Better without dialog

Rating: 5/10 (12 June 2005)

You have to see a new episode of Star Wars. It's part of cultural awareness. The first three episodes are bound to lose suspense because the audience already knows how everything will end. So you have to go for action and drama, and great special effects. Two out of three ain't bad, but when the drama falls as flat on its face as it did here, it's hard to forgive.
The film delivers all the digital razzle-dazzle money can buy, but by now that doesn't awe us anymore, and we begin to look for things like character, good dialog and drama. The light saber fights are still great, as are the chases and the exotic settings, but the stuff in between just keeps on disappointing.
The Force and the Jedi were mythic in episodes 4 and 5, but began to slide toward cheesiness in No. 6, the Return of the Jedi. Episode 1 started out great with a picture of the Jedi as they had been once, awesome. And we learned something more about the whole back-story--the Sith, Darth Maul and the Old Republic. It looked promising, but then it got bogged down in plotting about trade treaties and politics and cartoonish characters like Jar Jar Binks. Remember the conversation in Stand by Me about Mickey being a mouse, and Donald a duck, but "what is Goofy?" Jar Jar just didn't cut it as a realistic alien and Lucas has always had trouble noticing the difference.
General Grievous is a droid, so he doesn't have to look organic. Good choice. And that Transformers(tm) effect still works. Count Dooku was good too, but after his importance in Episode II, he deserved more than the short shrift Lucas gave him.
What continued to disappoint me wasn't just loss of the mystical and mythic Force or the wooden dialog and Hayden Christensen's total inability to portray the rage and torture that Anakin's story calls for. I was shocked when the Jedi were all caught flatfooted by Palpatine's turning out to be the Sith Lord. Did Lucas really think that something so obvious to the audience who remembered Return of the Jedi, wouldn't be detected by the adepts on the Jedi Council? Where was the famous Jedi sense for disturbances in the Force? They should have had better intelligence about what their enemies and those of the Republic were up to than our CIA had about 9/11 or WMD. And why didn't they know about the ability to "recalibrate" the clone army to switch sides at the flip of a switch, and worry about it? The sudden switch and the near genocide against the Jedi just didn't wash. It came across as trying to wrap up the story too quickly, without sufficient development. How could all these Jedis be Masters and yet not figure out that Anakin was slipping to the Dark Side, or if they did, not help him and instruct him with the kind of things Luke learned on Dagobah or explain a little more about patience and testing, instead of keeping him in the dark and frustrating him with their own impatience and distrust? That's where the basic failure of the last two episodes lies--in the unbelievability of the characters and the stiff dialog. It's no sin that the story is predictable, but when the dialog makes you wince, it leaves you with a bad taste. The action is great, and LucasFilms seems to be a unfailing font of creative new weapons, robots, creatures, vehicles and hairdos, but the movie would have been much better without dialog and just being narrated, rather than expecting Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen to create chemistry and pathos. Lucas doesn't know how to write realistic dialog, and his ear seems to be getting tinnier with each film. You'd think he'd have learned it by now, and collaborated by someone with a gift for subtlety and realistic speech.
Update: Watching on the TV screen is really sad. The digital effects always look fake on TV, and these are the state of the art, but still don't convince on the small screen. Maybe in HD. The dialog and acting are worse the more you see the film. It's almost camp.