Doesn't work

Rating: 4/10 (16 June 2003)

I think the plot of this movie is actually pretty good. I wish they'd found a better way to make Anakin go dark than having his mother die, but after Episode I (in which nothing happened) I had pretty low expectations plot-wise ... it was nice to see a little intrigue & mystery, and I like the fact that Sidious seems to be playing both sides in this war.

I agree that the romance is excruciatingly painful, but I want to note that I do think it's *believable*. Anakin and Amidala are both so incredibly insipid and detestable that I think they're perfect for each other. Anakin delivers horrible lines, Amidala is wonderfully impressed by them, Anakin is wonderfully impressed that she's impressed, and bam--two pretty, empty-headed teenagers with no personality whatsoever are smitten with each other. It's like a stereotypical football player & cheerleader, and totally believable, though maybe not in the way Lucas intended.
I like the lightsaber fights, as always, and I enjoyed the sequence near the beginning where they're trying to catch the assassin. The rest of the action scenes were pretty boring. In particular, I'm amazed by how boring the asteroid field scene was. Asteroid fields are awesome ... I'm still mystified as to how they made that boring.
All in all, this movie just doesn't work. I don't think any one flaw is really fatal for it--it could have survived with bad love scenes, or bad acting, or too much CGI, or all of the above. But it doesn't because there's just no spark. They want to preview Anakin's going dark, so we get a lot of close-ups of him grinding his teeth. They want a cool saber duel between Jedi, so we get a guy making things fall and shooting lightning out of his hands--the same stuff that drove the fights in the earlier trilogy, and it doesn't exactly awe anymore. Everything about this movie reeks of laziness, dullness, and a total lack of interest or inspiration. Most of it is boring, some of it has explosions, but the whole thing just plods along as if the scriptwriter had something else he'd rather be doing. I don't even care to compare this movie to Episode I because it's moot at this point--I think the new Star Wars trilogy is dead, and I don't think we have any reason to expect Episode III to save it. I'm less bothered by the fact that this movie has some painfully bad parts (all of the Star Wars movies do) than by the fact that it just has no really good parts ... none of the people involved in making this movie seem half as excited about it as the people paying to see it. (Even John Williams is way below his usual standard--like most things about the trilogy, the music is passable but not as good as it could or should be.) It's really too bad, but at least they can never undo the original trilogy. And the Matrix trilogy is shaping up to be pretty awesome.