Script lets the movie down

Rating: 4/10 (15 May 2005)

When this movie first came out I was in Year 12 of school and went to see it in the first week of release. I left the movie theatre being very impressed by the movie, after some impressive special effects scenes. However, once I thought about the movie more and talked it over with my friends I realised that the movie was missing a lot of substance. Now three years later, I have just finished watching the movie on TV, and agree totally with my past criticisms of the movie: the script is pretty damn bad.
If you took away the shroud of computer graphics that dominate every scene in this movie, the dialogue would be left naked on its own to embarrassingly be ridiculed. Even with the special effects there are plenty of laugh-out-loud unintentionally funny moments, especially the love story between Anakin and Padme. There has been plenty of criticism of the acting in this movie, especially Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor. Whilst I did find their stiff Jedi performances pretty bad, they were really doing the best that they could with the script. Conversely, whilst the 'serious' parts of the movie actually were unintentionally funny, the one-liner jokes were pretty cringe-worthy; especially those by C3PO. The film also resorts to using nudge nudge-type jokes about things that happen in later movies such as Obi-Wan's "Why do I get the feeling that some day you will be the death of me?" to Anakin; something I really hate about movies set in the past.
Whilst the special effects are very impressive, especially on the big screen, George Lucas really doesn't know when enough is enough. Whilst the Lord of the Rings films showed that you can successfully pull off having realistic-looking special effects used on a massive scale, many of the images in the film do look pretty fake, especially the scenes with the human actors fighting against CG enemies. Still, there are some good scenes, especially at the end of the film with the Colosseum-type fight scene and the battle that follows. I understand that Lucas is being bold in his use of CGI graphics, which is very good, but I'm not sure how well the visuals in this film will age in the future, as there are a few scenes that are a little too ambitious that you can clearly tell the actors are standing in front of a green screen. With the LotR films, I got swept up by the action, but in these new star wars films I'm always conscious that computer wizardry is behind what I'm seeing.
Overall, the film is fairly good to watch as a popcorn-type film, but whilst there are some great special effects-driven scenes, the whole film is let down by a script that is of rough draft quality.