Well, it’s all wrapped up, and at least it went out with a bang instead of a wheeze this time.
After Attack of the Clones, it occured to me that I’d gone to see it out of reflex more than anything else. After Fun Time with Jar Jar and Pals (also known as Phantom Menace, if memory serves), I had really lost faith in George Lucas. His “enhancements” to the original trilogy didn’t help matters, either. It felt like all my childhood memories had somehow been tainted, I wasn’t looking forward to the second installment. After the fever-pitch of hype and dissapointment that surrounded Episode I, most of the folks attending AOTC seemed just a bit wary. There were more than a few folks holding out hope, but even that had a certain guarded quality to it.
Episode II wasn’t nearly as horrendous as the first one, but it certainly wasn’t very good, either. The plot was a mess, the acting was a crime against humanity (remember the “soft and smooth” line?), and towards the end, we were fed a ton of CGI eye-candy and explosions in an attempt to gloss over all the glaring faults in the first 90 minutes.
The biggest problem with the first two movies was that I just couldn’t care less about any of the characters. The sense of comraderie that made the original trilogy so appealing was gone here. The mystical Force of the original films was replaced by a bunch of bacteria called Midichlorians, and the Jedi Knights, made to sound like noble Samurai by Obi-Wan, are shown to be elitist, arrogant and close-minded snobs. You can’t even criticize the acting, because the dialogue and situations are so poorly contrived that no human could possibly invest them with any real emotion.
You can rub all the special effects in the world in my face; it still didn’t gloss over the fact that everything else about the films was lacking and sometimes downright insulting.
Many of these faults are still present in Episode III, but most are only in the first half. In the second half, the movie finds its stride, and it makes a (mostly) excellent bridge to the original trilogy.