith in episode 4 at the time of its making and how busy Lucas was with building his empire during production of episodes 5 and 6, many more gifted and self-questioning talents were involved in key decision-making aspects of that original saga. We can get angry about Jar Jar Binks and Hayden Christensen all we want, but the real shortcoming of the prequels is not what is in them, but what is not: gifted screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, more actor-friendly directors (be it Kirshner or even Marquand) and especially producer Gary Kurz, along with stars who dared to question some of Lucas's decisions.
Now, we get to see what Star Wars would have been like had Lucas been able to call all the shots back in the late 70s. Rushed and clumsy storytelling turned into a rushed, lazy production with an over-elaborate post-production process to top things off.
First, the story. Without going into whether the story of Anakin Skywalker was one that needed to be told - it did not - Lucas manages to botch the whole set-up for his hero by having him be a completely different person from episode I's moppet, thus squandering an entire film of character-building, and by presenting him as a bad apple from the start. It's hard to enjoy the story of a good man's fall when he is shown to be a whiny creep from the get-go, and commits small-scale genocide an hour later. Not that the supporting characters fare any better, the Jedi being despairingly bland, especially a wasted Samuel L. Jackson. Ewan McGregor starts to inject a bit of fun into his character, but Yoda completely undoes his whole original trilogy image with a pointless and idiotic lightsaber duel. Beyond that, Natalie Portman is bafflingly bad, Christopher Lee is Christopher Lee, and hate him all you like, but Hayden Christensen does as much as anyone could with the lousy material thrown at him.
These shortcomings would be easier to overlook if the end result truly dazzled. That it doesn't attests to Lucas's laziness as a director. Either absent or parked behind a bank of monitors, latte in hand, the great beard managed most of these prequel films in the comfort of a green-screen studio. The result speaks for itself: even when set inside majestical environments, the result feels confined and staged - the actors having only a few square feet of featureless real-world space to work with. The camera blocking in character scenes has all the grace of a cheap tele-novella. Things only pick up in space or huge all-CGI action scenes, but then the frame is so dense (not rich, mind you, just cluttered) the story so muddled and the stakes so un-involving that you will be hard-pressed to care.
It is nearly impossible to invest any emotion into these films beyond nostalgia. We are interested in Anakin because we know he becomes Darth Vader. We feel for Obi Wan and Yoda because we remember them and their amazing portrayal from our childhoods. And for all its fatal shortcomings as a motion picture, it's most hateful crime exists at a conceptual level: it might have jump-started the current, exhausting prequel trend.
You can skip this one altogether, and if you really want to give your kids some modern Star Wars, go straight to the Clone Wars series. Each episode of that show has more adventure, inventiveness, joy and internal logic than Lucas's prequel trilogy combined.