Yes, it *IS* as bad as "Phantom Menace"

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2002)

Everyone currently talking about how much better Part II is than Part I are going to experience a tremendous *POP* in a few months, as their heads come out of their asses and they realize how they've fooled themselves.
Cast your mind back to "Phantom Menace," and remember the wishy-washy way everyone was talking about the wonderful images and effects, and trying not to focus too much on Jar-Jar, Jake Lloyd, and the god-awful script. It took a few months before a consensus was suddenly achieved that hey, it really was bad. No one wanted to believe it.
Well, the same thing is happening again, with far less excuse.
Yes, it has some cool moments, particularly towards the end (and Christopher Lee, I'll give you, is awesome)--but this movie SUCKS. Sucks sucks sucks suck sucks. Sucks like a Hoover. Has high levels of ambient suckiosity. Stop trying to convince yourself it's good--you've been taken for your ticket price, and you might as well admit to it.
Yes, there is less Jar-Jar, but we have the Padme/Anakin love story to take it's place. Yes, we don't have an unconvincing child as the hero, but instead we get a whiny, self-pitying adolescent. (I'm undecided as to whether Hayden Christiansen is a terrible actor; he was given a part that Olivier couldn't have played.)
By the time you start get the big action scenes, towards the end, it is impossible to care about the characters. For the first hour and a half the movie is boring and forgettable, except for the few scenes that are so dire they become unintentionally funny, and memorable for all the wrong reasons.
When Anakin, in an overheated moment, tells Padme that he loves her so much he's "in agony," someone in the audience with me muttered, "So am I."
This is a film that cries out for two robots and an astronaut down in the right corner, making wisecracks as it spools out.