For (dumb) Kids Only

Rating: 1/10 (20 May 2005)

I saw the Empire Strikes Back when I was a kid. I liked it. I saw it again when I was a teenager. I still liked it. Just to make sure that I was correct I watched it again before going to see the pre-quels. I was still amazed by the story, the characters, everything. Now, let's talk about TroS. It was empty, devoid of any emotion, full of ridiculous pieces of dialogue, unbelievable situations, unbelievable characters, fights without suspense, meaningless space battles. The movie tried to cling on to 'themes' from Star Wars like R2-D2, 3-CPO, Wookies, etc. But why? The first time the droids were funny, the sixth time they are not even annoying, they are just pointless reminders of the glory days. I couldn't care less what happened to them. The scene where R2 saves the heroes by remotely controlling an elevator: where did I see something like this? The main problem with repeating scenes from previous SW movies is that the audience already knows the scene so it's not original anymore. Worse still the audience already knows the outcome too, there goes suspense. So what's left is a mechanic execution of a trite re-enactment.
CGI makes repetition easy. Once you create a very detailed model of a huge starship it costs next to nothing to replicate that starship on the screen. The computer happily renders another instance. Problem is, we already know that repetition is easy to do with computers. "How many starship are there in this battle? Fifty !? Let's add another hundred, no wait, *two* hundred to make it more awesome." Why should I be amazed that some technician typed in a large number into a pop-up dialog window? And I had the feeling that in every single scene somebody boosted the numbers without constraint, beyond reason. Buildings were not just large, they were GIGANTIC. Literally, miles high buildings were the standard, not the exception. But all this left me unimpressed because I know that the height of the building is just another parameter for the computer and it's a trivial thing to render a building that is larger than mount Everest.
Overall, the movie is in the same league with the other two pre-quels. A really bad movie with a lot of over-blown CGI. Good with popcorn.