Where's Ed Wood when you need him?

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2002)

I'm sorry. I really was hoping this one would be good. Indeed from a lot of the views coming from the critics and public, this was supposed to be a return to the pleasures of 'Empire Strikes back'. It has the multi-strand plotlines, but that's about it. The acting is far worse, the plots are so intricate that they don't really make sense, and ironically I didn't think the special effects are that convincing. Yea sure, they were obviously state of the art CGI, but you felt like you were watching 2 movies. The live action bits and then the bits where the characters would step into a sumptuous video game.
Films such as 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Minority Report' have shown that CGI needs to complement the action, not exist just for the sake of it. Ironically, the one time it works well is when a CGI Yoda has his famous light-saber duel, which was one of the simpler moments. Not when they're 40 billion space ships exploding simultaneously across the scene.
Of course a problem with the plot is that we all know how things are going to turn out. Nevertheless you do get the impression that George Lucas is having to stretch things pretty thinly to try and fit it all together so the end product matches up to the beginning of Star Wars IV.

and then of course we have the dialogue and the acting. Christopher Lee does okay and if you haven't seen 'Lord of the Rings' where he gives exactly the same performance, it's quite impressive. I always said about the 'Phantom Menace', when everyone was moaning about the computer generated Jar Jar Binks, that at least he was better than the computer-generated Ewan McGregor. The main problem being that someone (Mr.Lucas?) has obviously told Ewan to play the part like an 80-year-old Alec Guiness. The trouble is Obi Wan is supposed to be a young man. Even Alec Guiness was young once. Watch him, in 'The Man in the White Suit', or 'The Lavender Hill Mob' or best of all 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' - where you've got 8 performances to choose from. Oh well it pays the rent. The rest of the cast with two obvious exceptions is only playing out cameos, if slightly more padded ones than the previous film.
and now saving the best till last. Natalie Portman is okay, in a pretty thankless role (did you notice that except at the end she seemed to be wearing a different outfit with each scene change), but poor young Hayden Christensen, he does seem rather lost. It's going to take an awful lot of work to turn a petulant high school teenager (I kept looking for the Acne) into the powerfully sinister Darth Vader. As for the relationship between Anakin and Amidala, let's just say I have seen better-written and more convincing romances in an average episode of 'Neighbours'.
One final point, for some reason, some of the aliens speak English with weird accents while others speak in their own languages which is translated with subtitles. I mention this because one of these aliens seems to be communicating with what sound suspiciously like a string of belches and farts. Is this a subtle comment on the film by its own makers, I wonder?