Sad Sign of the Times

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2003)

I always forgave George Lucas for the relative horror that was 'Return of the Jedi', because it did have some elements of greatness alongside some of the worst decisions about the franchise ever. I won't go into detail here. The new films I cannot forgive however, because they show so clearly what is wrong with the action-film industry today: artifice, shallowness, and the unfortunate demographic and marketing discovery that the dumber you make something nowadays, the more money there is to be made from it. (PT Barnum realized this a long time ago, of course, but even he didn't dumb things down *this* much)
George Lucas, if you read these reviews, please pay attention (semi-spoilers):
1. (also a fault of Episode 1) - did they go to Mitsubishi or something for the designs of the spacecraft and various machinery for these new films? One thing about episodes 4-6: *almost* everything follows combinations of the fundamental shapes - the triangle, the rectangle and the circle. This general emphasis on angularity looked great, and really signified the basic look of things in the Star Wars universe, while still managing to look sleek. Now, however, we see things that are more often based on the teardrop or beetle shape, and other flowing, unusually curved designs that are so significant to today's automotive design. And all of this technological finesse is supposed to presage the designs of the original trilogy. In our own history, we see varying degrees of aerodynamic shaping in cars and airplanes, chronologically going from box-like to curved. Lucas should have made note of this and followed suit. As is, the curvy fighter ship designs look more aerodynamic than the "later" design of the x-wing, as an example. And yes, I *did* notice the Boeing-like transport plane in the beginning of the film. It still doesn't qualify, not even with the artificial propeller sounds, and it doesn't look like a "star wars" design at all. None of it does.
2. On that note, the über-busy CGI that densely dominates every scene of the film is distracting and unnecessary. It is impressive that the ILM computers can render so much at once, but it doesn't mean that they should. Craft dictates that the denseness of a Mahler symphony gives way to the appropriateness of a Beethoven one. I don't want to bring out the modern proverb that "less is more" really, because I don't really believe it is true of all things. But! Some discretion, some restraint please.
3. Why pander so obviously to earth-inspired architecture? We see typical Roman columns and vaulted ceilings in one scene, a horrible 1950's diner in the next (Edward Hopper would be rolling in his grave), and finally, a nod to the Gladiatorial arena in the finale. Even with his limited budget in the original "Star Wars", Lucas managed to create environments that looked unlike anything on earth. One might recall the cantina and say, "Ha! That's unquestionably a bar!" The point is, it's a 'star wars' bar, and it fit the look of Mos-Eisely very well. Whereas that new diner looked just like any diner anywhere on earth, right down to the salt and pepper shakers. One thing: it's ok to borrow from earth sources to make the architecture look unusual, just make sure that the sources themselves have nothing to do with architecture! The oval patterns all over the interior walls of the Death Star were plainly based on the cooling holes of a WWI-era Spandau machine gun, for example. When shifted over to architecture, this earth-based design became one of the most recognizable "Star Wars" patterns, and nobody batted an eyelash over it.
4. CGI characters vs. muppets/CGI spacecraft vs. models: I'm not going to elaborate here, but, some of the CGI characters look horrible, and should be shelved until they know how to make these sorts of things look even remotely organic - and it affects entirely the interaction of real characters and non-real... As for the spacecraft, I still prefer the look of the models over CGI designs. Again, even with non-organic forms, it just looks more realistic.
5. Yes, Natalie Portman is beautiful. "Hot" even...but, in the future, if you're going to give her Britney Spears fashions with no midriff to show off her lovely abdomen, please just do so - make it part of her costume to begin with. Don't have a 1000-toothed monster tear the cloth away - it looked ridiculous, and betrayed entirely what you were trying to do, but in an artificial and ridiculous way.
6. It's too late now, but...the casting for the human look of Darth Vader has been bad since Return of the Jedi. First, we see the Humpty Dumpty, living soft-boiled egg man when Luke takes Vader's mask off in RotJ; next, we're treated to a typical American soccer kid in Ep. I, who looked like Nicholas from "Eight is Enough" and betrayed no super-intellect that we're told makes him special; and finally, we get the raver-era, n-synch-style whining weinie of "Clones". Two out of these three couldn't act at all - I'll leave you to guess who. How can any of these people live up to the physical stature of David Prowse (the man underneath the Vader suit) or the authority of James Earl Jones' voice? Who was in charge of casting here? What were they thinking?
7. It's not the fault of the actors really, but...the dialogue between Anakin and the princess/senator was *really* bad. It essentially boils down to Anakin hitting on Amidala every chance he gets until she relents - and he didn't even need to give her any alcohol! Then we're treated to interspersed lines of trite pseudo-poetry and cliche. WE're in the age of the anti-romantic, to be sure, but you can still do better than this. It was worse than bad. It made me wonder if the writer ever got any himself.
8. It's all been stated before, but...please never throw in the side-scroller video game cliche of characters having to dodge mashing machinery on an assembly line again.
9. Surrogate Senator Jar Jar. I don't even need to say anything else about this.
10. The concept of cute. In the original, untarnished Star Wars, the cuteness factor was relegated to jawas and the two lovable droid protagonists. This was fine, because you never knew what the jawas really looked like - they could have been hideous beasties underneath the cloaks - and the droids were relegated to an anthropomorphic, pompous, effeminate robot who happened to look very cool, and a little save-the-day useful robot who talked in chirps and moog synth sounds who also looked really cool. The mechanical nature of the droids made up for their cuteness factor, as did the efficacy in which C-3PO spoke and the non-speech of R2. Nowadays, well...stop it please. Kids aren't that stupid, and you don't need to Disney the franchise to death like you have since RotJ.