A 140 minute computer game.

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2002)

Like so many others I hoped and prayed that Episode 2 would turn out to be an improvement over the awful Episode 1 "The Phantom Menace" but it turned out to be just as bad. About an hour into the movie I was already looking at my watch, hardly believing what I was seeing.
As it was with The Phantom Menace, there were no interesting characters to speak of and those that did show promise were never given the chance to truly shine, and a movie where you don't care what happens to the characters can never be very exciting.
So much of the movie was in C.G.I that it left me wondering why they bothered to have live actors in it, but as with The Phantom Menace, the Special effects are the star and apparently the only thing that mattered to the film makers, since the storytelling is this bad. Too many action sequences seemed to be just thrown in because they might look good in a computer game (which I'm sure will be coming out) and far too many stupid one-liners which had me shaking my head, thinking "My God, Star Wars has been turned into an Austin Powers movie" .... Silly one-liners work for Austin Powers but NOT for Star Wars.
Still, it should have been possible for George Lucas to make an entertaining movie using just special effects and a lot of brainless action, but no, he could not even manage that. A screenplay without characters to care for, and even though the story (as we all know from Episodes IV-VI) is a good one, the screenplay is just TOO awful to make an entertaining 143 minute movie with the first hour being mainly an unbelievable love story.
This movie, as stated before, is about two and a half hours long, but it feels a lot longer, and it left me with the feeling that I had been watching somebody playing a computer game for two and a half hours.
Unbelievably this movie was worse than a waste of money, it was a waste of time, and I for one will not be wasting time or money on Episode III, no matter how much I love Episodes IV-VI.