Where's the beef...

Rating: 1/10 (22 May 2005)

Part of my beef, is now 3 movies deep into the prequels... Palpatine and Anakin are still essentially normal "good" citizens. Their transformation is rushed, unbelievable, and mindless. The Sith needed to be more developed overall... and unfortunately there's no evil here to speak of, just some dopey fretting and rather conspicuous manipulation. Why should we care if the powerful Jedi's can only beat up some non-firing security-guard robots, and then some crusty Senator out of the blue can kick 3 Jedis and Samuel Jackson's ***... That's just resolving an outcome that's already been decided, with zero narrative to lead us there. It's like if Trent Lott suddenly had Jet Li's fighting skills and Nicolai Tesla's ability to fire electricity... with no explanation.
For that matter, my second larger "Industrial Light and Magic" beef is this... these are pre-quels. The technology should be say, older and more primitive to the 4th New Hope installment. Why does the technology seem to be more advanced in these "older" movies, and seem to get more and more complex with each prequel... to the point we have R2D2 jumping, having the ability to catch items thrown to him... it's just dumb. The pointless waterwheel battle on wooki-oine...there's a scene where you almost expect to see Chewbacca water skiing... it's absurd. And stupid dragonfly ships. That whole planet battle scene looked like a bad Johnny Quest than a SW epic struggle. A friend mentioned a lot of the CGI "concepts" were stolen from various Japanese anime, like Obiwans' lizard steed... and this cut and paste aesthetic shows through as a desperation move by someone short on imagination. "Um yeah, have uh, one of your creative team sketch something up for me, I'll be at soccer practice and okay it later.... wow, that looks 'different', sure let's go with it." This corporate design-by-committee style just makes the prequel series totally bland and utterly uninspired.
Gone is the sense of scale that made the originals powerful... the first image of the Star Destroyer filling the screen, the Jawa sandcrawler lumbering along, slowly being drawn into a monstrous moon-sized battleship, or massive dinosaur sized Walkers... those designs generated a sense of awe via scale, and convey power without overkill. As opposed to attempting to create awe via sheer mass volume... 2 light sabers... then four light sabers... millions of boring toaster-headed clones... spamming the viewer with millions of ships on screen battling all over the place. That's not dramatic or impressive or awe inspiring... it's spamming the audience with volume, quantity over quality.
This prequel series was a pathetic missed opportunity... at the very least they could have had Spielberg direct one of them, alas Indiana Jones, just to bring back some wonder, real action, and real direction.