Not much more than CGI pyrotechnics

Rating: 2/10 (29 June 2002)

I am convinced that George Lucas could film 2 1/2 hours of his dog running around Skywalker Ranch, title it "STAR WARS: Fido's Sunny Day," and a cadre of pasty faced adolescents of all ages would waste weeks of their lives lined up to see it.
The names "Star Wars" and "George Lucas" combined equal box office gold, no matter how rancid the actual film may be (See "The Phantom Menace" for a prime example), so don't let high ticket sales fool you. Neither should you be swayed by the high ratings on IMDB, a ballot box which the Star Wars faithful readily stuff. The bottom line is that this is not a terrible movie, but it doesn't even touch "Return of the Jedi," let alone the other superior Star Wars movies.
What we have here is a hastily written script that must conform to a pre-defined story line. Take this exact script, change the names and the references so that it falls outside the realm of Star Wars, and you have a straight-to-video release that the Sci Fi network wouldn't even show. But Lucas gave up on storylines long ago, figuring that one part Star Wars legacy plus two parts marketing hype plus three parts ILM wizardry equals one great movie. Wrong.
We have all these, of course. We have Anakin and Obi Wan and Yoda and C3PO and R2D2 (who is becoming less cute and more annoying with each picture), each of whom is clumsily shoved into his role. We have TV commercials and web sites and Happy Meals and enough toys, games, clothes, cups, etc to fill the Death Star three times over. And we have Computer Generated Images. We have CGI galore! We have spaceships and explosions and robotic armies and alien beings, all constructed solely from ILM pixels, out the wazoo. But the whole is an empty product. A soulless mess that looks more like a highly polished ripoff of other movies.
For example, the first part of the movie contains a high speed chase through the hover traffic of Coruscant. It looks as though Lucas lifted the traffic from "The Fifth Element" and the cityscape from "Blade Runner" (the cars are even referred to as "spinners," a direct reference to BR). There is one of the most lackluster, uninspired love stories ever filmed that could have been lifted from a hundred different movies. And the final scene (the only redeeming scene in the whole movie) smacks of "Gladiator." Maybe this is Lucas' tip of the hat to Ridley Scott, or maybe it's just lazy filmmaking by a director who knows he's going to make his money back 3 times over. I tend to side with the latter.
Something else that Lucas just doesn't seem to realize is that special effects are there to accentuate a movie, not to substitute for the traditional conventions of plot, dialogue, and well-rounded characters. There is a reason that fireworks displays rarely go more than a few minutes. They are beautiful and exciting and awe-inspiring in short doses, but after an hour of floral shells, they all begin to look the same and your neck begins to hurt from craning skyward and you start to think about going home and hitting the sack. The same can be said for movies. The computer generated effects begin to wear thin, especially when there is anything but an interesting story behind it. Lucas expects us to look at his handiwork and go, "Ooooh! Cool!" but we've seen a lot of this before, and after two hours it just ain't that cool anymore.
One last thing, there is one more movie left before "Star Wars" is supposed to take place, but there are enough plot holes left to be filled by three more movies, which does not bode well for the next film. I imagine 3/4 of the last Star Wars movie will be spent bridging gaping chasms between "Attack of the Clones" and "A New Hope" with awkward plotting and cheap devices. A perfect example is this: Anakin finds C3PO working on a moisture farm, the same farm that Luke is raised on. In fact, Owen and Beru are there as well. So how is it that 3PO doesn't recognize the farm when he and Artoo are sold in the original movie? Better yet, how come Owen doesn't recognize 3PO when the jawas bring him by to be sold? I'll bet 10 to 1 the droids get their memory erased or something equally cheap.
The bottom line is this is a better film than "The Phantom Menace," but that's no great feat, not by a long shot.