Great visuals undermined by weak script, acting

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2007)

I hadn't seen this one since it was first released to theaters back in '02, and it didn't seem as good as I remembered it. In the theaters I liked it enough to see it twice, but on a TV screen Ep II's flaws are more evident.
What really brings this film down is the flat dialog and sub-par acting through most of it. It's really noticeable in the first half hour; the dialog is mumbo-jumbo, the kind of lines that you'd expect from one of those old '40s serials that the "Star Wars" saga was modeled after. You'd think that by now, however, screenwriters would know how to put a little humanity into the the script.
Even worse is the acting; Christensen and McGregor say their lines as if they were merely rehearsing the scenes and didn't know the cameras were rolling. Natalie Portman tries to add depth to her character, but there's only so much she can do with such a cardboard script.
The other major problem with this entry in the series is that it tries to do too much; since Anakin was such a good little kid in the first film but had to be turned into Darth Vader in the third, Lucas tries to cram in most of his "turn to the Dark Side" in this volume, and it just comes off as forced. Plus they also had to fit in the major part of the big conspiracy that results in the downfall of the Republic, but there's so much going on that, frankly, it's hard to tell what's going on. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor can a government ruling "thousands and thousands of solar systems" completely fall apart in seven hours of screen time. I'm at the point now where I'm reading the novelizations of the films and then watching the films just to try to understand everything that's happening on-screen.
The film finally picks up once the great "Clone War" gets underway. Lucas and his staff deserve kudos for some of the most fantastic scenes ever committed to film, and here it actually made more sense to have it all CGI - the logistics of trying to keep that large of a cast and crew all on the same page would have been too much for even Cecil B. DeMille. Stuff like this is why mega screens were made.
Unfortunately the film as a whole is too flawed to make up for the fun and excitement of the final half hour. I know most "SW" fans will think I'm crazy for saying it, but overall I have to say I enjoyed "Phantom Menace" more than this one.