Predictable

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2005)

By know you know the most important things: the acting and dialog are unbearable (except in the case of McDiarmid), and the effects are busy but competent. The story spins and spins until it ends where we know it must with each step being supremely predicable.
This comment deals with only two elements: risk and dimension, plus a few miscellany.
Risk:
This is the most profitable franchise in the history of media. Lucas has shown that fans will turn out no matter how bad the films are. The last two were scandals yet sold tons of tickets. He could have done anything with this. Anything.
Almost every other major player in Hollywood at this point in their careers  rich beyond imagining and nearuniversally celebrated  would strive to satisfy their peers that they indeed are capable of doing something clever and inventive if not artistic. They know history grinds away at hacks, no matter how successful, until they become jokes, Edward Bulwer- Lytton was in his day roughly in the position that Lucas is now. Today he is a joke from Snoopy in the comics to the yearly Bulwer-Lytton junk writing contest.
Recall this movie and ask yourself if there was anything in it that surprised you, that wasn't exactly as you expected from past movies, that made you sit up and say, "wow." With the approximately 8 billion dollars this franchise will make directly, there could have been room for something  at least one thing that was cool. There was not a shred of new imagination in the cities, creatures, props or design. Not a single novel technological item or scientific or even cultural idea was introduced, usually what defines science fiction.
Though Lucas owns the largest and most advanced special effects company in the world (Industrial Light and Magic), there was no effect that we haven't seen elsewhere. Does this lack of risk, ambition and novelty strike you as odd?
The first movie in the series (the 1977 one) did introduce something new in effects, the dogfight and trench run at the end. Since then, effect-laden films have learned how to place and move the camera in new and exciting places. Even a film as mundane as "Unleashed," which I saw last week, moved the camera into the midst of the fight scenes. Lucas' camera is still stuck in the same mode as in 1977, which he (admittedly) stole from Kurosawa.
Dimension:
That is... except for the first seven minutes or so. That is the only part of the whole movie where we see a new camera eye. This is dePalma's eye: it follows the fighters and their pilots; it swings around them and precedes them, it swings to their point of view, it moves back out of the battle and back in. But shortly we are back in the old static greenscreen mode with Jackson.
There's a famous story in Hollywood. Lucas took his original Star Wars money and built ILM and Pixar. He really had ambitions to change the future of cinema. ILM has indeed become a major force in movie-making and some say the world is now open to new possibilities. But ILM has instead become rooted in realities: you imagine a place and they make it look real. Pixar was always the place where more imaginative and impossible worlds would take shape.
But he simply didn't know what to do with it. He couldn't stretch his vision beyond what he could already see, so he sold it to Steve Jobs. Jobs has focused not so much on inventing new realities but on a new feeling of dimensionality for the viewer. "Nemo" was cast in the sea so that the action and the camera would be free to move in all three dimensions. Pixar has profoundly changed how we expect our eye to move in threespace, and they have effected that change more in the last 4 years.
Space battles are ideal fields for this sort of awareness, but simple travel in high cities affords lots of opportunities as well. This movie has many, many places where the new consciousness could have been employed, but it wasn't.
Miscellaneous:
Ewan McGregor's career will survive. He's already been in two films that actually did make a dent in the universe ("Pillow Book," and "Moulin Rouge"). He doesn't need to claim this as an important film.
Non-US viewers will certainly see this story as a metaphor for American politics and policies of force: a democracy that sacrifices freedom for security; a war based on sleight of hand; the statement that anyone not for us is an enemy; the misappropriation of religion for political gain...
On opening weekend of this film, I predict that it will be remembered as something that changed the political narrative in the US by sheer exposure (and timing). And that as mythmaking and movie-making remembered not as important but fondly recalled, like "The Wizard of Oz" is today.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.