Five down, one to go

Rating: 5/10 (31 March 2003)

It's time to face facts. The last good Star Wars film was released 23 years ago. The decline started with Jedi, and it just keeps getting worse with the prequels. I could care less about whiz-bang action sequences -- all I ask is a decent story. There's not one here. The plot is labored. The pacing drags terribly during the love scenes. The dialog is beyond stiff. I still hope that Lucas will pull off a masterstroke with the last episode (memo to George -- let somebody else write the script and tell them to make it dark). But I'm not holding my breath.
I was a huge fan of the first two films (I know, I'm supposed to say Episodes IV and V). What made those movies so great is that Lucas had created this world that had a great back-story -- all this history that had gone before. The Imperial Senate, The Clone Wars, The Jedis, Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan ("Old Ben") Kenobi, all of these things were alluded to
within the first hour of the first film. It gave the films a sense of a greater history (Lord of the Rings has that same mojo). The created world and the story taking place within it became that much more believable because you felt it was part of a grand history. The weight of that history added a gravity to the stories that made them all the more compelling.
The prequels series has nothing of the sort. The political discourse that Lucas apparently finds necessary does nothing other than advance the plot. It's tedious, it's just not engaging, and we end up not really caring. Continuity issues are all over the place. If R2D2 could fly, why didn't he do it in all the other movies? Christiansen and Portman have zero chemistry. Anakin is an extremely annoying character. You just want to slap him. Some of the CGI is terrible (those big lumpy creatures in the meadow come to mind).
The sad part is that Lucas used to know what he was doing, bad dialogue and all. But that magic is dead.
I know it's not a contest, but what Peter Jackson is doing with Lord Of The Rings shows that it's possible to have a mythical action blockbuster that is successful enough as a movie experience to be nominated for Best Picture three consecutive times (assuming ROTK is nominated, which it will be). Jackson's films have that exuberant film-school quality that made Lucas earlier efforts so good, and that's why they work as well as they do.
It's also interesting to take a look at the box office business for the franchise -- Episode II is doing considerably less business that Episode I. People are voting with their feet. I think that will get Lucas' attention, but I'm not sure it'll do any good.
I know people want to defend the Star Wars franchise for some reason -- maybe they're too emotionally invested to see how thin these films have become. But it's time to wake up and smell the coffee, folks.