What happened to the old Star Wars?

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2003)

I do not quite know what to think of this movie. I saw the Phantom Menace and was at best an indifferent viewer. But this one-well, this one gave me the shivers.
Forget the plot, which is plain daft in places. That was part of the first three Star Wars, and it worked quite well. Forget, too, the wooden acting from the leads (do they really expect us to believe that what we see are a pair passionately in love?), and the terrible, unconvincing dialogue.
No, what worries me is the philosophy of the movies. I do not necessarily agree that a corrupt and inefficient democracy, like the Old Republic, is the very best system the world has to offer. But I could forgive Lucas that.
No, the worst part was the clones. Think about it. In essence, Lucas is saying that all those Storm Troopers whose faces you never see in the first trilogy (A New Hope and sequels) are clones. In short, they have no humanity; they deserve to die. The Empire was built by things closer to robots than by men, which is plain silly. Every dictatorship is built by ordinary men, even if it is under the direction of one evil person.
Here, the Stormtroopers are no longer men conscripted by the Empire, which would have given them some humanity, would have made us feel some pity. It is quite all right to kill them; they are clones who have been deprived of their conscience and intelligence (they no longer have the possibility to discuss orders). They are a mechanical army of brain-washed robots, and it is no real casualty to kill them. Lucas is trying to make us feel that war is justified: look, the other side was clearly evil, and they were not human after all anyway. It sounds terribly like Nazi propaganda to me.
And it seems to me that there was quite a complex character in all of this: the Chancellor (later Emperor) Palpatine. Here we have a man who despairs at the inefficiency of the system and who seeks to seize the power to put an end to that, and is in turn corrupted by it. But Lucas makes him a scheming evil politician whose only preoccupation is to rule the universe. How original. There was some real material for character development here; both Palpatine and Anakin undergo their own downfall as they are corrupted by the Dark Side, which is a metaphor for greed and power.
But Lucas just gave us a propaganda film: the other side is evil because it wants power, and don't worry if a few Stormtroopers die: what the hell, they were clones anyway.
So perhaps it is just me; perhaps I have grown more cynical over the years, and less inclined to categorize the world between good and evil. Perhaps the previous Star Wars movies carried the same overtones, and I never saw them. But personally I think that Lucas goes from bad to worse as he moves along the arc of his new trilogy.
I do not want to imagine what he is going to do with the third film.