Goodbye Star Wars...

Rating: 1/10 (26 July 2002)

*MINOR SPOILERS* (though not too many!)
In this awful, uninspired film, Lucas finally manages to kill every hope I've ever had, that the new trilogy might actually be worth seeing. The plot is stupid, the effects are over the top and the acting is just plain bad! I know, that Lucas is really proud of the fact that he can do several takes of the same scene and then cut and paste the actors into the film as he pleases. Not good!
In the old trilogy, everything relied on models. Thus, in some way it seemed real. This time though, everything is too shiny, too neat and way to unreal. Lucas, watch Lord of the Rings for tips on how to use CGI.
Okay, I know the dialogue was kinda poor in the first trilogy. But in a way, it fitted the background of Space Opera. The acting was okay and more importantly: the script was based on classic themes, it created a logical world and the three movies each provided some important part of the overall legend of Star Wars.
This time around, we have a wooden Anakin. We have some ridiculously kliche romance thing going on. We have thirty plotlines, each of them delivered by puppet actors and rushed through on a computer. We have a Yoda, that literally breaks his character by fighting like a smurf on speed. We have the bad guys, that just sort of "pop up" at a convenient time with some hare-brained scheme of world dominance.
The action sequences are beautifully done! It is some of the best lightsaber scenes I have ever seen. But the problem with most of the fightscenes is this: You don't really care about who wins. You are not sucked into the action. The battlescenes are between millions of CGI characters, and you couldn't care less about which piece of binary code happens to win in the end. The original trilogy focused on drawing you ínto the cockpit, putting you in the Death Star trench and picking up that lightsabre and kill the Emperor. This time around, you just wish that someone would become remotely interesting. Like so much of this movie, it is beautifully done, but impersonal, wooden and ultimately too unimportant for you to do anything but fall gently asleep or whine about getting your money back.
I want those three hours of my life back, Lucas! Please stop making more movies like this. Settle for getting great ideas, and then let someone else direct, write the script and produce! Please! How can it take you three years to produce such a piece of cr**? It took 18 months to make LotR! Watch it and learn!