By The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
This movie is marginally better than Phantom Menace, but only marginally. Phantom Menace had approximately 0 good minutes in it. This film has 2 decent scenes, both of which occur in the final 20 minutes of the movie--which, incidentally, is only about 2 hours long, but feels like back-to-back Titanics. AOTC also has a lot more Obi-Wan, and this time, for some reason, Ewan MacGregor is acting. Ewan, in fact, is really the only consistently good thing about this movie, and thanks to his herculanean efforts AOTC manages to reverse the damage done to Obi-Wan in Phantom Menace and make him a real character again.
He is also the main thing responsible for the abovementioned 10 good minutes, although he shares some of the credit with Samuel "At Last, I Can Get In Touch With My Inner Hit Man" Jackson and Yoda. CGI Yoda didn't bother me as much has he bothered some other folks, and it did finally allow them to give him something real to do.
What separates those 10 minutes from the dreck surrounding it is that finally, in that sequence, you start to feel like these characters are actual human beings in actual danger using actual resourcefulness and cunning. The other good thing about it is that there is almost no dialogue. The conjunction is not a coincidence.
I could dissect the plot, which is just rotten as a banana that's been left out on Tatouine, but what's the point? Its flaws are so numerous they defy analysis. In an action flick, one has to accept a certain amount of that, but this is really egregious. But absolutely the worst thing about this movie is the dialogue. It is quite simply, utterly, inexcusably bad.
I remember Episode IV. I know it wasn't exactly Hamlet. But there, the writing was serviceable and some of the characters had personalities. Every single thing about the way this movie is written is wrong, painful, and so very, very awful as to be not only infuriating, but insulting. If this were a paper turned in by one of my students I would refuse to grade it. The fact that this is one of the most expensive movies ever only makes the insult that much worse.
Meanwhile, there's the acting. Lord have mercy. Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen vie for the prize here, but I do think that Portman must bear away the palm in the end. She is just awful. Even standing still she fails to convince you that she is anything other than a fairly pretty woman in an elaborate yet strangely revealing costume. When she moves or speaks, it gets worse.
As for Anakin, well, 2 things. 1) The fact that everyone in the movie calls him Annie is distracting. 2) He does not disturb, forebode, or terrify; he merely annoys. Smack! No biscuit!
As for the F/X, for the most part I remained unmoved. Sure, it's all fabulously designed and very visually sumptuous. But I am really leraning to hate CGI. None of the locations looked real to me. And by the end of the movie,the 10 good minutes become just a faint memory, as a load of huge CGI created crap shoots the hell out of a different load ofCGI created crap, FOREVER. You can't tell which crap belongs to who, and I personally didn't care. This appears to be a fundamental philosophical difference between me and George Lucas. I don't find watching machines blow up other machines even remotely interesting. Lucas, apparently, lives for this shit.
In the end, here is what it comes down to: if you want to sell me on a movie, you need to give me characters. My imagination is active enough to do a lot of the characterization on my own if you give me even the slightest encouragement. Episode IV suggested guidelines, at least, and I spent many hours filling them in in my head, as a child. But I can't work with this.
Back to the Adder's Lair