They should have left the deleted scenes in ...

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 2003)

Funny how this film grows on you with repeated viewing ... I just watched it for the third time and thought it was better than the first two times I saw it. Being a die-hard fan of the original Star Wars trilogy, I did not really expect to love AOTC but I have come to appreciate that it does have some merits.
The visuals are of course superlative, and I really like how Lucas is now spending a huge effort filling out his universe with interesting looking aliens and realistic activity. With Episode II, I guess ILM's techniques are maturing and he has managed to move beyond the gimmick stage (as in, hey we can draw a CGI dinosaur-creature so let's put one in here) and started to think about what these alien worlds really ought to look like, with appropriate economic activity going on like the shopping mall, sports bar and huge-scale industry you could see on Coruscant, and the less sophisticated activity on Tatooine - I especially liked the robot powered rickshaw there.
The weak point of this film remains the dialogue, with sparse and trite speeches to explain a complex political backstory (which will no doubt be fundamental to the future films) and a banal love story. Lucas clearly prefers to spend screen time on video-game-alike action scenes instead of character development, which is a shame because people love these characters, except poor Jar Jar of course.
(Some spoilers follow.) How much better this film would have been with the deleted scenes included. There would then have been more dialogue and less video-game, and the audience might have been more sympathetic to the love affair between Padme and Anakin. So in the deleted scenes, we see: (1) Padme is not just a pretty face with a great line in white jumpsuits, she is actually a good public speaker with clear ideals and because of this she has become the leader of the anti-war movement in the Senate with a good number of supporters; (2) the Jedi are actually feeling vulnerable and seriously worried about their lack of knowledge and control over the developing situation; (3) the Jedi analysis droids don't recognise the toxic dart (which is why it makes sense for a Jedi then to go and get advice from a cook in a diner) - the audience here may suspect that possibly all references to Kamino, the cloner's planet, have been deleted from Jedi records as well as being deleted from the imperial archives; (4) in Padme's culture, she should have settled down and got married by the age of 24, and indeed her sister has and has children and Padme envies this; (5) Padme has feelings for Anakin all along although she hides them well, denying that he is her boyfriend although she is the first boy she has ever brought home; (6) it makes sense for Padme to hook up with an offworlder, even though he is the future Darth Vader and a charmless brat most of the time, because she is a galaxy-wanderer herself and also she can see from the excellent way he carries himself in his first meeting with her parents that he is actually capable of being quite mature and likeable at times; (7) a court on Geonosis finds Padme and Anakin guilty of crimes and sentences them to death, they are not just shoved into the arena here for the hell of it.
If they wanted to shorten the running time of the film, they could usefully have cut: (a) the cringe-worthy fireside scene between Padme and Anakin; (b) the wedding scene at the end; (c) the first part of the fight between Yoda and Dooku, where they try to kill each other with flying bits of the set before they realise that lightsabers are the way forward; (d) the bit where R2-D2 flies - anyone can tell you that the R2 series of robots does not know how to fly, so somebody obviously made a big mistake here.
I guess the problem is that when they come to make these sort of decisions for the final cut, the film makers have seen the film or its component parts maybe 50 or 100 times, so they are not really in the best position to judge what is essential to the development of the story. They ought to stick to their first instincts from the time when they wrote the script.